project management - Express Writers

#ContentWritingChat Recap: Project Management & Content Marketing with Brittany Berger

December 31, 2020March 17, 2017 by Rachel Moffett

In the latest #ContentWritingChat, we talked all about project management and content marketing. If you want to learn some tips that will take your project management workflow to the next level, this chat is sure to help you out. Keep reading for the recap! #ContentWritingChat Recap: Project Management & Content Marketing: How to Have a Fluid Content Project Management Workflow with Brittany Berger Join us for #ContentWritingChat on Tuesday, March 14th at 10 AM CST with @thatbberg! pic.twitter.com/KeHfYWg3lc — Express Writers (@ExpWriters) March 7, 2017 Our guest host this week was Brittany Berger. Brittany is a PR and Content Marketing Manager for Mention. She shared a ton of great advice with us, so be prepared to take some notes! Q1: Why is project management important for content marketing? To kick off the chat, we asked everyone to share their thoughts on why they though project management played an important role in content marketing. Here are some of the answers we received during the chat: A1: Content mktg involves so many different assets at every stage of the funnel that there’s just SOO many moving parts #ContentWritingChat — Brittany Berger ✨ (@thatbberg) March 14, 2017 A1. There are tons of opportunities for things to fall through the cracks or content to become misaligned w/ its goal. #ContentWritingChat — Brittany Berger ✨ (@thatbberg) March 14, 2017 Brittany acknowledges there are many different moving parts when it comes to content marketing. For this reason, there’s always the possibility something could fall through the cracks or your content could become misaligned with the goal. With a project management strategy in place, you can keep everything working as it should be. A1: It’s important for ANY projects, because it keeps everyone aligned timewise + keeps you accountable for every step.#ContentWritingChat https://t.co/7IyJIIlTFg — ThinkSEM (@ThinkSEM) March 14, 2017 As Sarah said, project management helps to keep everyone aligned when it comes to timing. You want to ensure everything gets done on time and that people are meeting deadlines. Having a strategy in place will help you make that happen! A1: Project Management allows for consistently met deadlines; as well as executable plans that keep goals realistic. #contentwritingchat — Mallorie Cloum (@malocloum) March 14, 2017 Mallorie agrees that it’s essential for consistently meeting deadlines. It gives you the opportunity to set goals and create plans to help you achieve what needs to be done. A1. I think it helps you keep your content aligned, on time and on (under) budget. And it keeps the overwhelm at bay. #ContentWritingChat — Bourbon & Honey (@BrittanyBrander) March 14, 2017 Benefits of project management: it keeps your content aligned, keeps you on or under budget, and keeps overwhelm at bay. A1 Last year: organization went DOWN while content creation went up (CMI). A strong content PM workflow = more success. #ContentWritingChat — Julia McCoy ? (@JuliaEMcCoy) March 14, 2017 As if you needed more reason to create a strong content project management workflow for your brand… Julia mentioned it’s key to success. A1 without project management content marketing is chaos. Control it, don’t let it control you. #ContentWritingChat pic.twitter.com/N7jcuHVJwn — Cassandra Schwartz ⭐ (@MWestMillennial) March 14, 2017 Without project management, Cassandra said content marketing becomes chaos. And you don’t want that, do you? Q2: What does content project management entail? Now that you know what project management is important to your content marketing, what exactly does it entail? Check out these responses from the chat: A2 Content project management entails planning, organizing, and executing the different parts & content for a campaign #ContentWritingChat — Brittany Berger ✨ (@thatbberg) March 14, 2017 Brittany said content project management entails planning, organizing, and executing. A2 Structuring calendars, setting quantity, & deadline structure. Staying on top of the creation process + ppl involved #ContentWritingChat — Julia McCoy ? (@JuliaEMcCoy) March 14, 2017 Structuring calendars, setting quantity, and deadline structure all are important aspects of project management. Julia also said you need to stay on top of the creation process and everyone involved. A2: 1) have a goal, 2) figure out timeline/bandwidth, 3) scheduling/calendar, 4) execution 5) keep all members on track#ContentWritingChat https://t.co/x3oP62P3wi — ThinkSEM (@ThinkSEM) March 14, 2017 Sarah said you need to have a goal, figure out your timeline, schedule and plan with your calendar, execute, and make sure you keep all team members on track. A2: Content PM is essentially orchestration. You need to organize the who / what / when to get that piece completed #ContentWritingChat pic.twitter.com/JZqY4ccNkY — Digital Natives Cast (@DgtlNativesCast) March 14, 2017 You need to organized the who, what, and when of each of the content pieces you create. A2 A #Content calendar, contributors, important dates & events, deadlines, targeting,& monitoring. #ContentWritingChat https://t.co/hsLl5vdcx6 — Varun Kumar ? (@DigitalVK) March 14, 2017 Varun said you need to create your content calendar, know who will be contributing, important dates and events, deadlines you need to meet, as well as targeting and monitoring. A2 Determine your budget, plan your campaign, delegate tasks based on team strength, and let the hunger games begin #ContentWritingChat pic.twitter.com/K6TRmZ0UCw — HeyOrca! (@HeyOrca) March 14, 2017 Know your budget, plan out your campaign, delegate tasks based on the strengths of your team members, and get started! Great advice! A2. Having a solid editorial calendar, complete with accountabilities and deadlines. Even if it’s you doing everything. #ContentWritingChat — Bourbon & Honey (@BrittanyBrander) March 14, 2017 Brittany brought up a solid point for those of who are working solo. Just because you don’t have a team behind you, it doesn’t mean you can take advantage of project management. You should still have a great editorial calendar and assign deadlines to hold yourself accountable. Q3: What tools are the best for content teams to stay organized? The great news is, there are a ton of tools out there that can make project management a lot easier. We received some great suggestions in response to this question, so be sure to check these out if you haven’t already! A3 Tools to … Read more

What’s New at Express Writers for February: Storytelling Images & Custom Blog Headers, Social Media, Editing (Copy and Developmental), Project Management & More

September 5, 2022March 2, 2017 by Adam Oakley

This February, we’ve added some seriously powerful content services to our Content Shop repertoire. All of our continual changes and updates are based on specific needs from our clients, and a strict adherence we personally have to always maintain the edge of the curve in our industry. Here’s a shortlist / TL;DR of February’s new updates (scroll down to read about each): Storytelling Images & Custom Blog Headers. Our design team has been creating these for our own brand with great results in more brand awareness and content traction, so we decided it was time to launch custom image solutions, including beautiful storytelling variations and custom blog images, for our clients! Social Media Plans Update: Revamped social media plans to new standards, including content curation using BuzzSumo. Editing (Copy and Developmental). At both copy editing levels. Professional Interviewing. In this service, based on one simple interview fee, we now have staff Project Managers who are experts at interviewing subjects and obtaining key information that leads to a wonderful interview. Project Management. This new service takes care of a lot of “monkey work” that goes into organizing and maintaining content marketing. Client 101s. These are completely free for our clients, and are being written and designed as we speak! The first one, a Process/Content Order Lifecycle 101, is live! We’re working on a Meet the Team 101 next, where we explain how everyone’s staff role fits into an order and how clients can contact each of us, a Writing Levels 101, and several others. What’s New at Express Writers for February: Everything You Needed to Know on 5 New/Revamped Products & a New, Free Client Resource 1. New Custom Images: Storytelling Imagery, Blog Header Sets, & More Ever thought to yourself… “I wish I had a REALLY cool branded header for my blog and a variation to share on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook…” “I wish I could visualize a step in my customer journey/buying process with a cool, engaging illustration…” “It would be awesome to boost engagement with a cartoon strip for this industry controversial blog…” We’ve got you covered on all of those visual needs in our re-launched Custom Imagery service, live in the Content Shop. Clients can choose from a custom, beautiful, blog image set put together by our design team in Adobe InDesign, complete with a full-sized header and an inset to share on social media, or a storytelling graphic that would fit nicely in a process for your customers to visualize their journey/how it works page (example: our process). Want to see how cool these get (read: how amazing our design team is)? Here are a few: Killer, right?? We’ve literally designed thousands of these images for our own brand by now – the samples above are a brief preview of what we can do – and we thought it was high time to allow clients to buy it as a product. With custom imagery, we’ve seen massive results… We a huge CTR boost with a cartoon strip on our SEO post – a 25% boost in actual reads. Influencers picked up our content and shared it on Twitter WITH the image attached, boosting views to our content by another 25%. Never leave your images last on your to-do list again. Let us help you create better-than-average custom imagery to accompany your content! 2. Social Media Plans During this month, we also did some heavy updates and restructuring, much-needed, to our social media plans. I sat down and created new guidelines for our Social Media Experts, which condenses down to these three key, important changes: We now create and post 3/images per week at the minimum level (3 IG posts) instead of 1. Images, and Instagram, are hot! You can’t miss out on either, so we’ve increasing the volume at all levels on all plans. Our SMEs are now trained on how to use BuzzSumo to curate industry influencer content, and position your brand as an authority by sharing content that your fans will love and identify with. Choose whichever social media platform you’d like us to manage, now straight from the product itself! Our Social Media Plans have also been renamed to Level 1, 2, and 3 instead of Basic/Guru/Enterprise. 3. Copy Editing Our revamped Copy Editing service in the Content Shop now includes two levels to cover every need, developmental and copy editing services, starting at one hour (up to 3,000 words). We have senior, expert editors at both levels ready to take orders! See a guide to knowing the two differences of copy vs. developmental editing from our Content Development Specialist, Tara, on the Write Blog. 4. Professional Interviewing For one simple interview fee you can now have an incredible interview organized and done (check that off your list!) by our professional interviewing team. We now have staff Project Managers who have background expertise in interviewing and journalism, and have seen amazing results from the interviews done so far. See a post co-created by our Project Manager Hannah and Content Development Specialist, Hannah, on why interviews matter to content marketing. 5. Project Management Just launched last week, our new project management service offers a wonderful solution for a lot of our marketer clients who are continually overwhelmed, swamped, and lost beneath the work they have to do on their content marketing get-done list. Did you know that only 30% of marketers say their organizations are effective at content marketing? An actual decrease of 8% from the previous year.(source: Content Marketing Institute’s 2016 Benchmarks) Even less have a strong, documented content marketing strategy. Yet budgets, goals, and creation itself in content marketing actually increased by a large percentage during the same year. Our solution in offering project management is to help a real need we see that our clients have. Project management is a serious drain on them, yet a vastly crucial part of content marketing not to be overlooked. Scenarios Where Project Management Fits In Just a few of the problems our clients have given us that we can now solve with our project management service include: “We’re thinking about hiring a part-time staff member to handle all of these content needs and work with you, but it may not be in the budget, or we don’t know … Read more