This is the second half of a blog series featuring tips for creating more effective B2B content marketing. You can find part one here.
2. Create a publishing calendar.
As we’ve written about previously, B2B marketers today are increasingly expected to act like publishers. It is no longer enough to publish content once a year or once a quarter; you need a consistent stream of valuable content to remain relevant to your customers and prospects. In order to keep track of and organize the publication of all of this content over time, it is a very good idea to create a publishing calendar.
Without a calendar to execute to, it is easy for a great strategy to fall apart halfway through. Conversely, if everyone on the marketing team has clearly defined tasks with deadlines attached, there are no excuses for not getting things done. Try to create publishing calendars or schedules a few months in advance, or quarterly. Scheduling out any further than that may prevent you from staying agile and optimizing for improvement. To ensure the process goes smoothly, it is a good idea to have daily or weekly meetings to assess progress and address any issues that prevent work from being completed on time.
3. Put production and approval processes in place.
Every time a piece of marketing content is developed, there are a number of steps the content has to go through from creation to publication. Many times, content needs to go through various stages of editing before it is approved—grammatical, formatting/HTML, etc. In terms of both efficiency and quality assurance, companies should document these processes for content production and approval.
When production and approval processes are in place, there is no ambiguity about what needs to get done before a piece of content is completed and ready for use. One thing to remember is to factor in the time it takes to complete the production and approval processes when creating your publishing calendar. For example, if an email vendor requires email creative two days before an email blast is sent, that needs to be documented in your production process and reflected in the deadlines of your calendar.
For more tips on creating more effective B2B marketing content, read 7 B2B Content Ideas that Help Move the Deal Forward.
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