Niyat has been a content manager at Zooma since 2019. She loves to create content and helps to bring campaigns and ideas to life.
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Knowledge content really is a fantastic way to show your company’s best sides and convert visitors to leads and customers. Every company is full of hidden knowledge, and if you as a marketer can reveal it and bring it to your audience, the company’s perceived levels of trust and expertise will go through the roof.
However, producing great knowledge content isn’t easy. It requires input and work from experts, writers and content coordinators, as well as continuous reviewing and rounds of feedback. In other words, it’s a team effort.
The way you run your knowledge content creation process is just as important as how your write the content. At Zooma, we’ve been producing knowledge content for a while, and over time we’ve built a content team with well-defined roles that allows for a consistent output of high-quality knowledge content. In this article, I’ll explain why you should have a content team and what the team should look like – in the second part, I’ll dive deeper into the actual content creation process the team follows.
The purpose of the content team is to make the process of creating knowledge content easier. Knowledge content is probably the most important type of content you can use in your communication, but it’s also the hardest to do well. As opposed to commercial content, like a sales brochure, or educational content, like a how-to guide, knowledge content focuses on conveying the knowledge and expertise that exists in your company. It not only helps your audience rationally understand the strengths of your products and solutions, but also makes your company appear as an authoritative and trustworthy expert partner.
The difficult part is that this knowledge is hard to uncover. Your company may have some great marketers, but they’re generally not experts in the details of your products and solutions. In order to create knowledge content, marketing and these experts need to collaborate, which requires time and buy-in from both sides and their managers. Knowledge content can really increase your audience’s trust, but this trust can be lost if the finished content is poor-quality – so you need to review the content carefully. And to get the best effect, you need to be publishing the content consistently and distributing it widely. It’s hard for a single person to do all of this well – but with a content team, you can split up the work and become a well-oiled knowledge content-creating machine.
Even if you take the initiative and set up a content team, it can still fail due to circumstances outside of your control. It’s always good to simply start working on new ideas rather than spending too much time in the planning phase, but for your content team to reach its full potential, you need:
Getting to this stage is the hardest part of the whole process – but if you have this in place (or if you’re nearly there), the rest of the journey will be easier.
The content board is separated from your core content creation team, but it’s still a vital part of the process. The board is a group made up of a number of people from different parts of the company – like sales, marketing, R&D, service, management and so on. Their purpose is to give direction to the content manager and discuss how the company’s content can support the business and meet the needs of customers and prospects. You may have great content creators, but they probably won’t know too much about industry trends, new products and changing customer demands. Regular content board meetings, possibly once a month, are a great way for the core content team to get input and feedback and ensure that they’re providing value for the company.
Now we can look at the different individuals who will make up your content team. Before we do, it’s important to note that these roles within the team aren’t necessarily job titles – for a lot of companies, it’s simply not realistic to employ multiple people who can work full-time with content creation, especially not in the B2B world. Instead, these are descriptions of roles for different people within the content team – it’s likely that their actual positions at the company may be something else.
Once you have assembled your team, it’s then just a case of creating content together. The content board gives direction to the content manager, who directs the work of the content creators, who work together with the experts to create content, which is later edited by the content manager… it may seem complex, but it’s quite simple, and its tight structure really helps you consistently create high-quality content.
We’ll discuss the content creation process that your content team should follow in part 2. In the meantime, you can get more knowledge and guidance on content creation with our in-depth content creation guide.
The guide is also available as a downloadable presentation - click the button below to get it.