How to Build a Team For Marketing Automation Content Creation

Let’s face it — You’re creating content that you would like others to both read and interact with. Sometimes that’s a problem, and other times it is not. When it’s a success, everything’s fine. When no one is visiting your website, engaging in the comments section or sharing it on their social media channels, something’s wrong. This is where building a team for content creation becomes the foundation of your marketing automation efforts.

So, how do you build a team where each person is responsible for specific areas of content and publishing on behalf of your company? Well, you need a proper system for everyone to both engage and participate within. It may sound like I’m talking about an internal social network because you’re collaborating with other members of your company. However, instead of sharing personal status updates and photos of the entire pizza pie you ate last night (Jealous!), you’re working with others to create multiple pieces of content for websites and social networks that (hopefully) the world will see and interact with in some fashion. Now, about that “proper system”…

First, let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. What is “Marketing Automation”? Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media, websites, etc.) and automate repetitive tasks. Thanks, Wikipedia!

But to be successful with marketing automation, you need content.

You do know that this content is not going to appear all by itself, right? It’s time to assemble your team Voltron-style!

What do we do? We do the collaboration framework for bringing your team together to create your overall strategy and vision for content, and then produce the content that powers the marketing automation aspects. It’s software that allows for the strategic document creation, ideation, collaboration, scheduling, and distribution of content across a variety of channels. Try repeating that sentence three times. It’s also a campaign management tool where you can gather the analytics to review the ROI of distributed content.

Awesome, right? Now, it’s time to assign roles to your team (or, relating to the above video, who’s going to be the hands and feet/legs of this operation?). The creation of content and social posts comes from more than one person, and it’s important to know the responsibilities for each. When assigning roles, be aware of who is both assigned to and capable of doing this and that. Of course, the software for putting this together will handle it for you. Go ahead and assign roles, choose themes, a target audience or two, and increase your bid on that Army of Darkness action figure on eBay! Whoops, scratch that last one. See, I became distracted, and now need to get back on track to produce content for you, the audience, that relates to building teams and assigning responsibilities. (FYI — I was outbid!).

Overall, how much content you produce depends on the team that you’ve put together and how they help complete the process of content creation through marketing automation. The Administrator needs to oversee the Manager(s) and Author(s) as well as the editorial calendar’s scheduled publishing dates. These collaborative elements are the key to success, and we look forward to working with you on this journey!

Originally published on the Mintent blog on July 17, 2014.