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7 Steps to Streamline Your Content Creation With a Knowledge Bank

7 Steps to Streamline Your Content Creation With a Knowledge Bank

Download your customizable knowledge management template to follow along with these steps and start streamlining your content creation process.

Ah, content creation: the love-hate component of your content team. Of course, no content marketing program is complete without it, but few aspects of your strategy are going to be as intensive as your actual content creation process.

While it does take time and careful effort, content creation doesn’t have to be a painful experience. In fact, with a little prepping ahead of time, adapting to new processes, and a flood of expert knowledge, it can actually be easy, effective, and enjoyable for your entire content marketing team.

Your Content Team’s New Favorite Tool: The Knowledge Bank

As a content marketer, you work with many different people within your organization to create content for your goals. Maybe you help your CEO or CMO write articles for outside publications. Maybe you help your sales team create infographics or produce explainer videos to enable the sales process. Maybe you byline your own content on your company blog.

Download "The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing for Thought Leadership" to learn more about the kind of content you need to build the thought leadership of your key employees.

When you work with multiple people for multiple content projects, two things are certain: You're going to need their expertise to create exceptional content, and you're going to have to work around busy schedules to get it.

Using a knowledge bank (aka knowledge management template) to collect that expert insight and create content can enhance your efforts and improve efficiency throughout the entire process, especially when things get busy for you and your team.

The knowledge management template is a customizable tool for storing important information about your company, its key leaders and their industry insights, and your customers. From your company’s origins to its customer pain points, this template can help you organize every detail necessary to save time when creating internal content as well as guest posts for external publications.

Download your copy of "The State of Digital Media 2018" to learn more about what online publication editors are looking for in guest content from outside experts.

Now, chances are your company, its leaders, and your key employees have a ton of valuable information that could fuel your content creation. But it doesn't do your content team much good if it's not stored and accessible in a central location — and that's what makes a knowledge bank such a useful tool.

By establishing a central location for company knowledge, you’re providing a resource library for employees to better equip themselves with the materials they need to avoid major content creation headaches and make the process simple.

Your 7-Step Guide to Using Your Company Knowledge Bank

The knowledge you supply in your template is the key to increasing productivity, employee engagement, and the quality (and effectiveness) of your content. To get started, here’s a step-by-step guide to building your own company knowledge bank to streamline your content creation:

1. Customize your template.

Familiarize yourself with each of the template's tabs, and add any custom tabs that are unique to your company. Consider how you and your team members might sort through a bank of information, and add tabs or filters to make navigation simple. Customize it in whatever way works best for your team.

2. Stay consistent with the small details.

As you begin to input information, be sure to consistently add dates, relevant links, topics, and content to each tab. This will make it much easier to navigate and organize content as you begin building out your template.

3. Update it regularly.

You want to make sure your examples and insights are fresh and timely, so it's important to stay consistent and make a note to update it regularly. Depending on the cadence of your team's editorial calendar, monthly or quarterly reviews of your knowledge bank should keep it up-to-date.

4. Set guidelines for multiple users.

If you're not the only one on your content marketing team using the template, then set guidelines for consistency. Who will manage the Q&A process? Who will supplement answers with industry research? Who's taking the lead on creating content with those insights? Each person will probably use your bank a little differently, so set some guidelines to keep it organized.

5. Add context where possible.

Even with set guidelines, confusion is bound to arise if the content in your bank doesn't come with any context. As you're establishing guidelines and inputting information, consider how other people on your team will be using the content in your knowledge bank. To avoid potential confusion or any content being taken out of context, add notes and follow-up questions where you can.

6. Crowdsource knowledge across your team.

Encourage your staff to answer questions about their roles and experiences, too. Using your team members’ ideas can be immensely helpful in strengthening articles — just make sure to quote and give credit where it’s due. For more on expanding your efforts, check out this guide to crowdsourcing content creation.

7. Most importantly, make it accessible.

If other people don’t know where to find this amazing bank of information, it's not going to be very helpful. You might not want every person in your company to input information each day — that could get a little confusing, not to mention cluttered — but everyone should be able to access it if necessary. Your company knowledge bank will include all kinds of valuable information that's relevant to people in departments across your organization — and for it to benefit them, it must be easy to access.

So next time you have an amazing experience with a lead, find a hack that takes your productivity to the next level, read an article that’s worth sharing, or perfectly explain a concept that gets people to better understand what your message is, don’t let that knowledge go to waste. Open your knowledge bank and continue adding new information to make your content creation more efficient and effective.

We know creating exceptional content is only one piece of the puzzle. Are you effectively organizing and promoting your content once it's published? For a quick and easy-to-use guide, click to download below:

Content-Distribution-Guide

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About Nickie Bartels

I love cloudy days, office supplies, and rewatching the same sitcoms I've already seen a dozen times. When I'm not looking for ways to elevate content, I'm looking for opportunities to tell stories about my dog.

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