Are you running a Marketing Team with a hefty Content Calendar for executing your Content Marketing? Perhaps you've built your Content Calendar in a spreadsheet or a Trello board, but your team is taking on increasingly complex projects.
Increasingly, customers expect more personalization and more value-add for the time they spend engaging with your content. If you sleep on a new marketing trend or technology, you can easily find yourself flailing and falling behind the competition. But this means that the pressure is on. It can feel like you need to keep doing more and more. And though the landscape of marketing has changed drastically, there are still only 24 hours in a day.
So, how are you supposed to run effective content marketing projects in this context? Well, you wouldn’t expect a chef to work with a blunt knife. It starts with giving your team the right tools.
Stress and Multitasking Harm Creativity
If your mind is all over the place, working in disparate tools and disconnected spreadsheets, not only is your workday going to be more frustrating, your actual ability to create ideas for engaging, thought-provoking content is going to be hugely hampered. In a noisy world completely brimming with content in all channels, creating content that stands out is harder than it’s ever been. But negotiating different platforms that don’t talk to each other actively adds to the mental load that robs you of the energy to work well.
While consensus within the productivity sphere does not widely condemn multitasking for creatives, the kind of multitasking that is believed to be beneficial is ‘slow-motion multitasking’: intentionally moving between creative projects, while giving yourself enough time to do deep work on all of them. The kind of multitasking that requires spreading yourself thin, however, is considered pretty detrimental.
So, here’s a twofold problem that directly affects your ability to create great content: when you’re stressed, it’s likely that you will find it much harder to be creative. And when you’re multitasking chaotically - with twenty different tabs and multiple spreadsheets open - you will also struggle to put decent, deep work into projects that require your creative attention.
A tool like Forecast allows you to do all of your content planning in one place, for a complete overview of your entire marketing project. Learn how below:
- Create Your Narrative, from Start to End
- Assign an Owner to each Task
- Collaborate with Your Sales Team
Create Your Narrative, from Start to End
People buy into content that they are convinced by, and people are more likely to be convinced by a story that feels whole and authentic. The most effective campaigns are the ones that are planned end-to-end with a strong message that stays present throughout the campaign. But it can be hard to keep that laser focus if you have no way of keeping an overview of your campaigns.
Forecast allows for you to scope out your project in its entirety, with the ability to switch between the high-level to the completely granular with ease. Begin by breaking your project into phases. Depending on the nature of your content, you can use phases to segment your work. For example, if you're working with themes and like to group content across channels, you can use phases as your themes. Or you can use each phase to manage content scheduled for each different social media channel.
Assign an Owner to Each Task
Ideation and planning are often the most exciting and dynamic parts of working in content marketing. But how many potentially great ideas have been left on the cutting room floor simply because people forgot to do anything with them?
When you scope out the work in your project phases, you will be prompted to add assignees to each task. Once you’ve assigned a team member to a task, it will notify them and go into their work pipeline. Each Forecast user has their own dedicated ‘My Work’ tab which gives them a ‘to do’ list of what they need to work on this week, and sight of anything that is overdue or completed. Sorting by deadline in ascending order shows you the most urgent tasks at the top, helping your team know which tasks are a priority.
This clear overview of work in the pipeline helps your team members stay on top of everything that they need to do in order to ensure successful project delivery, without becoming overwhelmed by the number of tasks they have to complete.
Collaborate with Your Sales Team
Research by LinkedIn and InSites Consulting found that over half of salespeople and marketers agree that a company’s financial performance goes up when there is a culture of collaboration between Sales and Marketing teams. In businesses of all sizes, Marketing and Sales alignment leads to a better understanding of customer profiles, a more defined vision of the buyer’s journey, and even increased support from senior leaders in the business.
The benefits are abundant. But time is often scarce. Finding time for regular check-ins is challenging enough between team members. It can be even harder across departments. Particularly as your Sales function needs to prioritize client meetings, you can’t afford to eat up too much time with syncs just to make sure that everybody is on the same page.
By using a tool that talks directly to the platform that your Sales team uses, you can reap the rewards of more joined-up thinking without having to sit in countless meetings. Forecast knows how vital your CRM system is to your operations, which is why we have created integrations for some of the most popular CRM platforms out there, including HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive.
These customizable integrations allow you to decide at which stage a deal or opportunity in your CRM system appears as a project in Forecast. This way, you can keep a complete overview of deals in the sales pipeline, helping you stay in the loop about what your Sales team is working on.
Bring Your Content Planning Process into the Future
Multi-channel content creation takes a lot of work, so save yourself the headache of planning across disparate systems. Get oversight of all marketing activities in one location, allocate work to your entire team, track progress, and never lose track of your content strategy. Try Forecast today to see how your Marketing team can benefit from intelligent project planning.
