Train your Content Marketing team

[subornaakter20]

First, it's incredibly difficult to teach an adult how to write or edit well, so you should immediately look for very high-quality writers and fierce editors . If the applicant doesn't have those qualities, it's a no-no. Beyond that, how you train your team will largely depend on the structure you use and your goals. However, there are a few key elements you should be clear about.

Style Manual
You should have an extensive style guide fast food email list outlining your brand voice and standards. Here are some of the topics you might want to include (here's a leaked copy of Groupon's style guide that you can use as a reference):

Strategies to achieve a brand voice
Structure: including the use of subheadings, bullets, lists, etc.
Linking policies: Are there sources you don't want to link to? Do you want your writers to link only to primary and secondary sources?
Point of view to use
Grammar preferences: Are there industry terms you're going to abbreviate? What about countries, currencies, etc.?
Standard spelling: If you are an international company, what type of spelling will you use?
The purpose of a comprehensive style guide is to create consistency throughout the content, and it also gives writers something to refer to if they have questions (freeing up some mental space for the boss and staff editor). If you don't have time to write a style guide, we recommend purchasing a copy of the AP Style Guide , which is the one journalists use. If you're writing your own style guide, check out Purdue Owl and Grammar Girl for grammar and question formatting.

[Tweet “The #StyleGuide is used to describe our brand voice and standards”]

Guidelines for Editors
One of the best things you can do is create extensive writing guidelines, as it outlines exactly what is expected of writers so that there is no miscommunication along the way. Here are some topics that are covered in the guidelines:

What is expected of writers in regards to deadlines, plagiarism, quality of content, etc. (This is a superficial list that denotes the most basic expectations)
Legal issues: who owns the rights to the content, how you are authorized to edit the content, etc.
Information on how exactly jobs are assigned.
Editing policies: What you can reasonably expect in the editing process (e.g., how many edits you typically request, what happens if you want the content rewritten from scratch, etc.)
Your policies regarding extending the delivery deadline and the consequences if delivery is not made within that time frame.
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions).
Ultimately, your writer's guidelines will likely need to be a living document that continually has clauses added to it as new issues arise. Here's a list of questions that writers commonly have that you can incorporate into your guidelines as a start.

Feedback
This is a fundamental tool for training, but giving feedback (or feedback) between writer and editor (and we mean extensive feedback) is absolutely crucial for training, continuous improvement, building a sustainable team, and ensuring long-term quality and consistency.

If you're the editor-in-chief, you should give feedback to content creators for every assignment they complete. Make sure to give your opinion on what the writer did well , as well as any issues you saw. Some agencies have a system where articles are graded on a scale of 1-5, and the editor-in-chief is required to give writers comments and feedback for each article submitted. You should also regularly share edits, as that's the most useful form of feedback (a great tool for this, besides regular Google docs, is Draft ).

If you're the team lead, make sure you regularly review the content that the editor is approving and sharing. You don't have to review every piece, but make sure it's on schedule and give regular feedback (Pro tip: set up a monthly meeting with your editor to give feedback).

Monitoring and Supervision
Like any marketing strategy, content marketing needs to be constantly measured to see what’s working and what’s not. So what should you track?

Well, first, you need to track the goals you’ve previously identified (which should be easy, because all of your goals should be, in some way, measurable). Beyond that, it can often be difficult to know what you should be tracking. Content strategist Jay Baer suggests tracking four categories of metrics: