Are you looking for the secret to unlocking unparalleled business impact?
Look no further. It lies in a seemingly simple, yet profoundly transformative strategy: content collaboration.
In today's dynamic and interconnected business landscape, where information flows at the speed of light and trends shift with a single tweet, the concept of isolated silos and solo endeavors is rapidly becoming obsolete. But how can you make content collaboration work for your business? Let’s find out.
What is content collaboration?
Content collaboration refers to the process of individuals or teams working together to create, develop, and produce various forms of content, such as articles, videos, infographics, podcasts and more. This can involve pooling diverse skills, expertise, and perspectives together to craft content that is engaging, informative, and valuable to the target audience.
In a content collaboration scenario, contributors aren’t just within a marketing team, but from other departments, backgrounds, or even external businesses. By blending their expertise, they create content that is richer, more comprehensive and often more innovative than what could be achieved by a single individual.
For example, say you want to drive more sales with your content, you may decide to collaborate with the sales team to understand some of the opposition they come up against in their customer interactions, creating messaging that focuses on how you can resolve these issues. In doing so, you’re ensuring the content you create is strategic, customer-focused and drives sales. Now that’s what we call impactful content collaboration!
What are the business benefits of content collaboration?
If you’re starting to think we might be onto something here, let’s give you a few more reasons why content collaboration is the tool you need for your business.
1. Higher-quality content
By combining the expertise and knowledge of multiple people and departments, this leads to more comprehensive and well-researched content. With more people working on one project, they’re more likely to catch errors, offer helpful suggestions and ensure that the final product is accurate and of high-quality for your audience. And the data backs this up, with 55% of marketers strongly believing that content collaboration helps them make the most of their content strategy.
2. Expanded reach
With more people working on a piece of content, you can lean on wider and more diverse networks and followers to promote it. This gives you a much wider scope to amplify the content, as well as providing opportunities for cross-promotion and shared distribution channels, meaning your content can be seen by a bigger audience.
3. Cost savings
By pooling wide-range of resources, experience and diverse skills, organizations can reduce the costs associated with content creation. Instead of hiring multiple specialists, they can leverage the expertise of existing team members.
4. Improved employee engagement
Collaborative efforts promote a sense of teamwork and shared achievement. And 75% of professionals regard collaboration and teamwork as important, helping increase their learning and feel valued and motivated when their contributions are recognized and integrated into the final content.
5. Data-driven insights
Collaborators bring different data sources and perspectives to the content creation process. This results in well-informed content that is backed by robust data and insights, enhancing its credibility.
6. Adaptation to changing trends
The more people you have working on your project, the more open you will be to diverse viewpoints on industry trends and shifts, allowing your organization to quickly adapt its content strategy and stay ahead of the curve. While also minimizing the risk of your strategy being biased.
6 types of content collaboration
Content collaboration can take effect in a number of different ways, depending on the goals, resources, and preferences of the collaborators involved. Here are some of the different types of content collaboration you can take advantage of:
1. Internal collaboration
Internal collaboration can encompass any number of people or teams, however they are all based within one business. This could be a combined effort to update internal or external messaging, or to create blogs on your company website.
2. Cross-functional collaboration
This involves collaboration between individuals or teams from different departments within an organization. For example, marketing, sales, and product teams might collaborate to create content that aligns messaging and strategy across the company.
3. External collaboration
External collaboration is where knowledge and work are shared with individuals outside of an organization, largely with existing partners or agencies, or sometimes freelance workers. This is usually used to cover short-term project needs and can be particularly useful to fill knowledge or experience gaps within your own team.
4. Co-branding
Co-branding allows two or more brands to collaborate together, creating content that leverages each other’s strengths and audiences. This could be a product launch collaboration, co-hosted events or co-authored content.
5. Guest contributions
By inviting external experts to contribute to your content, you can lean on their expertise and credibility, in turn increasing your own. You can also take advantage of their followers, helping you reach new demographics and potentially increasing your audience.
6. Virtual collaboration
Virtual collaboration takes advantage of tools such as video, chat, email and other communication technologies to allow different people, teams and organizations to collaborate together on one project without the need to be physically near one another. This type of collaboration has become increasingly popular due to the recent pandemic outbreak, raising the need to 83% of workplaces relying on virtual collaboration systems in the workplace.
8 Impactful ways you can create content with others
Not sure where to get started? Here are some ideas for ways that your marketing team can collaborate with other departments in your organization to create amazing content.
1. Customer stories
Work with your account management and sales teams to find real-life stories of customers that have benefited from your product or service. As they deal with customers on a day-to-day basis, they’re ideally placed to highlight the best stories and outcomes that your business has produced for your audience, and will also likely have an existing relationship with them to ask further questions if necessary. With 77% of consumers agreeing that branded testimonial videos convinced them to buy their product or service, it makes this form of content collaboration extremely worthwhile for the business.
2. How-to videos
Work with your customer support team to develop a series of how-to videos or tutorials that address the most common customer inquiries or issues, providing step-by-step guidance on how to use your product effectively to overcome them.
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3. Employee profiles
Collaborate with your HR team to create a selection of employee spotlight profiles, showcasing the diverse talents and experiences of your team members to promote a positive company culture and entice new faces to the business. You can do this through spotlight social media posts, a mini blog series about their experiences or via employer brand videos to give your audience a glimpse of your culture behind the curtains. With 84% of job seekers stating that the reputation of a company as an employer is part of the decision making process when applying for a job, this is an excellent way to ensure you’re promoting the right image to your prospective employees.
4. Infographics
Speak with your finance department and work together to build a set of useful static or video infographics and blog posts, bringing some of the more complex financial concepts to life and assisting your audience in understanding how your products can help them.
5. Events
Work with your sales team to create pre-event teaser videos, social media campaigns and post-event recaps to maximize the impact of a company-sponsored event or conference.
6. Thought leadership
Collaborate with your research and development teams to produce thought leadership content that discusses emerging trends, technological advancements and industry innovations, showcasing your company’s expertise and positioning them as pioneers in your space. A whopping 64% of buyers say that an organization's thought leadership content is a more trustworthy basis for assessing its capabilities and competency than its marketing materials and product sheets, so this is one you won’t want to miss out on.
7. White papers
If you have a product development team, they’re ideally placed to help you create a comprehensive visual product guide or whitepaper that thoroughly explains the features, benefits and best practices for using a new product or service that your company has released.
8. Engaging designs
Get together with your designers to build visually engaging content, such as an eBook with compelling visuals and illustrations, to educate and engage the target audience.
5 Tips for ensuring smooth cross-team collaboration
Now that you have an idea of how you might work with other teams in your business to create content, let’s think about how we can make this journey as smooth as possible. Here are our top 5 top tips.
1. Establish clear objectives
Begin by defining your content goals and objectives. Determine the type of content and format you want to create (e.g., case studies, testimonials, success stories as a video, blog or social media series) and the target audience for this content.
2. Provide guidelines
Develop clear guidelines for the type of content you’re creating. Specify the key information you need, for example if you’re working on a customer story or case study, you might look at challenges faced, solutions implemented, results achieved, and any specific metrics or data points to bring your point home.
3. Involve everyone from the start
Decide who you need working on the project with you right from the start, and make sure you involve them at every step. This ensures that they have oversight at any stage that may affect them and allows the process to run smoothly.
4. Choose your tools wisely
With whatever you’re creating or whoever your audience is, it’s really important that you use the right tools. Whether this is project management and tracking tools, shared files or media libraries, making sure that everyone has access to the information and applications they need to collaborate is key.
5. Communicate
Maintain open communication with the people within your project team, providing regular updates and check-ins to help sustain a collaborative content creation process.
5 content collaboration tools for guaranteed success
As mentioned above, having the right tools is vital for making sure your collaborative team has everything they need at their fingertips to get the job done. Here are some examples of the best tools out there to get you started.
1. Google Drive
Google Drive is a cloud-based storage service that allows different users to access and share files online. This easily accessible tool is perfect for team organization, even if your teams are on opposite sides of the world.
