Content marketing drives results, but producing quality content at scale is challenging. Leading brands to rely on cross-functional teams that combine creative, analytical, and technical talent. Diverse perspectives allow you to capitalize on each contributor’s strengths. The outcome is high-performing content aligned with your brand voice.
However, more collaborators create confusion without an effective workflow. Misalignment yields fragmented branded content that diminishes trust.
This article details nine tips and tools to implement collaborative planning that tightens teamwork. With the proper framework, your creative team can harmonize instead of working at cross-purposes. Here’s how:
#1 Use a Shared Editorial Calendar
The foundation of an effective collaborative content strategy is a publishing schedule that maps creation from idea to execution. An editorial calendar fulfills that purpose by detailing the topics your brand will cover and when you plan to release associated articles, videos, podcasts, and other media across channels.
Enable access to useful productivity tools like a free PDF editor so collaborators can easily view and manipulate needed documents related to the collaborative content calendar.
By making your editorial calendar collaborative instead of siloed in someone’s notebook or a local document on their hard drive, you provide the entire team visibility into upcoming projects.
Anyone can glimpse the creative direction or drop-off date for a piece of content at any time instead of chasing down stakeholders. This level of transparency breeds alignment.
When evaluating tools to manage your centralized publishing schedule, the primary criteria should be ease of access and contribution. All involved parties should be able to view, comment on, claim, and update calendar items as needed with minimal barriers to entry. Friction encourages isolation rather than collaboration.
You can start with a shared cloud-based calendar solution. These make it simple to create titles, tag contributors, set deadlines, enable notifications, and more, with edits reflected in real-time. Nice ancillary perks are available on mobile devices and integration with other productivity apps like documents, drive, and email to store associated info and assets.Â
If you desire more robust project management capabilities, calendar solutions integrate with task functionality. These allow assigning/tracking collaborative content components like writing, editing and graphics while housing relevant materials in one place. Just beware of overcomplicating things that hampers use. The best solutions require minimal training and effort because convenience drives engagement.
#2 Build a Collaborative Topic Bank
Now that you’ve established a framework for what collaborative content gets produced and when the next step is sourcing subjects to cover in the first place. You can start by auditing existing site content and assessing performance to identify areas of opportunity or gaps that should be addressed. However, limiting new collaborative content to siloed efforts by editors scanning analytics risks creative stagnation.
That’s why leading brands develop collaborative “topic banks” housing crowdsourced ideas from both internal stakeholders and external audiences. Everyone, ranging from executives to subject experts to customers, gets a voice in submitting content suggestions based on goals, interests, and real-world information needs.
This ideation process not only produces diverse perspectives and fresher concepts but also seeds buy-in. Contributors gain confidence you’ll create content addressing their needs, which incentivizes promotion once published. You essentially leverage the wisdom of the crowds.
In terms of implementation, a shared document works well for informal brainstorming and commentary. Structured feedback features let you gather structured feedback on ideas or concepts if desired. For more formal submission workflows with excerpts and metadata, purpose-built templates and controls can help. You can even display submissions on a visible ideas board to spark creativity.
The key is keeping the barrier to entry low while providing enough depth for context. Overly complex processes reduce engagement. Also, focus on qualitative commentary rather than just upvotes. Curate ideas closely aligned with audience needs and brand direction rather than following the crowd.
#3 Map collaborative content with mind mapping
As ideas pour into your publishing schedule and topic bank from across the business, you may start suffering from information overload. All those great suggestions now need organization, so they translate into coherent content roadmaps and eventually polished pieces. This requires effectively distilling concepts, understanding relationships between them, and structuring orderly content frameworks.
Brainstorming raw topics into orderly content plans demands going abstract. Linear written lists only capture so much context and connection. For collaborative planning, mind mapping takes you to the next level by laying out ideas visually. Mind maps utilize branches, labels, and symbols to illustrate hierarchical relationships between topics and subtopics in your collaborative content ecosystem.
Centering your map on a core topic like your product, brand or goal, branch out into categories, related concepts, keywords, and specific potential articles or content formats. Connect associated nodes with lines or arrows to denote relationships.
This format helps teams conceptualize content while avoiding premature wordsmithing or production details. The flexible nature also encourages contributors to keep extending and shaping the map.
Collaborative mind-mapping software facilitates remote collaboration with real-time editing and threaded comments on nodes. This allows teams to develop an integrated map together, no matter their location. Handy features like search, tagging and analysis uncover gaps or clusters in your content plan. Some solutions even connect mind mapping to project management and editorial calendar tools.
While mind mapping shines for visualization, also record a linear document summarizing your actual content calendar. Translate the map’s topics and relationships into an actionable production timeline broken down by week or month.
This concrete editorial schedule will dictate work for writers, editors and other doers who think more linearly. Use both tools to align conceptual thinking with tactical execution.
#4 Hold Recurring Collaborative Content Planning Meetings
As valuable as shared calendars, docs, and maps are for visibility, nothing drives alignment better than direct dialogue. Regular content planning meetings provide hands-on direction setting, complementing asynchronous efforts. Convene stakeholders to chart an editorial course based on brainstormed ideas and strategy.
Cadence depends on output volume, but monthly or bi-weekly alignments work best for most marketing teams. Gather stakeholders to share progress reports, pitch ideas, scrutinize performance and ultimately select topics for development. This surfaces fresh concepts while building consensus on priorities based on corporate objectives.
Come prepared by sharing briefing documents, including executive summaries of the latest content metrics and suggested topics. Have your editorial calendar and mind map available to decide on upcoming issue assignments. Utilize your collaboration tools to facilitate the working session.
Allow liberal discussion with decisions recorded into calendars or documents in real-time. Agree on topics, assignments and expectations or angles for selected pieces. Close with a recap email highlighting takeaways for everyone to tackle before the next check-in.
If possible, conduct meetings in a workshop format with breakouts, whiteboarding and hands-on planning sessions rotating through website sections, social platforms and channels. Active collaboration sparks ideas and connections beyond passive presentations. The energy carries over into asynchronous work.
#5 Discuss Ideas and Volunteer for Assignments
Between recurring meetings, handle stray ideas or changes in direction through centralized message boards and commenting functions. Tools allow discussions on specific topics, articles or calendar items as they progress. Alert original authors when suggestions arise so issues are resolved efficiently without requiring full meetings.
Dedicate channels or embed comments in documents like editorial calendars that people access regularly. For example, have a Slack channel called “Blog Posts” for debating angles on draft posts. Or place editorial calendar comments debating the timing or direction of a series. This focuses conversations to drive progress rather than random chatter.
Callback to the importance of visibility established earlier. Making conversations and content visible to all with context encourages wider contributions beyond assigned authors. This often sparks volunteerism, where passionate team members offer to draft sections or supplementary content.
Nothing progresses work like harnessing distributed talent and passion to lighten individual loads. But it only works by providing transparency into content direction plus accessible commenting tools. Facilitate that culture of open discussion and contribution to keep your collaborative workflow humming.
#6 Curate Supporting Assets
Thus far, the focus has been on collaboration surrounding ideas, strategy and work allocation. Equally critical is managing access to supporting assets during collaborative content development. This includes both existing brand assets that give your work consistency and emerging research sources that inform quality and accuracy.
Gather relevant multimedia into a shared content library that team members can search and access. Solutions that centralize assets from official brand channels plus user-generated content from employees, partners and customers. Collectively, this amplifies available media to embed across content, keeping things fresh and authentic. Features like auto-tagging increase searchability.
Additionally, as research is conducted, writers and analysts save source material in the central library rather than locally. This provides easy access to deeper context and fact-checking for collaborators. Make citing stored research mandatory for documents.
A shared library functions as a knowledge base fueling content with reliable information and media. Instead of creating assets from scratch, authors build on existing brand assets plus new findings from peers. This drives consistency and quality across your content catalog.
#7 Centralize Research in a Shared Reference Library
A shared media library powers content with images, videos and branding material. An equally crucial repository centralizes research content that informs ideas and work quality. This reference library stores source material writers and analysts utilize to inject truth and originality into your stories.
As teams work, have them deposit assets like whitepapers, presentations, case studies and interview transcripts into cloud storage accessible by content creators. Solutions that integrate multimedia research alongside your shared editorial calendar and asset library create an ecosystem with everything related to a project in one place.
Discoverable research enables creators to build on facts and insights without redundant legwork. Writers gain confidence writing specialized topics or mentioning customer data, knowing citations appear backing claims. This saves effort while fueling quality and consistency.
Over time, you amass a searchable authoritative collaborative content vault fueling brand trust.
#8 Track Content History
What you publish often represents your brand indefinitely, thanks to search engines and social media archiving. This requires thoughtful editing and review processes, ensuring quality control.
To facilitate safe, collaborative editing of content, take advantage of version history tracking. Solutions exist that track changes to documents over time so you can review who edited what and when. This allows easy reversion to previous versions if modifications degrade quality.
Some tools also provide suggestions functionality where edits only go live upon approval. This lets editors propose changes while writers accept or reject them. This provides transparency without contributors making changes that inadvertently publish without oversight.
Between version history and suggested changes, you enable safe collaboration on living documents. As pieces shift from draft to refinement and finally approval, concerns get addressed through merges into definitive versions. Everyone knows who touched a piece and when all the way through publication, so you protect integrity.
#9 Foster Continuous Communication
As valuable as centralized documentation and meetings are, the conversation must continue between collaborators in the intervals between. Spontaneous discussions surrounding content projects as they unfold foster alignment and issue resolution. As questions arise or new directions emerge, prompt dialogue prevents misalignment.
Message board tools optimized for team communication facilitate these always-on conversations. Create dedicated channels for specific pieces of content and website sections rather than scattered exchanges. For example, have a channel called “Blog Brainstorming” for spur-of-the-moment idea generation. Or set up a channel tied to your editorial calendar for debating the timing of upcoming campaigns.
Set notifications around these conversation streams so when new questions or suggestions arise, key contributors receive alerts prompting their input. This allows organic, rapid decisions without scheduling formal meetings. Enable features like message threads and reactions to avoid clutter and make exchanges easy to follow.
The key is not over-structuring continuous chatter into rigid workflows. Light templates, reminder bots and quick polls can help guide exchanges, but frictionless environments foster richer dialogue. Keep an open mindset, listen to “random” ideas that emerge, and have disciplined summaries or highlights after the talk dies down to capture decisions.
Ongoing immersion in your content strategy allows teams to live and breathe initiatives in real time versus only encountering them during status meetings. Create that culture of active engagement through central conversation platforms and participation incentives. The creative dividends will become quickly apparent.
Conclusion
Modern marketing demands collaboration between thinkers, creators and analysts. While grouping talent helps, realizing the full potential requires focusing on process, communication and technology to enable cooperation.
The nine tips outlined establish visibility into editorial direction so your team can ideate collectively. By providing frameworks enabling clear assignment of work and access to shared research, brands derive greater impact than solo efforts allow. What collaborative tools prove most useful to your content strategy? Please share your experiences.
