Content Operations Essentials

Several years ago, I was tasked with creating an organization’s first content strategy.

I had never heard of content strategy, let alone content operations. Nevertheless, I interviewed stakeholders, researched best practices, and ended up with a lengthy, overwrought document filled with platitudes, pretense, and no less than 18 unicorns.

Don't laugh. The CEO loved it. Plus, just having a written document was already lightyears ahead of many companies at the time. Until I was expected to execute against it.

Nothing in my first content strategy was actionable. Not one thing. It had no shortage of tactics and processes, and that was precisely the problem. All the aspirations of my sprawling document failed to recognize that there were already existing processes.

Marketing trends have a way of making you feel like you couldn't imagine life without them. But the truth is, content didn't suddenly start when I wrote a document.

So I threw the document in the trash and started with the basics.

Images, documents, videos:

• How were they getting made?

• How were they getting found?

• How were they getting used?

It seemed like a massive step backwards, but I didn't know how to execute a content strategy without understanding these fundamentals.

Turns out, I wasn't the only one.

"Content operations" has become another buzzword among marketers. Like any other program, producing content involves resources, stakeholders, and timelines. And like other programs, these elements will never be efficient on their own. So before you can incorporate a content strategy, you need to proactively manage them.

PRODUCTION

Content production is not a one-size-fits-all operation. Different creatives with different disciplines produce different assets for different audiences, often during different campaigns. Ask almost anyone outside the creative space how long it will take to complete a project, and they’ll give you a tangible estimate. Ask a creative—at least a good one—and they’ll tell you, “It depends.”

Frustrated deadlines are just the tip of the iceberg: production delays are among the most common complaints made about creatives. That’s because most marketers don’t understand how interconnected content and creative projects often are. Gantt charts and workback schedules are useful to a point, but even they don’t fully capture the creative process.

For example, a good PMP will rightfully note a header image as a dependency on a blog post. But they may not catch the relationship between the post’s title and the subject matter of the image. They may even be tempted to batch related projects into a sprint, not realizing that the efficiency gained is often creativity lost.

A content professional, on the other hand, finds efficiencies by consolidating and reframing deliverables.

Stakeholders are notorious for making vague requests. This isn’t entirely their fault; most of them just don’t know how to communicate what they really want. The content person’s job is to act as a moderator between the stakeholder and the creative. We take the time to ascertain the intent of the request and set reasonable expectations accordingly.

DISCOVERABILITY

Content is hard enough to keep track of when the requests are haphazard and processes are fractured. But in an age of personal hard drives and cloud drives, it can be nearly impossible to find once produced.

Copywriters, graphic designers, and video producers all use different tools to create content. For example, Adobe products require local files, and video files are typically too large to edit in the cloud anyway. Without any management of these operations, they can lead to lost assets, duplicates, and version control issues.

Digital asset management systems and taxonomies can certainly enhance discoverability, but no content expert would ever call them solutions. A DAM is only as good as its governance. So if your creatives don’t use the right folders, tags, and naming conventions, fancy solutions will quickly become pricey parking lots.

More important than where you store your assets is how you get them there. However, forgetful creatives are less the problem here than pushy stakeholders. Every company has those people who like to circumvent process and work directly with creatives to get the assets they want. And for the sake of discoverability, it’s the content person’s job to keep that from happening.

USAGE

Beyond optimizing how assets are made and found, content operations addresses whether they needed to be made in the first place. Operations for any program is about finding efficiencies, but for some reason, questioning content requests rarely happens. Every project is treated like a sacred cow, and inefficiencies almost exclusively fall under the responsibility of the creatives.

Instead of trying to convince a marketer that their idea isn’t a priority, do what other ops team members do: use numbers.

One of the best practices you can build into your content program is tracking usage. Every image, every video, every piece of copy. Log when it was used and where in a database that you can analyze and visualize later.

The benefits of tracking content usage are vast. You can use it to better track the content lifecycle and automate sunsetting. You can use it to inform your content strategy by plotting performance against total publications. You can even use it to calculate ROI. But the greatest efficiency it will achieve is holding stakeholders accountable to their requests.

While some requests will result in widely-used, high-performing content, too many of them will be one hit wonders or go unused completely. Having this kind of data is the leverage you need to get leadership’s support and reign in your stakeholders.

Before I built my first content program, stakeholder meetings were deadlocked arguments over who had the most important campaign. By the time I left that job, those meetings had largely gone quiet. Eerily quiet. When I asked if anyone had any questions or feedback, they said, “No, we have everything we need.”

Content operations is more about managing stakeholders than managing creatives and processes. Once you get them in line, they’ll soon realize that they don’t have to fight to get what they want. That’s your job.