In this day of digital everything, it’s a shock to read the results of Content Marketing Institute’s 2022 State of Content Marketing Survey. A majority of marketers — 61% — admit that their organizations still don’t have the right content operations technology or aren’t realizing their current martech stack’s potential.
Even worse, just over one-fourth of B2B marketers could say with confidence that their current technology is up to the task. If you’re part of the 72% that are either unsure about whether you have the right technology or know you don’t, you need to consider getting your content operations technology up to speed.
Image via Content Marketing Institute
All too many content operations teams have shied away from AI-based content creation platforms. From fears of a robot army taking their jobs away to the awkward suggestions on platforms like Grammarly, many in leadership positions have taken a hard pass on adopting this technology.
That’s unfortunate. In fact, when your teams gain proper mastery of the technology, you can shorten the time it takes to complete many routine tasks. Here are some AI-driven options:
Turbocharge Your Content Planning and Research
Use AI platforms to automate various content planning operations, giving the human members of your team more time to focus on creative tasks. Those planning tasks include:
Content Ideation
Sometimes the well just runs dry when it comes time to think up topics that provide your audience with new industry insights. Using AI-powered platforms like Ahrefs, your teams can unearth topics that your competitors have covered, allowing you to one-up them with more detailed coverage and better insights.
And, if you want to go outside the scope of your competitors’ content, use Semrush’s Content Idea Generator or HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator to stimulate your teams’ creative juices. Simply plug in one of your focus keywords, and you’ll generate a wealth of ideas that your teams can run with.
Brief Creation
Once you have a topic, you need to create a brief that will provide your writers, designers, and videographers with the information they need to create stellar content. With MarketMuse, you can turn over brief creation to your AI assistant. All you need to do is double-check it, and voila! You have a complete brief in a fraction of the time it usually takes you.
First Drafts from Research Data
Turn graphs, spreadsheets, and other data from your company’s original research into first drafts of white paper summaries, blog posts, and video scripts with the help of a tool like Automated Insights. While these first drafts might not be as polished as those written by your top content creators, they do offer a foundation that your teams can revise.
Again, it’s the speed at which AI tools can automate some of the more tedious processes that occur during the content creation process that makes them well worth investing in. With the volume of content that today’s B2B decision-makers demand, time is of the essence if you want to eclipse the competition.
Streamline Your Content Creation and Approval Process
We like Writer, a content creation and governance platform that you can use to shorten the editing and approval process, guaranteeing that every piece of content reflects your brand, voice and style guidelines.
Writer gives writers lists of approved keywords, phrases, and messaging snippets to use that set your brand apart from your competitors. Writer can then prompt writers to replace wording that doesn’t speak with your brand voice with suggestions that do. Additionally, it can check for issues with grammar, voice, inclusive language, and plagiarism, making your editorial teams’ lives easier.
Ensure Transparency and Flexibility with a Dynamic Content Calendar
For larger companies, content collaboration, creation, and publication can turn into chaos at the drop of a hat. A content calendar shows your team how far along a project is and allows for flexibility. Knowing the status of projects in real-time is especially useful in emergencies or last-minute content requests.
And, if your content calendar sits on a platform that accommodates ideation and content collaboration in the same space where the creative process occurs, the back-and-forth of hunting for Slack messages and emails stops. Every comment, every piece of information someone contributes lives right on the page where the writer is working.
Automate Publishing and Promotion
With your final drafts ready to publish, many content marketing platforms facilitate automated publishing to a wide variety of CMS, email, marketing automation, and social media management platforms. For high-volume teams, this can mean hours of time saved every week for producers who typically have to jump back and forth between platforms to transfer content data, image assets, etc.
Some platform integrations, like Divvy’s WordPress integration, even provide automated synchronization so that future content changes/edits are synced back to your Divvy content archive, keeping it up-to-date.
Find Digital Assets Faster with a DAM
If you’ve ever had to hold up a blog post or ebook publication because you couldn’t find the right graph or image to support your message, you’re not alone. It’s a problem many content teams face.
With an AI-powered digital asset management (DAM) system like Canto, you can find the latest version of all your digital assets, ensuring that all permissions are up to date. With its robust metadata capabilities, you can classify each asset by pertinent keywords, buyer persona, and customer journey stage.
Find each asset in seconds, not hours — saving time for more creative tasks. If you’re already a DivvyHQ user, you can use Canto without even leaving the DivvyHQ platform.
Use Data to Guide Future Strategy
When you use your content analytics data to figure out what’s working and what’s not, you can use that information to guide future strategy and planning. Find a strategy that addresses your content’s shortcomings and expands upon its strengths.
As the Content Marketing Institute study we cited at the beginning of this post points out, one of the main reasons companies don’t make the most of the content operations tech they already have is allowing “features and functions [to] drive the strategy.” When you let data, not toys, dictate your strategy, you’ll soon realize the potential these powerful tools offer.
It’s a lot easier to manage and maintain your content martech stacks when you have a central hub to organize it all. With all the platform integrations DivvyHQ offers and a single place to manage every aspect of your content operation, it’s the right tech for busy enterprise content teams.
If your team is part of that 61% whose content marketing technology isn’t up to the task, it’s time to explore a new way forward. Request a DivvyHQ demo today!