February 17, 2015
Our marketing team is bringing you a new series to shed light upon our behind the scenes activities and processes. We’re committed to fostering engagement and knowledge sharing the marketing community — each month, we’ll be spotlighting a tool, program, or tactic we’re loving at Bluewolf Marketing HQ. In this first episode, we’re bringing you a sneak peek into how we optimized our marquee asset through content management.
Recently, our marketing team started using a content management tool called Kapost to manage the production of our content and campaigns through a centralized process — from ideation, to production, to reporting. Integrating with other platforms such as Salesforce, LinkedIn, Drupal, Readytalk and more, Kapost has overhauled our entire campaign process. Now everything can live under one roof — giving the entire team visibility into activity in all campaigns, as it happens.
We used Kapost to produce our largest campaign of the year: The State of Salesforce. Now in its third year, this marquee campaign was a bigger effort with more deliverables than ever before. We used three key functionalities in Kapost to optimize the production of this report:
- Nest all content under a central campaign.
Within Kapost, you can track your campaigns every step along the way —we were able to label various content pieces under a single campaign. From the main campaign page — in our case, the State of Salesforce — you could click into social tweets, ongoing design for ads, microsite copy, or one-off emails. Under the State of Salesforce campaign, we had 31 content pieces alone! This way, we could not only see the campaign on a larger level, but also every element of the campaign on a granular scale.
The result? We streamlined our core messaging, making it easier to realize the flow of the campaign across different channels.
- Organize task ownership and deadline management with optimized system filters.
One of the greatest advantages of using this platform is timeline management. On each specific content piece, we were able to easily assign tasks and deadlines to various owners. Every person on the team could see who was up next to finish their task, allowing them to track the progress of each assignment. Reminder triggers can be sent straight from the platform and dashboards maintain every team member’s task queue. This visibility into daily production tasks allowed us to raise red flags if needed when deadlines were approaching.
The result? There was stricter adherence to deadlines, ultimately putting us ahead of schedule for our launch date.
- Customize built-in workflow steps.
Finally, the most unique advantage of this platform is the fully optimizable capabilities of workflow and approval processes. While building out the platform, I was able to optimize workflows to pre-populate based on the content type. Whether we were working on building an email or a datasheet, a workflow would automatically trigger with built in ownership tasks. Therefore, when someone created a social ask for the State of Salesforce, our social coordinator, Bel Gu, was alerted of her upcoming tasks. Likewise, when a product manager requested an email drip campaign, Elizabeth McBain, our database manager, had an email campaign flow automatically appear.
The result? We created a smoother production process, eliminating the need for hand-off emails.
Since we launched the State of Salesforce this year, we’ve already seen greater success than previous years. And this was owed in large part to the way we were able to manage our content. While Kapost was a big part of optimizing our process, it took many iterations of this initial template to get to where we are today. Copy or download then customize it for your own campaign needs.
Look out for upcoming blogs in this series to look behind the scenes at our marketing team's process and initiatives. Subscribe to receive updates directly in your inbox! How does your team manage campaigns? Let us know in the comments below, or tweet us @Bluewolf.
