CREATING the content

“You have so many relationships in this life. Only one or two will last. You go through all the pain and strife. Then you turn your back and they’re gone so fast.”

How does that saying go? ‘It takes a village to raise a child’??

Well it takes a community to create your content. I’m yet to meet Superman – someone with the incredible abilities to do it all, and do it all well.

Even if you know about a lot of things, you’re probably trained as a specialist in one area – I spent a decade as a B2B marketer before specialising to become a copywriter.

If you want to create the best quality content your business deserves in order to hook the audience in and convert them into clients, you need to create a specialist team to collaborate and make it happen.

For example, I’m a freelancer, but I have a whole team that sits behind me. I might write every word of content for my business, but I have a VA who uploads the content to my website and then shares links on my company social media accounts, an SEO specialist working behind the scenes to help optimise my content online, I have an artist to help with my visual identity, a close-knit online community of fellow copywriters who I

introduce to clients when their projects require a
different writing style or content for a channel I don’t touch…

And did I mention that this blog is a collaborative effort with a fellow member of #Write52?!

You need a leader
Ideally you need someone in charge of marketing who knows what they’re doing. Not only do they have the time and effort to ensure that the content is completed on time and to budget, they have visibility of the wider marketing strategy and therefore they see how each specific piece of content fits into and supports the wider plan.

Hire the team
If you have the resource in-house already, great! If not, hire them.

The way we work is changing. Today, it’s commonplace for organisations to pull specialist teams together with the objective of completing a specific task before disbanding.

It’s why the freelance economy is growing in strength.

You don’t need to go through a lengthily recruitment process, onboard people, get them up to speed, and then worry about performance appraisals and keeping them busy. Simply hire people to complete a specific project and then let them move on to the next thing.

And a decent freelancer will have surrounded themselves with fellow freelancers with complementary specialist skills. They’ve probably worked with these people before and know how to get the best out of each other. So, find one person you like, and they’ll probably do the hard work of finding the other skills your project needs.

Establish how you’re going to work
Unless you have everyone sat in your office, you’re going to need to think about how your team communicates and collaborates on your project.

From O365 to Confluence, Slack, SharePoint, Zoom, Google Docs and many, MANY more, there are several business productivity tools that connect your disparate team to get the job done.

Use your planner to help communicate what you’re aiming to achieve with deadlines and the role everybody has to play in making it happen. And then telling the project team how you want them to communicate and collaborate with you and each other.

If you set the expectations from the start, there’s less likely to be any surprises later on.