We all know that SEO is highly dependent on the quality and content of a website. Poor content — despite excellent search engine optimization techniques — rarely produces good results in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
And high-quality content comes from high-quality content teams.
However, how do we define high-quality content teams?
They are productive; they produce excellent content consistently; they are efficient as in they do not waste a lot of resources, and they produce the desired results with their content, e.g., traffic, engagement, and conversions.
But what makes a content team highly effective and successful?
In this blog post, we highlight 6 habits that almost all successful and effective content marketing teams have. These habits make them produce high-quality content that drives traffic, engagement, and conversions consistently.
Let’s see what those habits are that most successful content teams share to some extent.
1. They proactively search for good content ideas
Good content depends on good ideas. And productive content teams require good ideas on a consistent basis.
But how do you build an idea machine that regularly generates good ideas for the content team to pursue?
The trick is to be proactive and find inspiration wherever you can. Here are a few places you can look into for inspiration:
- See what is trending on Google Trends
- See what people are talking about on Twitter
- Check customer reviews and feedback for content ideas
- Read posts on Reddit, questions on Quora, LinkedIn answers to find more content ideas
- Analyze what your competitors are doing
Etc.
2. They believe in cross-team collaboration
Cross-team collaboration often gives content teams fresh ideas and perspectives. Successful and effective content teams realize this and rely on cross-team collaboration to not only find useful content ideas but also to produce content that readers and potential customers would appreciate.
For instance, talk to your customer support team and identify the top 10 most common questions they face day after day from customers. Identify patterns and themes around those questions and create a guide on a topic that covers the most commonly asked questions.
Similarly, talk to your sales team and see what questions or feedback they receive the most.
3. They work with a document content strategy
According to studies, nearly 43 B2B marketers do not have a documented content strategy. That is a big mistake — one that effective and successful content marketing teams do not make.
They have a clear vision they follow, and that comes with a proven and documented content strategy.
You may think that having a strategy is enough, and that there is no need for documenting it. But not documenting your strategy will cost you more time and resources in the long run.
What happens when you onboard new members to your content team? What happens when you need to revisit certain elements of your content strategy? What happens when you need to make improvements?
Effective content teams prepare for such contingencies, so they face no operational hiccups.
4. They have a proven content workflow
Whether you are the only person in your content team or if you have a dozen people with different hierarchies, you need a proper and proven workflow.
Without a content workflow, you experienced missed deadlines, bottlenecks, issues with content approvals, and a whole lot of unpredictability.
That’s not the way successful, effective, and product content teams operate.
If you do not already have one, build a content workflow based on your preferred system or project management software. Some of the popular project management and workflow tools, such as Trello, Notion, and Wrike, are preferred by content teams across the globe.
While building a workflow for your content team, we also recommend building and documenting processes and setting clear expectations and responsibilities for each member of your content team.
Content teams excel when they have little to no ambiguity about their roles and the processes they are supposed to flow. Build a well-oiled machine that works for your team, not the other way around.
5. They believe in data and test results
Effective content marketing teams do not only rely on gut feelings and intuitions. Instead, they believe in analytics, data, and results. Moreover, they also tweak their content strategies accordingly whenever they need to pivot.
Here are a few examples of how content teams can rely on data and analytics:
- Regularly check Google Analytics to see what’s working and what’s not working.
- A/B test different meta titles and meta descriptions in an attempt to improve click-through rates.
- Measure conversion rates and try to identify patterns and themes around certain topics that tend to produce higher conversion rates.
- Analyze what type of headlines resonate the most with your readers.
Apart from diving into analytics and making data-driven decisions, it is equally important that your content team regularly engages with A/B tests and put different elements against each other to see which one turns out to be better.
Not doing so means you rely more on your gut feelings and intuitions, instead of hard data and results.
6. They rely on keyword research and SEO
Last but not least, effective and successful content teams realize the importance of traffic and conversions — and most importantly, a positive ROI. Because that’s what keeps the lights on.
A business won’t spend money on a content team if it is not producing results. Those results depend on the specific business goals and may be as basic as just driving organic traffic or as robust as contributing to revenue with a positive ROI (return on investment).
That’s why it is important for content teams to rely on keyword research, SEO, and organic traffic to ensure they give themselves the best possible chance.
Keyword research allows content teams to pick topics that — if done right — are more likely to generate free organic traffic for years to come. With proper on-page search engine optimization (SEO), a piece of content is more likely to rank on the first page of Google.
And if the right topic was picked — for example, one with the right commercial and search intent — it can drive conversions, sales, and revenue for a long time, without much additional effort.
Because you do not have to work on those content pieces regularly, you soon end up with a positive ROI. If you do it enough times with enough content pieces, you end with a very profitable content division.
And that’s what makes your content team highly effective and successful.
Conclusion
As we discussed earlier, content teams are an extremely integral part of any online business. A website must rely on content in some way, shape, or form — whether it is blog posts, commercial landing pages, or just images and videos.
How teams approach and create that content is all that matters.
How does your content team work? What is their approach? What are your successes and failures?
Please share your thoughts in the comment section below. We’d love to hear it.
