For starters, more resources will require strong documentation and systems so new people can follow the process. You’ll need to document your strategy, workflow, and calendar. You should also consider repurposing and reusing older content, leveraging collaboration, and using data to drive your growth. Check out our latest article for more tips!
Hopefully you’re in a position now, or will be soon, where you need to figure out how to scale the benefits and results you’re seeing from a consistent content marketing effort. For most companies, as they shift their marketing to a more audience-centered and content-centered approach, positive results start flowing in various forms. The content assets start to pay dividends. Some pay big.
Naturally, the smart marketer looks at this situation and ponders how to scale this entire endeavor. What might the results be if we did more campaigns, more articles, more ebooks, more webinars, etc.? Well, that pipe dream will never be more than that, a dream, if marketing leaders don’t start thinking about how to scale the entire content operation.
As a provider of a content operations platform, we (of course) have some thoughts on this. Let’s dig in.
Document Your Content Marketing Strategy
Unless you’re the mythical William Tell, you can’t hit a target you can’t see. Documenting your content strategy where everyone on your creative teams can see it ensures that your content will align with your corporate objectives and customer needs, reflect your brand voice, and reach the target metrics that will help your brand achieve its goals.
Document Your Content Workflow
Unless your teams have a well-organized production process, your content operations can soon turn into chaos. Documenting your company’s official content workflow is the only way to ensure that your teams will churn out quality content like a well-oiled machine.
Documentation is especially critical if you outsource any part of your content creation to freelancers or content marketing agencies. No matter how proficient they are as creatives, they usually handle a broad range of clients, unlike your in-house teams.
Make it easy for them to follow your prescribed workflow by documenting the process right on the platform where your teams do their work. Doing so will save the back-and-forth that wastes so much time and effort for both B2B and B2C content teams, as Content Marketing Institute’s Taylor Radey points out.
Repurpose and Reuse Older Content
Taking a multi-channel approach to content marketing, as Ahmad Benny advises, gives you a way to reach audiences with diverse learning preferences. Some audience members, for instance, spend their days surfing through YouTube videos to learn ways to solve their problems, while others prefer to read written-out tips in a blog post.
You can save time and reach more prospects when you repurpose older content in another form. For example, if you have a blog post that has garnered a huge number of shares, the information is likely valuable to your target market. So, why not repurpose that post into an eye-popping how-to video so you can reach that YouTube audience with those helpful hints?
Don’t stop there. Take the key points in your post and turn them into an infographic for your next ebook, allowing people to grasp the most important information quickly, even if they only skim through the text. Since visual learners are in the majority (65% of the world’s population), presenting information in a visual form is essential if you want to reach them.
Use a Dynamic Content Calendar to Keep Everyone Organized
In enterprise content production, there are a lot of moving parts. A central calendar that specifies precisely who does what and when can provide the structure large teams need to produce massive volumes of content efficiently.
But no matter how efficient your content planning is, life always throws a few wrenches into the works. Your top writer catches the flu, your sales team needs a white paper — yesterday – or a thousand and one other situations arise.
With a dynamic content calendar, your teams can adjust to these unwelcome surprises on the fly. And, if the calendar is transparent to everyone involved, everyone can make any needed changes to accommodate the extra work.
Leverage Collaboration to Ease the Research Process
For writers, research consumes the lion’s share of their time. Content collaboration with subject matter experts, sales teams, and customer support personnel can provide your writers with the information and metrics they need to create valuable content without spending hours looking up the information on their own.
Even more importantly, subject matter experts can add the cachet of authority to a piece of content. Citing your chief engineer or CEO in a piece of content is more likely to build trust in your products than content created entirely by your marketing staff.
Employee-generated content on its own is valuable enough in its own right. When the employee you quote is an expert in their field, the value grows exponentially.
Use Agencies or Freelance Content Creators to Scale Content Production
If your content needs have outgrown your in-house hiring budget, consider putting a content marketing agency or a team of freelancers into the mix. Hiring the right people can prove a challenge, but once they’re on your team, they’ll make life so much easier for you and your in-house creatives.
With outsourced teams, you don’t have to pay benefits or keep them on during slow times. You can add or subtract personnel as your needs require.
Be sure to provide your outsourced teams with all the resources they need to produce top-notch content. Allow them access to the content calendar, your documented workflow, and your ideation space so that they can take full advantage of the streamlined process you’ve created.
Otherwise, you’ll waste their time with back-and-forth emails and text messages. When they can communicate with your other team members on the same platform they use to create content, they can spend more time creating and less time seeking approvals and answers to questions.
Use Data to Drive Your Growth
Content analytics should be your North Star while scaling your content production. Keep an eye on your key metrics to ensure you’re on track to meet your goals.
Since your ultimate goal is to generate more revenue and slash expenses for your company, prioritize those numbers that lead to that result. Note the types of content that perform well among your audience and produce more of those types. Revise content that doesn’t perform up to its potential to resonate better with your target market.
Take Advantage of AI-Driven Content Tools
No, you don’t need to fire your writing teams and hire a futuristic robot. AI tools like Writer can augment your writing teams’ creative chops by generating first drafts, helping your editors catch errors, and ensuring that the language your writers use is brand-forward and easy for your target audience to understand.
Yet no matter how fantastic a job your AI does in supporting your teams in their creative tasks, be sure to check their work against your knowledge of English and common sense. Grammarly – an AI-driven grammar checker still comes up with some head-scratchers, such as suggesting “boxes” as a substitute for “tubes” while referring to the thin, flexible catheters used in endoscopy.
Use a Content Platform with the Power to Scale
With DivvyHQ, you have both a project management platform and a purpose-built content marketing solution designed especially for enterprise content teams.
With a dedicated ideation area, leading-edge metadata management, a calendar that can manage content across multiple channels throughout the enterprise, and much more, you have everything you need to scale content operations to whatever level you want to go.
To see what Divvy can do for your organization, request a demo today!