How many times have you had a meeting with upper management, and they tell you:
"We want to increase our marketing reach and brand visibility. We've decided it's time for us to scale our content production."
You sigh. Your team already has its hands full with existing projects, campaigns, and coordination. The timing is… a bit difficult.
Appeasing both sides can be tricky. But there is a way to make everyone happy.
In my experience, I've learned that it ultimately comes down to increasing efficiency.
Collaboration is more than just a buzzword
Every SaaS company I've worked for has thrown around the word 'collaboration,' but very few places have practiced what they preach.
According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, collaboration means working jointly with others or together, especially in an intellectual endeavor.
For collaboration to work, everyone needs to be on the same page. In other words, you’ve got to have a centralized system where everyone can access the tools they need for content creation. Luckily, such platforms exist. I won't lie; working at *Foleon has its perks.
(*For those of you who might not have heard of Foleon, it's a content creation platform, that pretty much anyone can use to create interactive content that is 100% on-brand).
Because the Foleon platform enables up to five user roles, I can better define who does what, when, where, and why, which fosters a more collaborative approach toward scaling content.
Discover: 5 Ways To Avoid Content Collaboration Chaos
How do the user roles work?
Say you have a Head of Brand & Comms that owns the company's Foleon account. This person is an admin user, so they can access all settings, add and delete users, and set roles. This user has control over all workspaces.
The Content Operations specialist owns the content governance within the editor. They have the role of publisher, which means that they can create and edit projects, Foleon Docs, and templates.
Then you have a Creative Director whose role is designer. This person is responsible for creating templates and owns the media library. The designer can share templates and media across workspaces. This way, shared assets are always approved and on-brand.
You have content marketers that are editors. They can add and edit projects and Foleon Docs but can't publish or delete them. They can edit all the content in the Foleon Doc and use templates.
With user roles, scaling becomes a team effort, but you don't just have to limit it to your marketing team. Think of others in your organization as content creators too.
Empower everyone to design content
Not everyone has a passion for design — myself included. However, using pre-approved templates that your peers can work from keeps the design of your content consistent and on-brand.
How long have we, as content folks, been waiting for tech that allows us to work on the content that would've traditionally been locked up in InDesign or Photoshop in the hands of designers?
We have four writers on rotation for our weekly newsletter, The Crave. Once the content is ready, it takes less than 10 minutes for the project owner to put everything into a template and publish.
With such templates in place, we've gotten top-quality content out to our readers faster than ever before.
Setting up templates is also a great way to see the creative capabilities of your peers because it empowers them to get their hands dirty. One of my colleagues said to me recently, "I never thought I was any good at design until I was given an opportunity to put something together and knock it out of the park."
Now just imagine all your content creators saying that!
Time to get the ball rolling
Undoubtedly, scaling content production requires commitment from your entire Marketing team to get the ball rolling, but fortunately, there have never been so many resources to perform this work successfully. Take a look at the work we’re doing in this space.
I hope my tips and tools help make your content production more efficient at every stage.
Good luck!
Foleon Guide
Marketing Power Plays
Whether you're in content, comms, or demand gen, here are some novel tactics from Foleon’s Marketing team.
.png)