Content marketing can be intimidating. There’s no magic recipe that reveals the perfect blend of blogs, infographics, emails and promotion campaigns to use.
It’s all about learning as you go.
But there are a few methods to implement that will help scale your content. In other words, you’ll see your results grow without increasing your amount of work.
Here are eight simple ways your marketing team can begin the journey to a more mature content creation practice.
1. Define your goals
Creating a content strategy is a big but important task. It’s worth the investment for all the time you’ll save in the long run because a strategy will guide your team’s efforts and help prioritize tasks.
One of the most important parts of a content strategy is the list of your goals. This could involve one major goal for the year along with a series of quarterly and monthly goals, or even day-to-day goals for individuals. These establish transparency among the team and keep you on track.
2. Create and maintain an editorial calendar
As part of your content strategy, your team will decide what types of content (blogs, emails, e-books, social posts, etc.) to publish, and how often. Once this is established, create an example editorial calendar to demonstrate the balance of content. For example, one month may include eight blog posts, 15 emails, two e-books and 30-40 social media posts (social media deserves its own strategy, and here’s why).
With your content production process on one calendar, your team will stay up-to-date on their own projects and will also be aware of what the rest of the team is working on.
To develop topics, hold regular editorial meetings. Here, the team can share their research and observations on what topics are currently trending in that industry. Set up Google Alerts or use BuzzSumo to find these trending topics.
Ask co-workers from other departments to join these meetings because they can share insight from clients. They will better know the questions clients have so you can use your content to answer them.
Bonus tip: Use the BrandpointHUB editorial calendar to track ALL of your content marketing projects and reduce content overload. Check out why it’s like using eight different platforms at once.
3. Write useful information
Content marketing is different than traditional advertisements (such as radio/TV commercials and billboards) because users choose to click on an article or to opt in to a newsletter subscription.
To encourage users to read and interact with your article, provide information that they find interesting, entertaining or useful. If you provide tips they can use in their everyday life, they’ll appreciate the info and will probably leave with a favorable view of your brand. They might even share it with their networks.
Pro content marketer Neil Patel explains in this blog post that actionable information is most effective. Writing posts that include a “how to” or a certain number of tips signals to readers that they will be able to use this information to improve some part of their lives.
Make content useful for your reader — and for you — by offering what Patel calls a “content upgrade,” which is an extra piece of content such as an e-book or interactive template. Require users to fill out a form to receive the content. That way, you capture an email address, and they get an awesome, free product.
4. Repurpose content
If you’ve already gathered sources and spent a ton of time researching, do more than just write one blog post about it. Use the blog post outline to make it into a webinar or podcast episode, or turn it into a piece of visual content like an infographic. The Content Marketing Institute also recommends mapping out a blog post series that could serve as chapters for next month’s e-book.
Using the same topic and turning it into multiple formats allows you to scale your content and provides more opportunities to reach different personas and establish your brand as an authority in your industry. Assign subject experts on your team to develop each piece of content for that topic. He or she will be able to reduce the amount of research needed and won’t have to start from scratch on each project.
Look at older, archived items as well to see what other content can be updated or reused in a new and engaging way.
[Related: How to approach a multi-channel campaign]
5. Be selective
It’s tempting to feel like you should do it all by being on every social media platform, publishing multiple blog posts daily or measuring everything possible.
But with limited time, it’s best to focus on content that will provide the most meaningful results for your company. Your content strategy will guide your team on how to be selective, which includes creating content just for your personas and choosing to post on the social media platforms where your audience is.
When analyzing results, only report on the metrics that best represent your KPIs. If you’re focused on the number of conversions, there’s no need to report to stakeholders the number of “likes” on a social media post or the number of email opens. Pay attention to these metrics so you have a basic understanding, but they aren’t relevant enough to your goal to be recorded and presented.
Measuring the right metrics guides the future of your content marketing practice so you know what works and what doesn’t. Without such insights, you won’t be able to scale.
[Read more: Learn how to track the right metrics to measure blog success and get a free reporting template to analyze results, and create more effective content]
6. Establish workflows
Is your team in place? Do you know everyone’s responsibility?
It’s worth taking the time to get together with your marketing team and company leader to define everyone’s tasks to ensure that each step of the content production process is completely covered. Even if your team is small, designate multiple roles to one person and agree on an established procedure for content planning, creating, reviewing, publishing, promotion and measurement.
If needed, you can build your team and consider hiring internally, recruiting freelancers or entrusting an agency. Learn which of these steps is best for your company by checking out this blog.
7. Take advantage of helpful tools
We surveyed fellow marketers and they let us know what marketing tools they can’t live without. But for a content production team, one of the smartest ways to scale is by using a content marketing platform (CMP).
The biggest advantage of a CMP is that it hosts all of your content projects in one place. Store ideas, write all types of content, schedule social posts and more. The tool also eliminates endless email chains, allowing you to have conversations within the content itself.
A CMP makes collaboration easier and streamlines the entire process, ultimately saving your team loads of time and making it easier to scale your content.
Bonus tip: Our BrandpointHUB content management platform saves teams an average of 74 minutes on each piece of content. Click here to see all the other ways your team can benefit from BrandpointHUB.
8. Don’t skimp on SEO
Publishing content can give you a big SEO benefit. Though the pages you have on your website help position your organization in search, adding blog posts and landing pages gives you more opportunities to rank even higher. If you write just one blog post a week, that’s 52 other pages that can appear in search engine results.
The SEO experts at Moz explain a few quick ways to add SEO value. With each blog you post, take just a few minutes to make sure the keyword for which you’re trying to rank is in your title and meta description, your post answers searchers’ queries and you’ve included related topics. A tool like Yoast SEO helps with a quick SEO boost. It’s also a good idea to maintain a list of the 50-100 most valuable keywords.
Boosting SEO, in addition to outreach and paid promotion, will help your team see more page visits and ultimately more conversions and results.
Are you ready to save time?
It’s getting more and more difficult to grab your audience’s attention online. Scaling content not only means working to save time, but it also means getting better results. Using your content strategy, you’ll be able to target the right people and arm your team with a well-stocked editorial calendar, efficient workflows and an effective plan to help you scale your content
