If you have to collaborate with others on your content, whether you rely on internal team members, external vendors, or clients, having a tool to craft, track, and revise your content is key. Let’s talk about content operations!
Having the right content operations tools can make your content creation process much more efficient. Word or Google docs can get messed up, are clunky to share, and make it difficult to post comments and track revisions. There are content operations tools out there that will allow you to:
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Design templates for content you create frequently, like blog posts, web pages, landing pages, emails, etc.
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Populate the templates with not only your copy, but also images, PDF downloads, etc. that will be part of your finished product
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Have tracked discussions with your team of content collaborators to go over questions, revision requests, and more
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Capture a revision history, so that you can go back to previous versions of a piece of content
Some tools can integrate with your website’s CMS to push approved/finalized content directly to your website.
The two content operations tools I have worked with are GatherContent and Kentico Cloud, which I believe is now Kentico Kontent. Kentico Cloud has a freemium plan, as where GatherContent is pay-to-play with different tiers depending on your team’s needs.
I personally prefer GatherContent because of its clean design, which makes it easy to learn and navigate. However, I currently use Kentico Kontent due to my present budget limitations. Both tools get the job done, although my guess would be that the learning curve is longer for Kentico Kontent due to its very detailed user interface.
Once you get over the hurdle of figuring out where things are—or can possibly hide—you can start collaborating on your content as soon as you complete your content templates. Both tools will allow you to add guidelines to specific content fields that will help your content collaborators as they are writing or curating images.
One of the best features of both tools is that you can customize a workflow to let all teammates know where a piece of content is in progress. For example, a general content publishing process may look like this:
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Outline
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Draft
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Internal Review/Approval
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Ready to Stage
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Staged, and Ready for Internal Review
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Ready to Publish
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Published/Live
When you’re creating a bunch of content at once, knowing where everything stands adds organization and helps you communicate better with your team. If you are using one of these tools as a marketing agency, you can even opt to give your client access to review content during appropriate stages of the workflow so that they can provide input and request revisions.
A caution I’ll add is that, in my experience with both tools, if you want to make changes to a content template, it’s better to create a brand new template versus editing the original template if it has been applied to one or more pieces of content you’re working on. Typically, changes made at the template level will carry globally throughout the tool, so that could make your content format wonky or lead to content loss. Nobody wants content loss.
What tools do you use to streamline your content operations? I’d love to learn from you. Feel free to leave your suggestions in the comments section.