The world of content marketing has a constant in flow of new talent. Depending on how you like your content produced, you could work with a different writer every day or every week if you liked. Many clients, however, feel that putting together a writing team and helping those few members really learn about your brand and marketing tone is a far more efficient content production method. This helps to decrease the need for constant revisions and increase the consistency of the content being produced. The only flaw with this method is that over time you may find that this team needs to be refreshed. Read on for a few tips on how to evaluate your writers’ efficiency and how to know when it is time to add some new blood to your team.
Dropping the Ball
One frustrating aspect of working with a cloud team is that you are not personally involved with them the way you would be in an office setting. When an office colleague begins to “drop the ball” in some way others in the office may be able to quickly pinpoint the cause. Water cooler gossip reveals marital problems, or a sick parent or financial problems. You do not have this insider scoop on your cloud content writers, so when a writer you have worked with and been pleased with in the past, suddenly drops the ball and is no longer producing great content for you it can be a mystery.
It is always in your best interest to give a good writer a chance to pull their work back up to status quo, but if the problem begins to slow down content production you may want to consider dropping the writer who consistently drops the ball. Signs that a writer is no longer a productive member of your team would include consistently missing deadlines, ignoring specific instructions or lazy repetitive writing.
Adding New Team Members
If you do have to drop a team member and add new ones, remember that bringing on a new team member is a progressive work. If you have had the luxury of working with a designated group of writers for a while who understand you, your brand and your tone, then you may have forgotten that newbies will need time for polishing. Give some wiggle room in the beginning for revisions and bumps.
Also remember that when you are looking for new writers be open minded to the fact that content developers are very fast learners. Even if a writer has not had specific experience marketing your particular product or service, it does not mean they could not quickly learn what you need and wind up being a great addition to your team.
Sarah R is a freelance author, content developer and single homeschool mother. She spends the early hours of the morning producing great content for her clients and the rest of the day lost in a world of sentence diagrams, construction paper, fractions, and spelling rules that, hey let’s be honest, make absolutely no sense.
