Over the past few months, after speaking to countless prospective customers and trial users at Brightpod, it has become increasingly clear that while marketing teams and agencies are jumping on the content marketing bandwagon (with good reason!), few really know how to create a collaborative content creation process that allows their content efforts to scale.

In this post, I’ve outlined a few strategies to help you build your own collaborative process and reap the benefits of a scalable content creation model.

Laying the foundation for a collaborative content creation process

Get your team, company and stakeholders on board

If your team is just diving into content marketing, it’s important to explain the rationale behind investing time and effort into content marketing to everyone on your team as well as other departments and stakeholders. Aligning your co-workers around the need for content marketing and the targets you’ve set for yourself will only help in collaborating with them for your content creation needs at later stages.

Motivate your entire team to ideate & curate

Motivating your entire marketing team to ideate for content topics and curate articles that could spark inspiration is a practice that can help you avoid the dread of not having enough topics to cover. Involving a larger number of people will ensure you have enough for at least a quarter.

Moreover, each person in your team will have different experiences with your own product, your community or with your clients, which could spark an idea you wouldn’t have thought of. Remember, your content is trying to provide value to your target audience or help your existing customers use your products better. Any idea about how you can make this happen should be welcome.

Tip: To organize in a way that doesn’t make you pull your hair out, use a Google document or Evernote for your team to submit ideas. To schedule your final content use an editorial calendar.

Understand problems and create supporting content

Having one-on-one discussions with your sales, support and development teams will help you better understand customer concerns and product development needs. This understanding is crucial to help you create supporting content that your sales reps, customer service agents and product manager can use to meet their objectives.

This is also a great way to get co-workers interested in the content creation process and contribute posts, presentations and reports.

Creating content with multiple authors

Managing a multi-author content creation process can get confusing, especially when there are stringent review guidelines in place. To effortlessly manage your multi-author content creation, I suggest using a collaborative Task Management tool.

A few things to look for when selecting the right task management tool are:- A tool that allows you and your team members to see the status of each content piece that your team is working on.- A tool that makes it easy to collaborate so your team can suggest edits and give feedback on the content that’s created.

For instance with Brightpod you can use the Kanban style flow view to plan divided into stages.

Brightpod’s collaborative features i.e messages and comments also make it super simple for team members to communicate. The best part? All the planning and communication takes place within the tool without having to resort to email or IM to collaborate.

Sharing Results & Progress

The final pillar of a collaborative content creation process is to share the results of your content marketing efforts periodically with everyone involved i.e. your team, various departments, clients etc.

This is will ensure that your stakeholders will always know the effectiveness of the effort you’re putting in and it’s contribution to key business KPIs.

Moreover, this is something that can keep your team motivated and help them create even better content!

So there you have it — a three-pronged strategy to help you build a truly collaborative atmosphere for your content machine.