7 Steps to Scaling Content Marketing without Losing Quality

Many SB’s fall victim to pushing out sub par content with little benefit, read these 7 tips for scaling content marketing without losing the quality.

The soul of any great business lies in its ability to create amazing and relevant content continually. Whether you’re in charge of content marketing in a large company or a small business owner, you will agree with me that scaling up and content intelligence is essential to brand building.

However, with limited knowledge on successful scalability, a lot of content marketers focus on scaling content by merely expanding the volume of production, while leaving out a vital aspect, which is quality. According to a survey carried out on content management, 64% of content marketers expressed that their greatest educational need is to understand how to create a scalable content strategy

As consumers get more aware and vocal about the kind of products they want, scaling content while maintaining high standards can be challenging. Indeed, several businesses continuously push back on expanding their content due to a lack of resources, time, and energy. If you are one of those caught in such situations, fret not because I will be taking you through seven easy steps on how you can scale your content without losing quality.

The best part is that while the steps in this article are mostly applicable for brands, content marketers and agencies will also find it handy when improving their processes for content optimization.

 1. Set-up a Balanced Team

When reviewing the need to scale up your content, it means you also need to consider your team as well. The key to any successful creative team is having a balance between an external and internal workforce that can handle the workload. For example, you can have an in house content manager while you outsource your editing and writing to professional writing services review websites. 

Although statistics from CMI’s 2020 report show that 82% of B2B marketers outsource their content creation, in my experience, it is also vital to have an internal editor or content manager who is working with the external team. This is because you need someone who knows what your brand is about and can represent these ideas while scaling content. The involvement of the internal team ensures that the brand’s high standards are incorporated.

 2. Review your Audience and Group into Segments 

Over time you would realize that as your audience grows, so also will their needs change. Thus the strategy for engagement with your audience also needs to change. The best way to go about this change is to consider a marketing segmentation of your audience.

First, you need to create a profile for each existing and prospective customer group, identify their needs, inspirations, challenges, content triggers, etc. Once you’re able to analyze these interactions and identify common patterns, it becomes easier to create quality content that is targeted at each consumer group.

Also, you need to consider Keyword Intent when scaling your content. What this means is that the intent of your target audience defines the value of your keywords. Bear in mind that highly targeted content is high-quality content.

 3. Consider building Customized Content Templates. 

Now using templates might give you a cause for concern because we are often focused on the cookie-cutter usage of templates. However, if you can look at it from a different perspective, you will see that in reality, creating customized, high-quality content templates is an excellent way to brand.

When designing these templates, you need to be specific with your blueprint; it should also be simple yet be able to challenge your audience’s expectations and capture their attention. Additionally, customized content templates provide an accurate blueprint for new hires, editors, contractors, content managers, writers, etc. It optimizes content production, time efficiency, maximizes budget, and quality is not lost.

 4. Repurpose Existing Successful Content  

Any content that generated massive consumer engagement and conversions must not be forgotten. You need to re-package such content for a different post channel or media format when scaling. It also becomes an excellent way to get more ROI. Most often, when managing content marketing, most businesses fail to repurpose their most successful content. A report from the 2019 Content Management & Strategy Survey shows that 72% of companies find it hard to optimize repurposing their content without “a lot of manual labour,” while 27% do not even bother.

When repurposing a few helpful tips, you can use includes:

Turning an article, video or infographic into a webinar or podcast and vice versa

 Creating a photo for an Instagram post with a catchy quote from your blog or podcast

Continuously updating older posts so they remain relevant and valuable to readers

Revamp distribution methods by re-sharing evergreen content to different social media channels.

Besides, the benefits of scalability and time efficiency that come with repurposing old content, it also increases your sites Search Engine Optimization. Your SEO benefits as the revamped content adds to the targeted keywords and generates backlinks from external sites.

 5. Consolidate Your Review Process

Multiple times we hear of horror stories about a single word blog posts being stuck with the legal review team for months unending. While the legal team might assume they have all the time in the world, the marketing cannot afford to waste so much time. Therefore, such a slow review process can become a significant obstacle to scaling your content program. To work past such a barrier, you will require a lot of creative thinking and analytics.  

My advice is to develop a highly simplified review process that requires just one person on the legal team who can review all content. Both legal and marketing teams can also join forces to outline procedures that will help to eliminate the unnecessary grounding of each content.

Additionally, a list of crucial watch-outs and best practices that the content creator can or cannot use can be drawn up. So with the list, you are sure that the content is written using the best standards and the review process if faster.

 6. Conduct a Small Test

Another critical step to scaling your content is to conduct a test if you want to scale effectively. The test size depends mostly on the size of the project. For example, if your content scaling requires 1,000 product descriptions. Your test should be carried out at 1%, .i.e. 10 of the product descriptions.

What testing does is to enable you to make any necessary adjustments to the style guide and carry out quality checks that are in line with creative interpretation. It is likewise crucial that your internal team diligently assess the test because the result is what you will use as baselines for the remaining 990 pieces.

7. Map Out a Distribution Plan

Imagine putting in all the time and resources to create high quality packed content, and the right people don’t get to see it. Wasted effort, right? So, before you push out your scaled content, ensure that you have set up a solid distribution plan. You need to know how, where, and when each piece of content is going to get dispersed. Create a schedule and how you plan on posting via media platform, blogs, website, social media, etc.

Besides establishing a distribution plan and schedule, you also need to identify the KPIs that will help gauge content performance. As you start rolling out your content, you quickly have an idea of how it is performing. This way, you are sure that the time and resources spent on scaling are being leveraged to full potential.

Conclusion

The quality concern will always come up whenever it comes to increased content production levels. However, once you develop an effective workflow that supports high volume and consistency, then you will be on your way to producing an impressive amount of high-quality content.