If it feels like you are spending a lot of time as a marketer copying and pasting information, reformatting it for different channels and hoping that the translation is okay, then you are not bringing the value that you can bring to customers. You are stuck publishing a product announcement on 5 different channels within 3 hours of it going live. The work that is not ideal. It is not ideal because while you are spending time doing something that can be automated, you are not spending time creating a compelling message that resonates with customers.
For companies with an online presence, content is more than ever the lifeblood of a company. The sheer volume of publications on the Internet today means that companies must deliver a high volume of consistent content, in addition to taking into account a host of other factors such as the technical requirements of each online channel, the brand guidelines, as well as the target audiences for each publication. And on top of all this, companies are under constant pressure to achieve the optimal results.
Hidden costs of manual distribution
Even simple content can be very time-consuming when it is distributed manually to be published on the Internet. Although a piece of content for a single announcement can be produced in thirty minutes, the same content distributed on three platforms can take up to three hours.
A bigger problem for Marketing, however, is that distributed content typically is not of the same quality as it would be if it were published in a single location. Because it is written to fit into a variety of formats and channels, the quality of the messaging will often decline as the content is distributed. This is a particularly large problem because the biggest bottleneck for most Marketing teams today is the distribution of already completed content. While one person on the team could be uploading a press release to the Partner portal, for example, another team member could be spending their time planning and developing the next announcement. Because of the way that Marketing teams are organized today, however, the time that it takes to redistribute already completed content creates a huge bottleneck that prevents the team from meeting announced launch dates. Given the fact that many organizations are now pushing for faster announcement cycles, any delay caused by the distribution of completed content is likely to be attributed to the Marketing team.
This issue also causes problems for teams when updates are required to the distributed content. Because the content was distributed separately to each of the channels, there is no single place where the team can go to update the content. As a result, the team must search for and update each published version of the content. Often, this means that some versions of the distributed content are not updated at all. When published, this causes brand messaging that is inconsistent, confusing to customers, and water down the impact of the published message.
Building systematic content workflows
To ensure that your team can be publishing content efficiently, you must first start to standardize the processes of your team. This could start by creating a set of templates that the team can use for distribution of the different channels that are being used for publication. Creating a content architecture that can be ‘unrolled’ into different formats for the different channels of publication is also very important. Instead of creating lots of new content for each of the different channels of publication, your team will be able to create a ‘master’ version of the content, and then ‘unroll’ it into the different formats that are needed for the different channels. For example, the team may create a version of the content for the company’s website, as well as for social media sites and for mailing to customers.
Content architecture that scales
Once the team has created the master content for the announcement, they can then start to create the different versions of the announcement for the various channels and create the necessary formatting for the various platforms.
A content matrix is a powerful strategic tool. A smart company would create a content matrix for Twitter, for LinkedIn, for Email and for all other multi-channel communications of a company. The content matrix lists all the messages a company wants to communicate and then maps each message to the appropriate channels as well as to the characteristics of each channel (e.g. Twitter = Brevity + Hashtags, LinkedIn = Professional Depth, Email = Personal Connection, etc.). As a result, when creating content, a company can ensure that the messages that they are sending are the right messages to the right people.
Technology workflows
All this specialized publishing can be done through platforms like MadCap Syndicate, which enables content to be published out to multiple outputs (e.g. web, print, etc.) from a single piece of content and then finely-tuned for optimal performance on each individual output.
It is more important to have integrations with other tools and systems than it is to have features. For example, it is very important for a team to be able to create content in a Content Management System (CMS) and then publish that content to social media, email, and a web site. This way a team can focus on creating content instead of figuring out how to distribute the content.
In summary, distributing to multi channels does not have to be automatic. Messages need to be written for different audiences. There is also a need for human intervention.
Quality control that keeps pace
Efficiency without quality control is just organized chaos.
Review processes also need to change and move from being approval processes that review announcement content in detail and formally approve its publication to being quality assurance processes that can complete their checks within a fraction of the time required to publish the announcement. In order to check the announcement for publication will look when published to different channels and on different devices, many of the tools used for publishing will provide a preview of the announcement. These preview facilities will also allow a check to be made to verify the formatting of the announcement in the content management system looks correct when viewed in email clients and on a number of different mobiles some of which will have smaller character limits than others and as such may alter the formatted announcement in order to display it within the allocated space.
Your company’s analytics can provide your team with great insight into their publishing efforts. For example, you can see how your content performs on different platforms, see which headlines are the most effective on LinkedIn, and see which email subject lines get the highest open rates.
Data should go back to the team immediately and be used to fine-tune the content on an ongoing basis, as opposed to months later in a quarterly report.
Strategic advantages
Publishing content on various channels in a timely manner, and systematically, creates opportunities to test out different versions of an announcement, and to apply lessons learned systematically from the results. This is how teams that master the systematic and high quality publishing of content on various channels are able to maintain brand consistency and create high quality content published on various channels.
By removing the tedium of distribution from a team’s workflow, technology can allow them to get the very most from their content. They can distribute it across all of the channels on which they publish, and do so consistently and to a very high standard. They can launch on time, keep stakeholders informed, and generally get the very most from their communications with their audiences.
With the right processes and the right tools in place, your team can publish timely, high quality content to all of your channels and post types consistently and efficiently. No more conference room meetings to figure out how to handle the manual multi-channel publishing panic!
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