Collaborative writing - Why teams produce better content?
“Content is king!”
A line proclaimed years ago, still rings true today. Content marketing is an industry that keeps growing and with a good reason - it brings in results and is expected to continue to do so. With many limitations coming to advertisers due to user privacy concerns and an oversaturation of ads everywhere, they look, a genuine connection is what needs to be created between brands and their audiences.
For this reason, the question that’s been lingering for quite some time has been:
How do we make the content we’re producing better?
Standard advice often includes proper research, a well-defined target audience with detailed personas, as well as having a strategic approach to creating content. However, as content production grew, so did the number of people involved in the process. Efficient teamwork that creates consistently good results became the new end goal. While more people working together brings in new challenges, it also allows us to create better content in the end.
How does teamwork produce better content?
Multiple perspectives
Each team member comes with a unique skill set that they put to the forefront when getting hired. However, when creating content their unique approach to doing research, personal challenges they overcame, and the insights they acquired through formal and informal education can be incredibly valuable.
If someone from the team can not only put themselves in the target audience's shoes but has walked in them or personally knows someone who has - it’s a huge added benefit.
Now, it should be noted that we shouldn’t ever generalize purely based on ourselves. However, having first-hand experience as a starting point can open up many avenues for future content development that we wouldn’t be aware of otherwise.
And practically speaking, a fresh pair of eyes can weed out more errors. When we're proofreading our work, we know the meaning we want to convey. Because we expect that meaning to be there, it's easier for us to generalize and miss the absent parts. While Grammarly and similar tools help, some things can still slip through. Why take the chance?
Good practices are shared and adopted more quickly
A great benefit of sharing best practices in a team is that it helps with filling existing knowledge gaps more quickly and organically. While working together, people can share tips, tricks, and the know-how they acquired along the way. When new skills are learned through work, they are also more likely to stick.
Additionally, companies where sharing best practices is common, attract more talent and are more likely to boost employees’ performance.
Longevity of content (and quality)
Content marketing is a game that pays off in the long run. This means that time to achieve results sometimes exceeds the time some members of the team stay with the company.
Having a well-functioning team allows us to keep the same quality of content, even when some team members move on to other opportunities. This has been immensely important in B2B where content has to be sharp and precise and is now gaining more and more importance in B2C.
And if team members have taken the time to learn from each other, they can then transfer them along to their new colleagues.
To sum it all up, working as a content team holds many benefits for both the quality and continuity of content creation. As the industry continues to boom, the supply will have to rapidly develop to match the demand.
Why not take the opportunity to build better content together?