With the massive increase in remote work worldwide because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are bound to be lots of different opinions about remote work and if enjoyable? Is it lonely? or really productive? Is it challenging? One thing’s for sure: remote work is a bit different from what we used to, right?. People you could walk up to and chat with are now just little faces in a Slack chat group. And while there’s tons of generic content about remote work that you could consume, we wanted to help you explore this new world as a content marketer.

In this article, we’ll be diving into some of the steps to help save you time, keep your sanity, and hit the goals you set up for yourself and your team. Let’s get started…

Let’s start with a Strategy

Not so long ago, we were able to do strategy meetings in person, with whiteboards and hand gestures and all the other things that come with working in person. Not any more. Here’s how to succeed when tackling strategy remotely.

Your vision & overall marketing strategy

The content you create must fit into the company’s strategic vision for growth. When you’re working remotely, you can’t hear the ideas other managers and executives are talking about. You need to all know things like who your target market and audiences, the ideal content formats, and channels, and how content plays a part in your other marketing strategies such as outbound, direct, and paid. Be proactive, this is how one can combat this.

Here are some options:

• Each month, send a quick message to the CEO, VP of marketing, or whoever you report to with a quick overview of the strategy you’re implementing
• If you’re in a position where strategy shifts often, then set up a meeting to discuss it every month or even more frequently
• Set up a review meeting to discuss the content that went live over the previous month, and talk through any changes

“Remote meetings can be just as effective. To combat the fact that you don’t have a whiteboard everyone can look at, open up a shared Google document to take notes, or use a whiteboard software. You can also designate a note-taker, record meetings, and/or transcribe them.”

Your targeting audience

Learning more about your audience, their needs, and their interests is essential. One of the smart ways marketers do this is overhearing a customer success and sales team conversations. But now, as a remote worker, you don’t have team members from other departments surrounding you. Now, you need to make sure you’re actively getting insights from people who directly interface with your customers.

Here are some ways to do this:

• Ask for transcriptions or recordings of customer or sales calls and review at least one or two each month
• Learn what deals the sales team is landing right now, and ask sales what the customer was looking for and why they decided to sign up (so you can create content around these motivations)
• Discover which customers and types of customers are being retained so you can create content that attracts similar customers.

“Reducing unnecessary remote meetings When you can’t just ask a team member a quick question, you might find that people are scheduling more meetings than necessary. Just because something is too complicated to talk about over Slack, doesn’t mean it needs a meeting. Encourage your team to use Loom videos for quick questions and answers, which can be watched at 1.5x or 2x speed to save time.”

If you typically attend industry events and meetups in order to learn more about your audience and customers, you’ll need to replace that research as well.

Here are some ways to get closer to your customer’s needs when working remotely:

• Watch a webinar intended for your target audience
• Join Facebook groups for your target audience
• See what offers and marketing messages other companies are offering to your target audience

Top tools for remote content marketers Here are our favorites:

• Loom for screen recordings
• Vectera for online meetings with shared whiteboards and documentation
• Slack for chat-style team communication
• StoryChief for blogs and social content collaboration and promotion
• Hive for project management
• Sunrise KPI for simple KPI dashboards
• Mangools for more affordable SEO keyphrase research
• Icons8 for creating beautiful graphics, vectors, and own stock photo’s

Phases of a buying cycle

When creating content, you need to pay attention to the buying cycle of your product or service. How much research do customers do before buying? How many touchpoints do they have with your brand? Especially during very challenging times that force the world’s office workers into remote work, you need to consider how the buying cycle may have changed.

During difficult times, some companies boom and others bust. Is your sales cycle going to get longer because your product or service is deemed nonessential? Or is your sales cycle suddenly shorter because your company’s offer is all of the sudden even more relevant than it was previously? These are questions you should talk through with your CEO or senior marketing executive, as well as a leader on the sales or product side. Together, decide how the buying cycle has changed, and identify content gaps and opportunities.

Team building

Your team is important. They’re your work family. When working remotely, you can still feel that human connection. It’s great to spend the first few minutes of any meeting catching up on life. But 3 minutes isn’t enough for quality team building. One to four times a month, set aside time for something special. Since our StoryChief team had to go remote, we’ve been having lunch video chats together and playing video games!

Keyphrase research for SEO

And finally, when it comes to content strategy, SEO has a big role to play. You need to dial in all of the above before selecting keyphrases. SEO keyphrase research is fairly easy to do remotely. You can use tools like Mangools, Ahrefs, and Surfer. Find key phrases with over 100 monthly search volume and a competitive score low enough for your domain to have a chance of ranking. Then review these with your content decision-makers before choosing which to tackle next.

Hacks to be more productive

You’re bound to get sucked into some black holes of unproductiveness now and then. Here’s how to get out:

• Focus on what you can control, make peace with what you can’t
• Separate personal time from work time (don’t clean your kitchen when you’re supposed to be working)
• If possible, take turns with other people in your family to take care of children
• Set focus timers for 25 – 50 minutes, and when they go off, get up and move around for 5 – 10 minutes

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