In a survey of 1,000 digital marketers in 2017 , researchers found that one of the biggest challenges they faced was how to scale their marketing.
Well, considering how much time, resources, and mental energy go into creating effective, top-notch content, those numbers aren’t surprising. While outsourcing may be an option for you, it also comes with a unique set of hurdles. In other words, you may be better off laying out your strategy for scaling your content marketing while staying on budget.
In this article, we'll walk you through some tried-and-true c level contact list practices that can help you get the results you need. You'll discover valuable tips on how to scale up content marketing and come up with a checklist to tick off as you prepare for content production.
Six steps to prepare for content production
As many businesses have found out the hard way, creating high-quality content doesn’t guarantee great returns in content marketing. However, quality is crucial to success. By producing great content, you’re more likely to achieve desirable results when your content finally reaches your customers.
That said, it is necessary to take your time during content production and never rush the process. The following steps will help you use the resources available to you to produce the most relevant and effective content possible.
1. Choose the type of content to produce
The first step in content production is to determine what type of content should be created. However, to answer this question, you need to have adequate information about your audience: their desires, the problems they encounter, the solutions they need, and their preferred type of content.
Source: Active Campaign
Source: ActiveCampaign
In other words, you will need to conduct extensive research and analyze your business niche again (identify your trends, challenges, and even your competitors), but from a different angle. Once you have all this information, you will be able to decide what type of content will have the most significant desired impact on your target audience.
For most businesses, common first choices include blogs and videos. These are relatively simple to implement into your content marketing strategy and give your audience a clear insight into your brand.
In terms of blog content, there are many subtypes, including but not limited to:
Long readings: to showcase your expertise and authority in the field, presenting essential knowledge on a topic.
Case studies: to provide a case analysis with data and results.
Checklists: Boost engagement with easily digestible information
Infographics: to present data in a fun and easy-to-read format.
White papers: to show data and experience in your reading
E-books: to present comprehensive and well-structured information on a broader topic.
You can also write social media posts along with a high-quality photo that you can relate to or collaborate with small-scale influencers in your niche to expand your audience reach. As for the latter, micro-influencers are quite affordable due to a smaller audience number (2-50 followers) but have high engagement rates.
2. Describe or visualize your content production process and the entities involved.
Once you focus on the type of content you want to deliver, the next step is to determine the parties that will be involved in the content creation process and how it will flow.
Determine the entities that will be responsible for the different content production tasks. These may be your writers and designers, journalists, interviewers and editors.
Next, determine how you will communicate with the team. You may choose to do this through an email client , a chat/video, or any collaboration and productivity app , or a combination of several tools.
Next, assign responsibility for overseeing and managing the content production process. This person’s job will be to ensure that the team stays on track with the plan and deadlines.
Finally, decide who contributes content ideas. In some cases, the entire team comes together to develop content ideas, while in other cases, an SEO specialist should take on the role.
By outlining and dividing responsibilities and duties across your team and also establishing ground rules that guide communications, you have greatly simplified content production. More importantly, you have increased the chances of producing content successfully.
3. Gather the creators: choose the right team
After determining the roles you need within your content production team, the next step is to choose who handles what.
Here, you will need to assign specific roles to people who can handle them and deliver the results you need. In most cases, you will already know certain people who can deliver the quality of results you need. However, you can also re-evaluate your staff and talent pool to assign the various tasks.
Here's a pro tip to help you through this process:
If you want to build a very strong team, we recommend presenting the opportunity to team members rather than simply assigning them new responsibilities. This is because not all of your workers may be ready to take on new projects or even available to do so. Therefore, if you load them with more work, they may not be able to function at their highest level of productivity.
However, if they are on board and take on their responsibilities themselves, they will likely be more motivated in their new roles. This may mean having to reassign some tasks and move some duties, but it's usually worth it!
Another thing you need to consider is the diversity of the content production team. Each position requires different talents, skills, backgrounds, and interests that complement each other. Some essential requirements are strong writing skills, attention to detail, vision, design skills, leadership, teamwork, and time management.
Sometimes, you may not have the talent pool available within your organization. In that case, you should consider training some existing staff members, hiring someone for the position, or outsourcing specific functions to a freelancer or agency.
4. Edit, recycle and improve existing content.
Sometimes, it's easier to edit and improve existing content than to create new content. So if you already have some posts, original images, or infographics, that's a great place to start optimizing your content marketing.
Analyze the topics you’ve written about in the past and evaluate how the content performed. If the results were satisfactory, you can move on to the next one. For example, you can even turn a “How-To” style article into a Webinar . Use the same content, just deliver it in a live video format to your audience.
However, if there is an article that produced unsatisfactory results, analyze it to find opportunities for improvement. Some common shortcomings include the absence of adequate visual aids, lack of relevant keywords, statements that are no longer objective or even irrelevant to your audience.
Depending on the problems you identify, try to improve those articles and use them in other publications and even on other platforms.
Analyzing your past work is an essential activity as it can provide you with valuable lessons about your content marketing. Not only that, but it also lays the groundwork for new projects. So, identify which topics sparked the most interest and engagement from your readers and create additional content around them.
You can also repurpose top-performing content on your other platforms with a few formatting changes.
