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Pre-requisite: Assuming you have found your niche and target audience.

Steps in the content management process:

1. Create the content strategy/game plan
2. Create a content calendar
3. Acquire initial tools
4. Align team and hire talent
5. Start developing content
6. Develop content templates
7. Create onboarding materials
8. Optimize communications and storage
9. Publish content
10. Feedback, iteration, and improvement

Content strategy/game plan

The content strategy is your overall game plan for everything content-related. It is absolutely imperative that you outline all the content pieces and strategies throughout a specific period – be it a quarterly plan or a yearly plan. It should be as complex as possible, even if you initially start small. And if you’re struggling to get all your ideas written down, you can always have a look at our content strategy template.

Basically, you’re looking to include a general overview of all the types of content you’ll be creating and how it all will be distributed. That includes, but isn’t limited to, blogs, social media postings, whitepapers, podcasts, videos, and infographics.

Content calendar

The content calendar is your pre-production stage as well as a form of organizing your content pieces. While you will generally schedule the posting of content on your calendar, it’s also great to outline what content you still need to create, to schedule upcoming events/activities, and to map out any of the smaller details that will form part of the execution.

There are great tools out there to help in creating a content calendar, but you can also create your own on a spreadsheet if you’re not looking for something too complex.

Acquire initial tools

Depending on your budget, you will need a few premium tools to supplement your game plan. If you have the budget, you can probably get one tool for every second to third major facet of the content management process. This means you’ll need around 3-5 different tools, in total, to schedule content, map out content on a content calendar, analyze metrics, effectively optimize content, and manage multiple projects and team members. If you don’t have that budget, don’t worry, because there are many free tools available as well (don’t forget to leverage those free WordPress plugins!).

Regardless of budget, in fact, we recommend that you stick to one tool per facet; in other words, you only need one communication tool and one project management tool. There is no need to use Skype, Slack, Google Hangouts, Trello, Asana, JIRA, and whatever else is new and exciting, but will eventually have a poor UX/UI, simultaneously.

Align team and hire talent

This is where you, as CEO, develop or update the accountability and organizational charts for your C-suite and middle management. You will also want to make sure that everyone is aligned on what the content and product goals are and what the concrete vision will be. From there, the Chief Content Officer can hire their writers, editors, designers, etc.

Content development

After you have defined team roles, you can start with your content creation. As a Chief Content Officer, your role is to take what you have learned from the alignment to achieve content/product goals, and then to continue mapping out your content calendar so that you can now execute everything on there.

Update the content calendar, leverage available tools, and templates, and then meet with your staff to get the content factory up and running. Your writers will follow your style guide and templates to continue producing content pieces, the editors will proofread and apply necessary edits, and you, as CCO, will ensure that the content actually meets the objectives and deadlines.

Content templates

While there will be some templates prior to content development, you won’t really see the perfected result until after the real product arrives and experimentation has occurred. Once you as CCO have your content, and it has been revised multiple times, you will be able to meet with the CEO and other C-suite members to align them on what future content will look like. After all parties are satisfied, the content can be transformed into templates so that the writers, editors, and designers can make use of these.

Onboarding materials

Since you already have your templates, you can then go on to create the onboarding materials for new team members. All you have to do is document the content creation processes, preferably with a video recording software, such as Loomly, and then store it in a directory where new hires can easily access only the relevant materials.

Optimize communications and storage

In case you haven’t already decided, the leadership team should discuss the use of one communications tool (preferably) and one storage tool – such as Google Drive. The less you use, the more confusing it will be in the long-term. And trust me, you will definitely lose files and communications if you’re planning on using multiple tools.

Publish content

This is where you finally reach the stage of execution. You’ll want to have all your web pages social media accounts at the ready.

Feedback, iteration, and improvement

I can’t stress this enough: you won’t have everything perfect in the first round! It takes months to years of improvement to optimize everything, so don’t be too harsh on yourself or others. What you will need, however, is a great feedback mechanism and transparency. Monitor the analytics, meet with the leadership team and other team members, and discuss potential improvements. Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty and dig into the root of the previously latent issues. From there, the company can go through multiple iterations.

Finally, we haven’t omitted transparency. From the top, to the bottom, everyone must be transparent on what the goals are and what improvements are expected. That doesn’t, however, mean that anyone should be micromanaged; rather, you’re looking to optimize the final products. All that’s left is… are you ready for round two?