Today, all brands are using some sort of content marketing strategy to reach out to their audiences. But it’s a massive undertaking as you must plan, prepare and roll out content on the ever-growing digital channels to ensure your audience is engaged.
Among many activities online companies undertake to engage their customers, content marketing campaigns are the most cost-efficient. But it can backfire easily if they aren’t managed properly. It needs strategy and proper execution.
Therefore, project management (PM) tools are important for B2B content marketing strategy.
What is a project management tool?
A project management tool or software is a platform or aid that helps teams or an individual organize their tasks, manage their project and ensure efficient delivery. With time, project management tools have become more effective by offering functions like time management and tracking, helping in task management, resource planning, budgeting, and collaboration.
Why do you need one as a part of your B2B content marketing strategy?
Content marketing campaigns have not only grown in the past few years but also have become more complex over the past decade. With no agile project management, campaigns go beyond their due dates, cost more and have a low return on investment.
This is exactly why almost every agency out there is using some sort of project management software.
Today, content marketing campaigns start from a simple brief and grow into different digital channels where every day unique content is being posted to engage audiences.
Often, agencies get overwhelmed by the sheer size of their content marketing campaigns. Having a project management tool at your agency helps in avoiding questions like:
“Where’s my Christmas post for Facebook?”
“What’s the status on that blog post? It needs to up today!”
“What were we publishing on 22nd? Does anybody know?”
Agencies that have big in-house teams and use freelancers love project management tools. Having one helps them manage not only everyone on the team like SEO specialists, content writers, graphic designers, and others but also manage the tasks and their distribution.
The core reason for having a project management tool is this: it brings order to the chaos.
Here are a few more reasons you need one:
Prioritizing core tasks
When running their B2B content marketing campaigns, digital marketers need to focus on some tasks above others. For instance, optimizing a website for search engines. Why? Because it takes time to rank a website against your competition.
Here it helps to have a Gantt chart.
What is it?
Gantt Chart is a useful project management tool where you can check which tasks need to be completed urgently with a simple glance. It lists projects based on their due date, phase, milestone or dependencies (some content marketing tasks need to be finished before others can begin like keyword research is carried out before SEO can happen).
You can make one easily in a few minutes and share it with all stakeholders so that everyone knows what needs to be done first.
Helps in managing long-term tasks
Some content marketing campaigns tasks take a long time.
For instance, when creating backlinks, agencies create content that is posted on other websites and blogs. This means that someone needs to search for websites and blogs that accept content from others, writing content with specific keywords and adding your desired URL in it. Not to forget, someone also needs to quality check all the work.
Having a project management tool can help an agency do this all in a systemized way. They can add in their content writers, SEO specialists, and other key stakeholders on to the tool and create tasks, manage resources and accumulate all information in one place.
Organizing this is one of the key blogger outreach lessons and having project management tool really makes your life easy.
Helps in maintaining the publishing cycle
One of the biggest reasons content marketing initiatives fail is agencies don’t publish content on time or stop publishing altogether.
When you have a project management tool, you can set a recurring task on it for content publishing. What this means is that you can assign the task to your social media manager where they need to publish content on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Now they will assign the content writers and graphic designers to create micro-content for them on Monday and Tuesday.
The project management tool will not only remind all parties about the deadlines but will also ping others when one party finishes and uploads their part of the work.
Publishing content is one of the foremost activities in content marketing and with a project management tool, you can ensure you never miss a day without publishing something.
Brainstorm ideas
Many project management tools have features where individuals can come together and talk about new ideas, tasks, and other pertinent stuff. They can brainstorm and share their creative thoughts.
What’s best about this is that everything is organized on the tool and stays online for anyone to look it up later.
Everyone knows who the target audience is. All you have to do is bring everyone online on the project management tool and get them to discuss how to best reach them through content marketing.
Ideas posted can also be emailed to relevant people and can be accessed remotely whenever anyone wants to.
Better management of employees
With project management tools you can better manage your employees.
You don’t have to send out emails or ask verbally whether a task is done. The tool will send out a notification to both parties that the deadline is approaching, and status needs to be shared.
And even if you are naturally curious and want to know what’s the status of the work, you can easily write on the task’s page, asking for its status. For instance, you can ask your content writer when the blog will be finished by writing – “Hey! What’s the status on this? Let me know if you need any help?”.
Notice how you don’t have to write about the task all over again or had to write a proper email. In fact, you only had to write a simple message to get a response.
The benefits of having a project management tool for content marketing campaigns are many. So get one today and employ some systemization to your B2B content marketing strategy.
