Ann asks, “Name one or two mistakes people make while managing a content marketing team?”
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
Christopher Penn 0:12
In this episode and asks, name one or two mistakes people make while managing a content marketing team.
It depends on whether we’re talking about content marketing specifically, or just talk about managing specifically, because there’s so many mistakes, you can make managing, micromanaging, failing to manage appropriately not setting goals, not checking in with people not providing support, not paying them equitably.
There’s any number of ways that you could badly manage any given team.
But in the context of content marketing, specifically, there are three major areas where things are going to go wrong, right? Number one is not having good processes in place.
And if you are just having people winging it, it’s going to get very frustrating, and you’re not going to deliver your best product.
That’s pretty straightforward.
Number two, is in choosing your content, marketing format, and platform, choosing badly, choosing badly choosing platforms where your audience is not choosing to distribute content in a way that makes it difficult for people for people to access your content, choosing platforms that are difficult for your team to work with, right? Yeah, you may have all these requirements for your internal business processes.
But if your people hate working with that system, you’re really handicapping yourself.
But the biggest mistake of all, is having a content marketing strategy and plan that does not leverage people properly.
What do we mean by this? Number one, is, if you have no idea what talents your team has ain’t just kind of throw content marketing plans out there, you’re gonna get less than their best work, because everybody has different aptitudes, right.
Some people like to talk.
So people like to write, so people to draw or paint or compose music, or dance or whatever, there’s, people have all forms of different self expression.
And if your content marketing management does not take into account all the different ways that people can be creative, you are handicapping those people in terms of their ability to create work that they enjoy doing, because of self expression.
So is good.
And more importantly, the quality of work you’re going to get out of them is not going to be as good.
It’s it’s going to be mediocre.
Because taking somebody who is naturally a visual person, and making them write a 1500 word blog post is a recipe for failure.
Can they do it? Yes.
Is going to be as good as it could be? No.
Right? It’s like taking somebody who is a world class Japanese chef and putting them in a bakery.
Are they going to be able to bake things? Yes.
Because they’re they’re superbly talented professionals in general.
But are you leveraging their talents for what they’re best at? No.
Right? Having someone who can make amazing teppanyaki or sushi, cranking out croissant.
It’s just a mismatch.
And that’s something that I see happen a lot in content marketing people are people are creating content marketing strategies and plans without taking into account what their team is good at.
They may not even know what they are good at.
So another key part of this is doing that skills assessment, doing a skills assessment regularly, and understanding what the aptitudes of the people are that work on your content marketing team.
And then as projects and products come up, you figuring out how do you leverage all these different disparate talents because everyone has some form of self expression.
Sometimes, someone’s self expression just may not be a good fit for your content marketing strategy, right? Maybe somebody is a really, really good sort of 360 degree video maker like this superbly good at that.
They can make very compelling virtual reality content.
And your content strategy does not call for virtual reality, and it’s not a good fit for your products or services.
That doesn’t, you haven’t figured out how to unlock that value for your audience.
Having that person using their talents would be a mismatch for what your content marketing strategy is trying to accomplish.
And so that’s an example where you might not have the right people, right, you want to have the people who can generate the output you want in the format’s you want working for you and making sure they’re compensated appropriately so that they’re doing their very best work.
Right.
I’m free Be good at writing,
Christopher Penn 5:00
I really enjoy doing video.
So as you can see, I do a lot of video.
And at Trust Insights this year, I have had more fun making content than I ever have before.
Because we’re doing a lot of courses, right we have a new Google Analytics course go to trust insights.ai/ga for course, it was like five and a half hours of video and I get to play around in Premiere and doing my editing and transitions and all this fun stuff.
It’s fun, is leveraging an aptitude that I have.
And so if I had a manager who was saying, Well, no, that’s, that’s great that you can do video, but we’re really trying to create just written word, I wouldn’t be as happy.
Could I still create good content? Yes.
Would it provide value to the audience? Yes.
Is it what I love doing? Not as much.
So when it comes to managing a content marketing team, know what skills your people have, and know what your strategy is, and make sure that your strategy is aligned to your people, it is much easier to change your strategy to match your people than it is to try and force your people to match your strategy.
You can change strategies but not written in stone, right? They are not delivered on high for tablets from a deity of some kind.
Yeah, made it up.
You made it up.
And so you can change it just as easily.
Put your people skills first, put your audience’s value second, and then put your corporate business goals third, they do things in that order.
You’re going to create great content that people love to make that will give value to the audience and will still achieve your goals, your marketing goals.
So really good question.
Thanks for asking.
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