A content team that’s too stressed out can't function at its best. Fight back against fatigue with these expert tips.
Poor content quality and missed deadlines can be signs your team’s tanks are running on empty. Here’s how to get things back on track and keep your content engine humming along.
By Julia McCoy
The site hasn’t published a new post in over a week. Timely topics and keywords never get tackled because no one can look up from what they’re already doing. Poor-quality content gets published because the team just needs to get something into the world.
The effects of those and other headaches for time-starved, burned-out content marketing teams ripple. What can you do to minimize or even prevent them? How can you help everyone stay on track so your content marketing hums along without speed bumps?
These five practical ways can help you stay ahead and on point with your content schedule. And I’ll share bonus tips to help individuals avoid disruptive procrastination and burnout.
This first point may seem elementary, but it’s crucial. Don’t just say, “Well, we publish a blog every few weeks. It depends.”
That’s not a schedule – that’s an estimate nobody can pin their hat on. Get specific and document it in your content marketing strategy. For example, detail how many blog articles will be published each month – tie a number to a time, such as, “We publish one new or updated blog every week.” Get equally specific with all types of content you publish: videos, emails, social media posts, etc.
Your whole team should know and respect the documented schedule. Record it in your content calendar and keep the publishing cogs turning according to the schedule. That means deadlines are not nudge-able. They’re firm. A post must go out at regularly set intervals.
That said, it’s important to embed some flexibility into the schedule. For example, next week’s planned article could get pushed back if a subject matter
expert is unavailable. What can’t change is the deadline for posting an article. This keeps your content schedule consistent but allows wiggle room for human needs that pop up.
Your content calendar – and, by extension, the tool to create and manage it – isn’t just a calendar. It’s a living plan for how your content strategy will play out over time.
With the right tool and features, your content calendar can become the hub of your content marketing."
If you only scratch the surface of what your calendar can do, you’re short-changing your team. With the right tool and features, your content calendar can become the hub of your content marketing:
Don’t just use it to record publishing dates. Document everything – topics, keywords, assets, goals, creators, resources, and more – anything that helps track your content creation process and helps your team put together all the pieces.
Dive deep into your calendar tool to harness its full potential. Check out developer guides and videos and learn about all the features available. Teach yourself (and your team) as much about the calendar tool as possible, including further possibilities for automation and collaboration you haven’t touched yet.
I recommend Airtable over and over for managing topics, tracking publishing dates, and corralling assets like header images and document files. Its robust features include handy automation and collaboration capabilities.
Ever heard of batching? You group similar tasks and complete them in one fell swoop. It’s a great productivity trick and can help you get ahead with your content calendar.
For example, instead of researching content topics piecemeal, brainstorm a batch of content topics for the month at one time. I’ve relied on this process since 2016. One day per month, I block out a few hours to come up with all the content topics we’ll publish in future weeks. It goes like this:
Batch content topics and set tentative publishing dates. Doing this gives you a bird’s eye view of how your blog or website will look. You can confirm publishing dates later.
Record them on the content calendar where the whole team can view them. They can prioritize tasks around the content schedule and execute their roles smartly.
With this system, you never have to scramble for new content ideas. A list of fresh topics tied to great keywords is recorded monthly on our content calendar. At any given moment, most of them are in production with writers, designers, or editors.
You and your team can batch a ton of other tasks besides topic generation:
Here’s a great example of a schedule with task batching that goes from 8 a.m. through 5 p.m., highlighting each task based on concentration level (light, moderate, deep):
If your team implements batching, make sure to communicate the designated times, so others aren’t trying to DM or call during the focused time. If you must, use do-not-disturb mode on your phone or create an away message on Slack to let people know you’re in focus mode.
The way each role is delegated has a direct impact on your content marketing. For example, does each team member have defined tasks within their role? Or do tasks – and who completes them – shift depending on which way the wind is blowing?
For small content teams, it might seem to make sense to keep roles amorphous and flexible, but you’re really just shooting yourself in the foot. Without clearly defined roles for each team member, tasks become muddled. Creative tasks start to feel like “creation by committee,” which ultimately can water down your marketing. Ann Handley aptly calls this “hot dog writing” because it’s (as she shared in her newsletter) “extruded
through so many messaging machines and opinionators and cogitators that you can’t tell what it was originally made of.”
A well-defined role with well-defined tasks allows each person to take full ownership of their responsibilities.
Do you see a theme emerging here? When in doubt, document. It saves a lot of hassle as your team gets in a groove with content production.
Document everything – style guides, call-to-action guidelines, processes, tool workflows, etc. Err on the side of specificity versus vagueness. When questions arise, your team can look at these guides first and refer to them as needed for consistency across your content and channels.
Plus, when you need to onboard someone new, all the documentation will be right there for them to digest and learn your processes.
Alongside these team-centric strategies, there are also actions you and your team members can personally take to keep things going smoothly.
Set boundaries: Does your work bleed into your downtime? Are you checking your email at the dinner table? With so many of us working remotely, the lines between work and play blur more easily.
It’s so important to set firm boundaries. My best tip is to strictly enforce a cut-off time for the workday. For instance, at 5 p.m., log off, silence all Slack notifications, and shut down your computer.
Setting an end time makes you prioritize tasks differently during the day. You only have so many hours to accomplish what you want to do, so you’ll work smarter to get it all done.
Prioritize rest, nutrition, and movement: This is your gentle reminder that mental and physical health are intertwined. Care for yourself the way you would care for a loved one. That means:
Don’t give up: Most of us know, as content marketers, it takes a while to see results from our efforts. Content marketing is not an instant payoff game. Instead, it rewards patience and perseverance.
Take this mindset and apply it beyond content. If you’re frustrated, missing deadlines, feeling overwhelmed, etc., don’t give up.
Take small steps to make positive changes in your daily routine – work and otherwise. Take a step back and look at the larger picture. What good could happen if you persevere? What if you saw your current roadblocks as opportunities instead? What if …?
If you are what you repeatedly do, then your habits truly define you. Taken alone, these small shifts in how you and your team operate might not seem like much. Taken together and repeated over days, weeks, months, etc., they’ll add up to major change for the better for you, your team, and your brand’s content marketing.
Which small shift will you focus on first? Whichever you choose, let this be the first nudge toward the bigger change you need. CCO
Julia McCoy is an entrepreneur, author, and leading strategist around creating exceptional brand-building content. At 19, she built Express Writers with a total startup investment of $75, and in the next decade grew it to $5M in sales through 100% organic, SEO content marketing before exiting. Today, she runs The Content Hacker, where she teaches entrepreneurs how to build a sustainable, content-first industry presence. Learn more about her methodology in The Content Transformation© System. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaEMcCoy.
