Content Ops and Real-Time Marketing: Staying Agile
Staying on trend with current events allows companies to remain relevant in their audience’s daily lives. In order to keep up with constantly changing trends, brands must enhance their processes for creating and distributing content ? known as content ops ? to turn marketing ideas into finished content as quickly as possible. Find out how to create streamlined content systems that enable your marketing team to create and respond to trends and events quickly.
Overview of Content Ops and Real-Time Marketing
To understand how content ops fits into the concept of real-time marketing, it’s important to understand each as a standalone concept. So what is content ops?
Content operations (also known as ?content ops?) encompass all of the processes, people, and technology involved in the life cycle of a piece of content. This starts in the planning and brainstorming phases and follows content all the way to the distribution and analysis phases. Ultimately, the aim of content ops is to maximize processes and content quality so all branded content delivers value to its proper audience in an efficient manner.
How does content ops relate to real-time marketing? In a chaotic marketplace that gives consumers myriad options for every single purchasing decision, brands capture attention by engaging with customers as much as possible. Marketing agility ? powered by good content ops ? empowers brands to respond to trends and events in ‘real-time?, creating more opportunities for forming customer connections. Essentially, real-time marketing allows brands to be a part of the everyday trends and events that draw and hold their audience’s attention, ultimately allowing them to play a more meaningful, integrated role in consumer’s daily lives.
The Role of Content Ops in Marketing Strategy
Content ops represents a vital part of an overall marketing strategy. Every marketing project is subject to a marketing team’s content ops while moving from an idea to a finished product, then to distribution, and finally to evaluation.
A few key ways in which good content ops contribute positively to marketing strategy include:
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Streamlining content creation and distribution: Enhancing workflows and technological systems used throughout the content life cycle, so content moves through creation and approval to distribution faster
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Ensuring consistency across channels: Managing brand requirements like writing tone and visual brand aesthetics properly so all creative personnel know how to make content that maintains trusted, recognizable branding across every channel
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Empowering cross-functional collaboration: Proper processes allow multiple teams to work together on one project seamlessly, from content writers to designers, and all the way up to key stakeholders reviewing and approving content
Real-Time Marketing: Definition and Significance
At its most basic definition, real-time marketing refers to the practice of creating and distributing immediate responses to trends and events. Using real-time marketing, brands strive to create relevant and timely content that enhances customer engagement.
To participate in events and trends as they happen, companies must reduce the time to market for marketing pieces like emails, social media, blogs, and more. Improving content ops helps brands balance this need to create content faster while ensuring all content meets quality standards prior to distribution.
Implementing Content Ops for Real-Time Marketing
Content ops aims to improve marketing processes to create a faster timeline for marketing projects, ensure content quality, and make actionable insights about content performance that inform future decisions. The aspects of content ops that have the greatest positive impact include the following.
Content Calendar Optimization
Digital content calendars allow marketing teams to create and collaborate on the master schedule for distributing content. The digital version allows teams to change content schedules quickly and easily to make room for responding to current events. Many content calendar management tools also empower marketing personnel to schedule content distribution across channels, ensuring their take on a trend makes it out to every relevant audience in a timely manner.
Agile Workflows for Quick Turnaround
Workflows that determine how content work is assigned, completed, approved, and distributed play an important role in the speed of a team’s content process. Within content ops software, like a digital asset management system (DAM), teams can create workflows that notify team members when a task is assigned, when it’s due, and who next to send it to in order to streamline the process.
For example, a content writer may get assigned to write a marketing piece in line with a current trend and then send it to a designer to collaborate, who then passes it to a manager for review and approval. Once approved, the writer handles scheduling and distribution. A workflow creates a digital trail of each of these tasks as they are completed, ensuring no steps in the process are missed and reminding every person involved of their responsibilities and deadlines.
Utilizing Technology and Automation
As mentioned, DAM software is a powerful tool for controlling content ops, enabling marketers to automate administrative and menial tasks and streamline content processes. Within a DAM system, assets like content pieces are securely stored and intuitively organized so personnel can easily find, edit, and distribute the right assets at the right time.
Using robust DAM technology powered by AI, marketers can achieve faster content processes that enable real-time marketing through:
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Workflows
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Integrations with other marketing platforms
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Digital content distribution scheduling
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Project management features for easier collaboration
Agility in Responding to Trends and Events
A brand’s ability to balance quality and speed in content ops powers its success in real-time marketing. Brand content that exudes both value and relevance will connect with customers on a deeper level, forging better consumer relationships.
To maintain agility amidst constantly changing and emerging trends, brands must be able to adapt their pre-existing content and templates to new projects easily. One method that powers this is a modular content strategy, in which marketing creatives make content ?blocks? that can be individually used, changed, and combined to personalize branded content pieces for specific audiences or situations. Leveraging modular content allows brands to balance creating highly targeted, relevant content with enhanced time to market for finished content pieces.
No matter which strategies and tools a company plans to implement to achieve better real-time marketing, setting proper monitoring and evaluation of goals is paramount to success. Analyzing and tweaking processes and technologies in order to continuously improve after the initial implementation powers greater long-term success.
Measuring Success in Real-Time Marketing
Since real-time marketing is aimed at increasing customer engagement, the key performance indicators (KPIs) to track include:
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Social media engagement metrics including the number of likes, comments, clicks, and shares; as well as associated percentages like click-through rate
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Email engagement metrics like clicks and click-through rate
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Blog engagement metrics like comments (if applicable) and shares
In evaluating program success, rely on analytics and data-driven insights to see where changes are working and identify further challenges to solve. From there, generate and implement iterative improvement strategies alongside marketing personnel working within the new systems and processes to ensure your team remains agile.
