Regardless of what you do, the internet is the most significant source to penetrate your content and establish your feet among the masses in today’s time. With the competition increasing daily, you need to level up and scale your content creation. This is the ultimate way to grow on the internet. You need a plan and a strategy that makes your content well marketed and meets the required parameters of the product you are trying to sell.
The plan needs a structure that promises results. This is the reason we penned down this article. We are deconstructing the plan that you will need in order to have the best results with your internet presence.
Content creation is not a cakewalk and certainly requires day and night efforts. First, you need to put out knowledgeable and exciting content to read so that the reader does not just skip you. Then, as you read further, you would come to know how you can estimate prices, know which types of content can be created, and come up with your own plan before you finish. This article is your one-stop destination from team management to content marketing.
What Does Scaling of Content Creation Mean?
Scaling is not just dumping content down your viewer’s throat for the sake of numbers. Instead, scaling means you gradually increase the production tastefully to immerse the reader in the content each time.
You will eventually lose its purpose if you target just the figures and number of posts you want to make. It’s not the volume that matters but the content with it. You need to give the reader something new every time, or else they would think that this is nothing but massive spam.
Churning out high-quality content is essential every single time because you never know which blog blows up. You need to learn from each post and grow in the next one. Content creation is an umbrella, and blog posts, infographics, videos, eBooks, and other materials are all part of it. One promotes another.
You must figure out how each is linked to one another and how each serves its purpose to the fullest and does not seem forced. Doing this consistently would surely bring you better results than ever.
What Makes the Content Important?
Every business requires content. This content is nothing but a simple medium for the customer/reader to understand and learn more about your business. This includes all the information about you and your business alongside the goals. Here are some reasons why content making is vital in every field:
Delivers knowledge to audiences
Depending on who your target audience is, your content would be crafted in a way to deliver the message to them. It has to be informative and made with proper facts, educational resources, guides, and articles. Make content that helps them instantly, for example, an article giving tips and tricks to make house chores more manageable.
This is what will add value to the content.
Build a brand and gain customer loyalty
You need to establish your brand. You need to show people time and again how ahead you are from the competition and how truthful you are to your audience/customers. This will be the primary factor to attract more customers since there is no marketing better than word of mouth. So focus on delivering your best; customers would surely stick by.
Gives joy to the current customers
Newer content is used to attract new customers and satisfy those already associated with you. They are waiting for your content push as well. So make sure your content does not serve only the newer people but the existing ones too. You need to, time and again, make content that is relevant to the older readers.
Do not compromise your position
Lead the industry. Become the number in your field. This should be your primary focus to become the juggernaut of your niche. However, competition is too high, and you have to ensure you don’t give them a single chance to outgrow you. This will be done by stating the truth, being loyal and transparent to your customers, and repeatedly putting out great content.
Improved ROI
Creating content is great for your business because it will solidify your company and its goals in the reader’s mind showing how passionate you are about your customers. This will surely bring in more traffic, thus better ROI.
Type of Content Creation
Blogs
Blogs are significantly one of the oldest and broadest known ways of creating and delivering content. This article you are currently reading is a blog post too. The entire motive of putting a blog is to make the reader or the customer more acquainted with the company and its ideologies while educating them and not just selling the product.
Podcast
Podcasts have gained massive traction recently, especially after introducing apps like Spotify. These are audio blogs one can say where the host talks about a particular topic. These are easy to access and can be heard any time while doing other tasks.
Video
Nothing is more enjoyable for the masses than a digestible, quick video about the topic. While blogs and podcasts could be boring, videos keep them entertained since their eyes and ears are occupied. There is an audience for both short-form and long-form videos. However, they need to be crisp.
These are the top content categories. Other types of content include Graphic animations, content offers, and more.
How to Benefit from Putting Out Scaled Content?
Brand Awareness
We have stated it multiple times, and we will repeat it: Establishing your brand name is essential. Creating content lets you establish your niche and keeps you connected to your audience. This is a qualitative measure of how much you want your brand to be famous.
Digital marketing plays a massive role in it. Blogs of companies that appear at the top of your search list will gain more clicks, thus more people becoming aware of the company. Constant uploads increase your SEO ranking since people find your helpful content more frequently than others.
Authority
There is no detailed breakdown of the SEO ranking from Google itself. However, analyzing their pattern for years has given us an estimate of how it functions. First, any type of content that is well organized and easy to consume is promoted more than simply a blob of words. Using ways to channel out and link all your topics to each other in some way or the other is essential. You need the reader to stay on your site for the longest. This is why pillar posts are created. One main topic which branches out many more.
When you gain control on continuously posting organized content connected to each other and establishing your brand, you will see your website popping on the SEO charts. Topping the game when the competition is unimaginably high is undoubtedly a sign of an authoritative figure. A master of its craft.
User Experience
If you are marketing digitally, you need to ensure that your viewer/reader/user has a good experience while consuming your content. The site should be easy to use and have access to multiple blogs that you plan to branch out. Since blogs are detailed, every consumer would have different questions from different blog sections. You need to ensure that all the topics are further explained in other blogs.
New ideas and in-depth analysis are the way to go. The reader should be able to easily navigate your website. This way, they won’t feel lethargic when consuming more content and thus stay on your site for longer. The algorithm would analyze that viewers stay on this site for longer than usual, increasing your SEO ranking.
Market Data
Today, almost all companies need user data to perform and better themselves. Understanding the user is essential so that you can deliver accordingly. Every time you put up content, you have a chance to know your audience more. Their likes, dislikes, and expectations from you. You can then further grow while keeping those things in mind. Seeing the change occur immediately would also make the consumer loyal and happy. The more content you put out, the more chances you get. This is why scaling is essential. This can be achieved through FAQs, review boxes, interactive quizzes, tasks, and many other ways.
Here are some tactics you can apply for scaling your content creation
As mentioned previously, the benefits of scaling your content creation are many, so let’s look at how you can do it and give your content marketing strategy the boost it deserves.
Work on creating a unique style guide
A great way to scale your content to a newer extent is by developing a unique style guide. For scaling your content, you can’t be reliant on the existing workforce, majorly because a fresh perspective will be demanded to develop content that is not just different from the rest of the content on the web but also ensures that it goes well with a strong strategy.
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So, if your company’s managers have been reluctant about hiring new talent for the job, it’s about time this reluctance goes. Then, of course, the concern of whether your brand’s expectations will be met or not, and whether the new team members will understand the brand propositions or that is bound to be there. All you need to do is ensure that the entire team is aligned with the project in terms of both- creative and strategic requirements. And for that, you need a style guide.
A style guide is essentially a detailed document that is purposed to help new members of the team to know and understand the type of content that the brand produces. It allows them to understand the tone of the brand, its values, and the standard of content that is expected. It also enables them to know how the communication channels are chosen and used, such that no stone is left unturned for them to know what is expected and how it can be delivered.
It is usually advised to make the style guide as detailed and comprehensive as possible, so you can even include extra sets of manuals for different categories like content planning, content writing, design, SEO, and so on. This is only to make it easy to read, understand, and apply.
Structure makes everything better
Structure plays a massive role in making any process easier and smoother, and of course, the process of content production is no exception. As you may already know, there are several steps involved in producing content. It is not just writing and publishing; because that would not fetch you the impact, you are trying to create. Right from Search Engine Optimization to Design and Development, there are many other steps involved that happen in between.
So, to ensure that each stage is completed at its best capacity, you need to structure the entire process and let your brain absorb that structure. So, first of all, it’s important to understand how the entire process of creation unfolds.
For your understanding, here are the most important steps involved in content production:
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Keyword research:
Finding out which are the most searched keywords and how you can incorporate them in your content. It also involves finalizing the exact keywords, their volume, and positioning for achieving higher search engine rankings.
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Guidelines:
Once the primary research behind the keywords is done, all the data derived from it needs to be compiled in a systematic manner so that the writer can access it and write content accordingly.
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Content Writing:
This is the part where a copywriter or content writer comes into action. The extensive research done on the keywords needs to be applied to the content while ensuring that the topic is explained well, the writing is creative enough to stand out, and the keyword strategy is met.
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Proofreading:
Proofreading is an essential step because the content is going to represent the brand’s values and expertise. It involves checking and correcting grammatical errors, spelling and punctuation errors, and also ensuring political correctness and running anti-plagiarism checks.
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Design and Posting:
As and when the final piece of content is ready, the last step is usually to make that content visually appealing and, most importantly, readable. Adding visual elements like images, videos, and GIFs to break the monotony of the text, dividing the content, highlighting head points, etc., are all part of the design. After that, post it on the desired content channel.
This is what an ideal content production structure looks like. So, you need to document these steps, align your resources, and of course, execute all the steps in your best possible capacity.
Here are the main goals of structuring your process:
- You know how the process actually works, so you and the team will never be misguided or uninformed.
- When you know the structure, you are bound to have more control over the procedure while ensuring high-quality content.
- Structuring helps in delegating tasks to each team member based on the requirements and skills. This again enables scalability.
Stay organized
Organization is key to most of the tasks, and it is an inevitable effort when it comes to complex processes such as content production. Writing or posting content with a random approach will never give you the results you want. You cannot compromise organization when it comes to the planning process as well as the execution of the same plan. Please understand that content production or content marketing is not to be done just for the sake of it. There are many underlying purposes behind it, such as educating the audience about your brand, stressing why it is better than the competitors, how it can generate value, and most importantly, solving their problems.
When so many points need to be addressed through your content, you need to be organized through the entire process. As we mentioned previously, a structure needs to be formed and followed. But that’s not enough. You need to know precisely what needs to be done content-wise, too, as in knowing when and what to publish. And to have clarity over this, there is no better way than creating an editorial calendar. Let’s find out what that is and how you can create it
Building an editorial calendar
Creating an editorial calendar can prove to be an absolute game-changer when it comes to content production because not only does it allow the entire team to be on the same page, but it also encourages smooth and efficient working. But wait, what is an editorial calendar in the first place?
Well, in the simplest words, an editorial calendar is a systematically developed sheet that covers everything about your content production process. It is a chronological alignment of the contract that needs to be published and also includes details such as the expected deliverables, deadlines, task delegation, etc.
It makes sure that everyone from the content team is well aware of what needs to be done when it is due and what all needs to be covered in the final copy. This calendar allows you to not only understand the tasks on your plate but also helps in aligning resources for it well in advance and tracking progress. An editorial calendar stands as a visual representation of the content team’s strategy that bridges the gap between planning and execution.
Generally, content production needs to be planned for the long term, for a couple of months at least, so that you don’t have last-minute struggles about what to post and how to go about it. A clear plan for the coming 2-3 months needs to be projected on the editorial calendar so that you can ensure consistent growth and allow yourself and the team enough time to produce high-quality content that fits the brief perfectly.
Hire outstanding talent
If you want great content and great results, hire a great content team. That’s how simple it is. And with the rise of platforms like LinkedIn, Monster, and so on, finding talent is not a challenge. You can find many people having the required expertise, skills, and experience to meet your content expectations. So, make sure you research well on multiple platforms. However, for doing so, you also need to know exactly what you’re looking for. And to help you with that, here are some important points of consideration when finding talent:
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Qualification:
A higher qualification is always a plus when it comes to hiring talent. However, make sure that you don’t just judge potential team members on the basis of their qualifications. Sometimes, a less qualified individual can also bring something unique and valuable to the table.
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Experience:
Experience always counts, and not just any kind but experience relevant to the required position. This will save you the time and effort of training the individual as he/she would already be familiar with the work.
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Skills:
Skills are non-negotiable, and we all know that. For a position in content writing and content marketing, the prerequisite skills would be time-management, excellent written and verbal communication, design, MS Excel and MS Word proficiency, and creativity.
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Interest/Drive:
Last but not least, an interest in content marketing will help ensure proactiveness in the team. Hiring people who have the drive to grow in the same field will always give you a bonus point as they would be more dedicated to the job.
Consider outsourcing
As mentioned previously, there are quite a few steps involved in content creation, especially when your brand’s entire reach is based on digital platforms. You need content for every little thing, right from blog posts to FAQs and product descriptions. And apart from this, there are planning, ideating, SEO, and design-related tasks that need to be taken care of. So, quite evidently, content creation is not a one-person job.
This is why we strongly suggest you outsource both- talent as well as content strategy. Of course, you can have some virtual assistants, interns on board. But again, that would require you to lead the team, explain the job, and so much more. So instead, what you can do is hire a content marketing agency altogether.
In this way, you don’t need to worry about hiring talent and training them, as these agencies are full of trained professionals who know their way around the job. These people are more likely to drive impactful campaigns through extraordinary strategic content publishing and bring in the desired results.
Over time, this move of outsourcing to an independent content marketing or digital marketing agency will start showing up on your content, as the creativity and strategy would be of a professional level. This will also keep you free from all content responsibilities, allowing you to focus on other business developments.
Invest in content tools
There are so many tools that are made for content marketing that will allow you to ensure smooth and steady progress with minimal effort.
For instance, SEO tools such as Google Trends, SEMRush, and Keyword Planner can help you find the right keywords that need to be incorporated into the content. Similarly, CRM and analytics will help in managing day-to-day activities with great ease.
Investing in these tools will reduce the workload from the team and allow them to do things that require the human brain in its truest form, i.e., driving creativity in the content.
Conclusion
All in all, content creation is a highly competitive space in the world of digital marketing. But with the right tricks, the right team, and the right timing, you can certainly scale your content and reach greater heights. All you need to do is either hire a talent pool that can come up with an exceptional content strategy or collaborate with a content marketing agency that knows the industry inside out.
That being said, we hope this guide helps you scale your content creation process and achieve all the goals you have planned for the year.
