Teams that create marketing and brand content can sometimes be lacking in content operations. Building and adopting a content operations workflow may seem overwhelming at first, but it can provide several benefits for the enterprise. Strategic ContentOps will streamline business processes, produce quality content, save costs and time and provide an immersive customer experience. 

According to an Upland Kapost report, only 11% of marketing or content teams plan their content campaigns according to organizational objectives and prioritize campaigns based on the ones that bridge the strategic gaps. That alone screams how organizations are struggling to pivot their business models and produce content operations with core competency. Companies are bound to suffer due to disengaging content, thereby making their operations inefficient at scale.

This article will guide you through the basic principles of Content Operations and the role of a Content Operations Manager.

What Is Content Operations?

Content operations is a set of people, processes, and technologies leveraged for strategic planning, creation, distribution, management, and analysis of all types of content across multiple channels of an enterprise.

In true essence, it is a systematic framework that defines how an organization creates engaging content that will deliver exceptional CX (customer experiences). It just begins here, as content operations further aim to deliver personalized content experiences, enhance brand experience and ultimately boost business growth. This is done by breaking down silos between teams to bridge the gap between content processes, which in return will accelerate content creation, management, and delivery.

Why Is Effective Content Operations So Important?

Enterprises will definitely get big wins if they implement streamlined content operations. When done right, content ops not only generate high-performing content but also save on significant resources, time and money.

Here are some major benefits of content operations: 

• Produces high-performing content of all types
• Accelerates the process of content production
• Seamless cross-departmental collaborations
• Consolidated content technology
• Boost in conversions

Any organization that wants to build solid customer relationships must leverage content operations solutions. According to Forrester's research, 89% of digital businesses are investing in the creation of personalized content including Netflix, Sephora, Wells Fargo, Coca-Cola, and USAA.

Having a robust content operations strategy in place will solve major content challenges, as content ops aim to empower teams in content creation, planning, management, and analysis.

What Does a Content Operations Manager Do?

A content operations manager is responsible for implementing and managing a company’s content operations. Here are some of the things they do:

1. Strategic Content Planning

To manage content across the entire organization horizontally and vertically, a content ops manager needs to have a keen understanding and expertise in content planning and marketing. 

No doubt, content marketing is the foundational step of content ops, hence a content ops manager needs to understand how it will coexist and adapt with the organization’s strategy, business goals, and balance sheet.

Producing content that precisely represents your brand is important to ensure customers resonate with it. Strategic content planning in Content Ops will define the various types of content your business creates and why. Standardizing this content will help you create a potential branding and contribute to your ultimate digital marketing plan.

2. Production of Quality Content

The very core reason for leveraging Content Ops is to produce and deliver engaging content to the customers. It must derive great value consistently in the content lifecycle. 

A Content Ops Manager needs to create content with core proficiency to make an impact on consumers, especially when there’s so much competition out there in the digital market. Content ops are the tool that will help you to achieve that milestone.

3. Implementation of Content Strategy

Implementation of the content strategy involves tagging and grouping to make sure there’s enough content to fill into every stage of the content lifecycle. For example, you may find that you have engaging content at the beginning of the sales funnel to attract executives, but not sufficient content for the same persona during their decision-making funnel. 

A Content Ops Manager must be able to identify these gaps in the content lifecycle and strategically implement content strategy throughout the marketing funnel. This will ensure the right content is presented to the right persona at the right time.

Having expertise in this field will also save organizations a significant amount of time, money, content, and effort. With around 70% B2B content going to waste, companies need to avoid creating content that is NOT needed or that already exists. 

4. Align With Business Priorities

A Content Ops Manager often may produce content without taking the bigger picture into consideration. The content may actually not fit into the business’s revenue goals and balance sheet. Organizations can create engaging content, sure. But, content ops managers need to make sure the content is in sync with the efforts of other departments as well.

Content for the sake of the content model does NOT work anymore! Today, content ops take marketing as its foundational stone towards business growth and boost in ROI.

5. Collaborating With Other Departments

For streamlined content ops workflows, a content ops manager needs buy-in from other business units such as sales, product teams, marketing, HR, R&D, Training, Legal, the C-suite, and e-commerce teams. 

Cross-departmental collaboration will enhance a wide dimension of the business. Without it, you may lack in producing content that resonates with the internal teams and potential customers. 

As per a Kapost’s latest report, only 44% marketers have complete visibility into the content and campaigns of other business departments. This alone speaks about how there’s a potent gap across an organization and its marketing teams. Therefore, a content ops manager must begin every initiative with a precisely defined content plan. This involves splitting up production assets into a bunch of tasks that are strategically assigned to contributors and are met at specific deadlines.

6. Make Data-Driven Decisions

Content ops managers must be able to make informed decisions that rely upon trusted data. This is possible by leveraging comprehensive reporting tools through a robust content ops solution.

7. Content Performance Insights

Content ops managers cannot keep on moving to the next goals, without pondering upon what’s done in the past. One needs to derive and analyze content performance insights to see whether content ops strategy has really had an impact on the consumers, teams, and revenues. Only then content ops managers can go ahead with strategic confidence, as they now know what really works and what doesn’t.

Invaluable metrics help you derive data-driven insights, using which you can implement content scoring and detect where and how assets affected a buyer in their sales journey. Reflecting on content performance will eliminate the need to rebuild a wheel for new campaigns every single time. Rather, business processes that work can be replicated and scaled across departments and projects. You can establish the same timelines and tasks with little to no changes across other initiatives as well.

All of this is possible with content operations, as it scales processes that work for your business.

What Skills Does a Content Operations Manager Need?

Content Operation Managers must be knowledgeable and skillful enough to drive operational excellence for content dispersed across internal workflows, company campaigns, social networks, corporate blogs, and so on. They must be able to create, manage, maintain and syndicate the content.

Here are some of the critical skills a content ops manager needs to possess for a successful content operations workflow:

• Ability to boost audience engagement on multiple channels with effective social campaign execution
• Seamlessly cross-collaborate with other business teams such as content designers, product marketers, researchers, content strategists, copywriters, etc. to improve efficiencies, content quality, and workflows
• Execute content audits and gap analysis to derive insights that will help to improve content operations
• Skills for content management including use of content management tools, technologies, and systems
• Manage daily content tracking, processing, and reporting with cross-functional teams to ensure better content monitoring for accuracy
• Experience in an operational management role 
• Outstanding professional and interpersonal communication skills
• Respect for deadlines and ability to pivot on multiple content-driven projects
• Data analysis to be able to connect the dots between brand storytelling and expected ROI

All of these skills are fundamental, basic, and timeless.

Get Started With Content Operations

Content ops are all about how you connect with your consumers, internal teams and how you scale and contribute to business growth. A discrete content operations solution will help you deliver great CX and better efficiencies in executing content ops workflows.

Today, content enters every business team - be it production, marketing, HR, R&D, sales, e-commerce, or legal units. And this is the reason why a robust content operations solution is essential to take content ops to the next generation of customer experiences.

Content Operations is that key framework that you can leverage to build a strong content strategy and technology stack.