As a Content Strategist, you need to collaborate with different teams and stakeholders to create and deliver effective content that meets your goals and audience needs. But how do you work with cross-functional teams and manage the challenges and opportunities that come with it? In this article, we'll share some tips and best practices to help you succeed in this role.
One of the first steps to work with cross-functional teams is to understand the roles and responsibilities of each team member. This will help you communicate better, avoid duplication of work, and respect the expertise and input of others. For example, you might work with designers, developers, marketers, product managers, editors, and writers. Each of them has a different perspective and skill set that can contribute to the content strategy. You should also clarify your own role and expectations as a Content Strategist, and how you can support and align with the team goals.
Conduct Team Meetings: Organize regular team meetings to discuss and clarify each team member's role and responsibilities. Use this as an opportunity for team members to share their expertise and insights. Establish Clear Communication Channels: Set up clear communication channels to ensure team members can easily share information, ask questions, and provide updates. This might include using project management tools, messaging apps, or regular email updates. Remember that fostering effective communication and collaboration within cross-functional teams is an ongoing process. Regularly revisit roles and responsibilities to ensure they remain aligned with the team's goals and the evolving needs of the project.
It's crucial to include sales and your SMEs before crafting your content to ensure it speaks to your audience and uses the industry terminology your clients and prospects are using. Involving SMEs helps to build thought leadership backed by accuracy. Collaborating with Sales is important because they interact with your audience regularly face-to-face or via phone and email and are more apt to use the content when they're involved. Take these people along for the ride.
"Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much." - Helen Keller 3 Questions to Ask on this: What are the key strategies content strategists can employ to effectively collaborate with cross-functional teams within an organization? How can content strategists ensure that their content aligns with the goals and needs of various departments, such as marketing, design, and development? Can you provide examples of successful content strategists who have excelled in working with cross-functional teams, and what best practices and lessons can be derived from their experiences?
Recognizing and valuing the expertise of each team member fosters collaboration. Clear role definition prevents overlap and ensures efficient content creation.
Create synergy for your content strategy by understanding the pain points/road blocks of each team in delivering value through content. Sit with the writer, designer, editor, sales partner, growth marketer and all others involved and ask them the one biggest challenge they face in creating/delivering value-generating content whether it's a carousel design, sales pitch, email copy or caption. There will be some eye-opening discoveries. And you will be pleasantly surprised to play the solution matchmaker through this insightful cross-functional exchange.
Another key step is to establish a content workflow that defines the process and steps for creating, reviewing, approving, and publishing content. A content workflow should also include the tools, platforms, and standards that the team will use to manage and deliver content. For example, you might use a content management system, a collaboration tool, a style guide, and a content calendar. A content workflow will help you streamline the content production, ensure quality and consistency, and avoid delays and errors.
Tracking the progress is key. A lot or often all the time goes into planning and execution. It's important to have weekly/bi-weekly team huddles to cross-check: ? How much has been done ? What was the outcome ? What needs to be done differently. This helps establish accountability and also helps set the direction or redirection for the different teams involved.
A well-defined workflow reduces bottlenecks and ensures timely content delivery. Using standardized tools and platforms ensures consistency across content pieces.
This is especially important when working with remote team members or those who have different working styles. Make sure that everyone is aware of deadlines, expectations, and how to provide feedback. Regular check-ins can help to ensure that everyone is on the same page and that projects are progressing smoothly.
The tools and platforms to ensure the content workflow are secondary to the RACI system - who makes the decisions? Who is responsible, etc., doesn't work. Identifying the stakeholders and holding them accountable is key to a good workflow.
Let's use case studies as an example. One of the biggest obstacles content strategists have is getting approvals for case studies. But if you embed the goal of case studies into your workflow, it becomes SO MUCH EASIER. - Make case studies a part of your contract, the default is expectations of success and a story to tell - Engage your sales team way earlier to identify best examples and priorities - Capture data during the project (instead of trying to find it later); numbers, quotes, real-time solutions, etc. - Use a case study template to engage the client and your internal team (make it easy and short) Doing all this makes the case study a breeze, as opposed to a nightmare.
Communication is essential for working with cross-functional teams, especially if they are distributed or remote. You should communicate regularly and clearly with the team members, using the appropriate channels and methods. For example, you might use email, chat, video calls, or meetings to share updates, feedback, questions, or issues. You should also communicate the content strategy, goals, and metrics to the team, and explain how the content supports the business and user objectives. Communication will help you build trust, rapport, and understanding with the team, and resolve any conflicts or problems.
Start with asking for their input and content needs. For example, product teams have a better understanding of the product while customer support teams have a better understanding of customer needs. Getting input from these various teams will enrich the content strategy.
Content strategy is not a very broadly understood discipline. This means that you need to be careful of how you communicate with content strategy muggles. You need to communicate about goals and tactics using their language, not content geek speak.
Regular communication prevents misunderstandings and keeps the team aligned. Using a mix of communication channels, like emails, chats, and meetings, caters to different team preferences and ensures effective communication.
As a content strategist, clearly communicating with cross-functional teams requires using plain language, defining key terms, being specific about needs and expectations, being open to feedback, respecting different perspectives, utilizing multiple communication channels, being mindful of time zones and cultural differences, and exercising patience. Additionally, providing clear briefs, being clear about goals, being open to collaboration, and providing feedback are essential for building strong working relationships with content strategists and ensuring the delivery of high-quality content.
Working with cross-functional teams also means seeking feedback and input from the team members and stakeholders. You should not work in isolation or assume that you know everything about the content. Instead, you should involve the team in the content planning, creation, and evaluation stages, and ask for their opinions, suggestions, or critiques. You should also be open to feedback and input from the users, and test and measure the content performance and impact. Seeking feedback and input will help you improve the content quality and effectiveness, and incorporate diverse and valuable insights.
Diverse feedback brings in different perspectives, making the content more holistic. Regular feedback loops ensure continuous improvement in content quality.
By gathering insights from a variety of perspectives, content strategists can gain a deeper understanding of the target audience, identify potential blind spots, and ensure that content is aligned with the overall goals of the organization. In addition, feedback and input can help to improve the quality of content by identifying areas for improvement and ensuring that content is clear, concise, and easy to understand. By seeking feedback from team members with different areas of expertise, content strategists can identify potential errors, inconsistencies, and cultural sensitivities.
Finally, working with cross-functional teams requires you to learn and adapt to different situations, challenges, and opportunities. You should not be rigid or complacent with your content strategy, but rather be flexible and willing to change and improve it based on the team and user feedback, data, and trends. You should also learn from the team members and stakeholders, and appreciate their skills, knowledge, and experience. Learning and adapting will help you grow as a Content Strategist, and create and deliver better content.
Flexibility in strategy allows for quick adaptation to changing market trends. Continuous learning from team members and stakeholders keeps the content strategy fresh and updated.
In the ever-evolving landscape of content creation, learning and adapting are essential for content strategists working with cross-functional teams. This allows them to adapt their strategies and approaches to ensure that content remains relevant, engaging, and effective. Additionally, by demonstrating their willingness to learn and adapt, they can build trust and credibility with team members from different disciplines. This fosters a more collaborative and productive working environment, where everyone is willing to contribute their unique skills and expertise to the process.
Along these lines, realize that varying interests and perspectives often produces tension. In terms of content creation, this can be a productive tension. Marketing team members, product managers, designers and others all have unique perspectives on content. When we can gracefully bring these all into the same room and glean the gold from each, our content can truly shine.
It is relatively easy to write content. Finding the right distribution channel to ensure the audience you want to attract is much harder.
Using collaborative tools ensures transparency in the content creation process. Regular training sessions foster team bonding and enhance the overall content strategy.
Seek to deeply understand the interests of your cross-functional team members. It's not enough to simply know what they do. Spend time learning what's important to them, what their best- and worst-case scenarios look like, whether they've ever worked with content folks before, what that was like, what their hopes and fears are in working with you. Reflect back what they tell you and see if you came close to what they meant to say. This helps to build trust so that when it's time to work out content details among team members with varying or conflicting perspectives, you will have build enough trust to take leadership steps in providing content solutions.
Writing content is easy, making sure that you reach the proper audience is hard. Knowing your audience is the hardest part. Once you work with your cross-functional teams it helps build a better brand for you to reach out to.