How A Content Marketer Can Be Productive: 4 Challenges And 3 Tips To Avoid Them
Productivity is not doing too many tasks, at the same time, with average quality. It is about doing a perfect job with minimal work and within the timeframe.
Content marketers are perhaps professionals who need to follow a strictly productive routine. They need to exhibit productivity of a human with four hands and two brains. There is so much work to do, yet so little time.
From creating and curating content to approaching guest posts, managing social media, and analyzing organic traffic, there are so many tasks that demand a content marketer be highly productive.
Being a content marketer myself, I have always been on the prowl to find tools, hacks, strategies, and everything else that will make me more productive. I have listened to podcasts prescribing tips from monks and read books by successful business honchos. They have all helped me in some way or the other. Still, the question lingers.
So, how can a content marketer be more productive?
Before I tell you how to become a productive ninja in content marketing, I must make you aware of the inevitable challenges that make all our content marketer’s life a tad difficult.
Challenges That Hamper A Content Marketer’s Productivity
- There are too many tasks to be done
Write a blog, design/get its feature image designed, publish it on a CMS, insert links, optimize keywords, add it to analytics, and do the rest of the nitty-gritty work to rank it on search engine results. - Each task requires different skills
Writing is research-oriented. Designing is a creative pursuit and is time-consuming. Publishing a blog requires the basic skills of web expert. Now you know why content marketers need four hands and two brains. - You have only a small time frame to do everything
Ten hours a day, five days a week. A content marketing and social media calendar to follow. Adherence to best times to publish social media posts. Above all, you have to live a life too! - We are human beings who make mistakes
A small punctuation error in the title. A blog title that has the keyword cuffed. A social media post that got the wrong description. All these mistakes take time to correct. (Read #3 again)
While these challenges seem insurmountable, there are ways to overcome it. As the century-old Zen proverb goes, "obstacles do not block the path, they are the path".
Without much ado, let's delve into the many ways that will help you become a productive content marketer:
1. Plan Now. Plan Ahead.
Content marketers need to have a plan that helps them steer their efforts in the right direction. You have to first understand and precisely define what you want to achieve with your work and then execute on your plan. The planning process begins with creating the editorial calendar.
A content editorial calendar will typically have sections like:
- Date
- Type of content
- Content idea or topic
- Title
- Objective
- Keywords
- Views
- Comments
- Social shares
- Leads generated
You can add/delete sections to the editorial calendar to best suit your requirements. The motive is to have a sheet which acts as the central repository for all your content marketing efforts. No more feeling blue wondering what you are working on, what you should be working on and when to work on it.
2. Assemble A Toolkit For Better Content Creation
Tools, be it a software, or a cloud-based service or a mobile app, helps quicken your workflow. For content marketers, there are quite a lot of tools available in the market, both in the free and paid versions that help you get things done without batting an eyelid.
Some of the tools that make me work productively are:
Grammarly
Weeds out silly typos and grammar errors that can create red flags once the content is published.
Buffer
A one-source destination for handling all social media handles, monitoring traffic and scheduling posts.
Google Analytics
Gives a bird’s eye view with granular level information of where my website traffic and campaigns are performing.
Google Suite
- Google Docs
To create, edit, and share content documents in the cloud. - Google Sheets
To create edit, and share spreadsheets containing the content editorial calendar, campaign lists, budgets, bids, and everything else. - Google Slides
To make quick layouts of presentations that can be later perfected by the design team. - Google Drive
A powerful, scalable, and secure digital vault I can access from anywhere, anytime, and on any device.
Trello
It’s a good feeling, staying on top of your tasks and billables. Trello makes that easier with a host of features that resembles a full-fledged Project Management software, but without the complexity.
Yoast SEO
If you are a WordPress user, Yoast SEO plugin will come in handy to ace the SEO-friendliness of your to-be-published blog. It takes care of everything from creating XML sitemaps to setting canonical URLs, updating meta titles and description among many other tasks. The premium version helps with SEO optimization for NAP and video as well.
Canva
Create stunning designs, quickly and effortlessly. You can also share your designs with a team that can be invited through email. You can download the completed designs as PNG or JPEG files. The free version offers endless pre-built design templates for log featured image, infographics, social media posts, eBook covers, and much more. Canva offers a free as well as paid version.
3. Automate Repetitive Tasks (Social Media)
Artificial Intelligence and machine learning have automated the software industry. The marketing industry will soon follow suit. Although they are yet to become mainstream, there are few marketing automation tools available right now that will make your working hours more productive. Some of the automation tools I recommend are:
- Snip.ly
Add your own links to published content on the web. An excellent tool for content curation and building user engagement for every link you share. - Infusionsoft
A top-notch CRM software that makes email marketing and social media campaigning a breeze through. - Zapier
A tool to share single social media post across multiple channels. - HubSpot
End-to-end, professionally managed marketing workflow automation. - Sprout Social
Create social media content and schedule it to be published at the desired time. - Searchmetrics
A stealth tool for competitor analysis, content optimization, tag management, and the rest of SEO tasks.
Final Thoughts On Becoming A Productive Content Marketer
Content marketing is difficult. But, its difficulty is what makes it worth the time and efforts too. If you are a 'solopreneur' trying to make content marketing work for you, these productivity hacks and other content marketing tools will help you up your game to the next level.
They will help you leapfrog above all challenges that otherwise curtail your productivity. So start putting these productivity mechanisms into work to own your content marketing efforts.
