We all know how critical content is in a company’s fight for customers. Great content builds trust and loyalty, it leads to confidence, and it drives successful business outcomes. Creating and deploying great content is a challenge for any business. But when you’re a large organization, that challenge usually grows. That’s because you have to find ways to produce high-quality content across multiple teams and for multiple channels. Plus, you’ve got to promote different brands and products, and target different audiences.
The good news is that there are six key steps you can take to succeed with content marketing at scale. Following these steps will allow you to make smart decisions, tackle content marketing strategically, and ultimately save time, money, and resources.
Step 1: Develop a well-crafted strategy.
The first thing any large-scale content marketing effort needs is a robust, documented content strategy. To build your strategy, you need to establish several core elements: your brand story and identity, your company’s mission, and customer personas for your target audience. You also need to outline your goals and the ways you’re going to achieve them. SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goals are a true and tested way to achieve this. But make sure these goals always tie back to your company’s broader business objectives.
Step 2: Hire the right mix of people.
You’re only ever as good as the people who work for you. That means you need talented, driven people who work well as a team and are committed to your strategy. Good talent costs money, so you need to hire people who will best fit your organization’s needs.
You can’t just grow your team haphazardly. It’s better to do it strategically. When you’re creating content at scale and expanding, you can have dozens, if not hundreds, of writers. And you’ll need them all working from the same playbook. You’ll also need employees in other roles to drive and create content, manage technologies, and shape strategy.
Creating content at scale isn’t simply a question of employing more people. It’s about maximizing your resources, finding efficiencies, and building a well-organized team.
Step 3: Use detailed and methodical processes.
Even if you have the best team and the best strategy, it’ll be hard to succeed without solid and robust processes. You need to implement a detailed framework to keep everyone aligned and aware of what they need to do.
When you document and clearly express your processes, it’s easier to onboard new staff, keep operations continuous, and ensure projects are on time and on schedule. Your team needs to know exactly how your business creates content. For example:
- How the review and approval cycles work
- What the brand guidelines are
- How content is distributed
- How content performance is measured
It isn’t about stifling creativity. Explicit, well-documented processes improve consistency, and save your content creators precious time.
Step 4: Create compelling and high-quality content.
Audiences love compelling, useful, and interesting content that’s delivered regularly and without agenda. Your organization probably isn’t the only one producing content on a given topic. So it’s very important that every piece you create is original, creative, and demonstrates superior knowledge and insight.
Your content needs to be clear, readable, accurate, and in your brand voice. When you’re under pressure to push out tons of content, it’s easy to let mistakes slip through. But, if you’re regularly publishing content that’s poorly written, repetitive, or full of errors, your audience will quickly abandon you.
Step 5: Harness powerful technology.
There are dozens of tools you can include in your content marketing stack to supercharge your content marketing efforts. Maintaining consistency across a large, content-producing organization is no small feat. Using technology to automate clarity, readability, and brand voice keeps your content hitting that high mark.
Data-driven technologies can also provide valuable insights into your customers’ behavior, helping you create the kind of content they want to consume. You need to know how your content is performing, so using tools to identify where you should focus your efforts helps you work smarter and more efficiently.
Step 6: Focus on continuous improvement.
Just because you’ve found a formula that works doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. You need to continually look for ways to create efficiencies and achieve better results. Today’s technologies can provide you with vast amounts of information on how your operations are performing and give you insights into how to improve them.
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Creating great content at scale doesn’t need to be hard. By approaching it strategically and intelligently, and harnessing the appropriate technologies, you can create high-quality, successful content. And at volumes and frequency you never thought possible.
To learn more about creating great content at scale, download our Marketing Playbook for Content Creation below!
