Impactful content marketing is crucial when it comes to building up your business, so it’s no surprise that scaling up content creation is on the agenda for so many brands.
If you’re interested in scaling up your content creation and reaping the rewards, read on for some invaluable tips to help you get started.
Things to Consider Before Scaling Up
Once you’ve decided that you want to start scaling up your content creation for SEO, it’s tempting to dive straight into it.
Don’t – this can be a recipe for disaster.
Instead, carefully consider the following points to determine if you are ready to scale up your content creation or if you need to spend some more time on preparation first.
1. In-House or Outsourced?
Take the time to examine your internal capacity and the capacity you can extend by roping in some external help.
When referring to capacity, I’m talking specifically about people, tools, and processes. You must have the right people, tools that fit the job, and straightforward procedures, or scaling up your content creation could be very troublesome.
2. Ensure Efficient Workflows
A workflow is a system that helps everyone involved in a project know exactly what they’re responsible for and where there may be gaps in your procedures.
It will allow you to have a high-level view of what’s going on with the content creation in your business and will help your team stay focused on the brand’s message and mission.
The point of a workflow is that it will help you to ramp up content creation while maintaining the quality that your customers are used to.
Crucially, a great workflow has to be personalized to your exact requirements as what works for one business may not necessarily work for yours.
3. Take Advantage of Automation
There’s a huge variety of automation software at your fingertips.
Make sure you take advantage of it.
These tools can be potent and save vast amounts of time, energy, and other resources on boring, time-consuming tasks so that your team can focus on what they’re best at.
4. Be Cost-Conscious
You must make sure that you maintain a positive return on your investment (ROI) over time.
Having a consistently negatively ROI is a sure way for your business to bomb – and quickly.
When making any investments or purchases to assist with scaling up your content creation, you have a good think about whether you will get a decent ROI (a ballpark figure for this is around three times your investment) or not. Also, consider whether your costs will decrease over time and whether your investment will reduce risk.
If the answer to any of these questions is no, consider how soon you predict that you will achieve a positive ROI. Also, what will this investment have the biggest impact on? If the answers to these questions leaves you satisfied, the investment may still be worth considering – but be prepared to ride out a period of negative ROI.
Steps to Scale Content Creation
We’ve identified some important factors to consider before scaling up content creation.
Once you’ve decided that it’s the right time for your business to start scaling up, here are some pointers to get started:
Research Keywords
Relevant keywords are the building blocks of any content created for SEO purposes.
The right keywords will transform your content into search-friendly pieces, dramatically increasing the traffic to your content.
After all, that’s the main aim of this, right?
Search engines love longer keywords, so long-tail keywords are a great place to start.
Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific keywords that customers are likely to search for when trying to find a particular product. For example, “white cropped cotton t-shirt” compared to “t-shirt.”
Using long-tail keywords will reduce the number of competitors vying for action on the same keywords and make your website more likely to rank highly in search engines, leading to more clicks.
Related: How to grow your Business with Content Marketing and WordPress?
Plan Your Content
You need some direction when it comes to scaling up content creation, and that’s where a content calendar comes in.
A content calendar is an essential tool that allows you to get an overview of your content creation plans for six months in the future. You could really find yourself floundering without one.
Luckily, creating a content calendar is very simple.
Once you’ve picked your keywords, convert them into topics and content headlines.
The next step is to pick a month to dedicate to a specific topic cluster.
Now, decide what sort of format you want to use to approach this content. Are you going to focus on blog posts, videos or infographics?
The calendar should also include space for the status of a content piece and a publishing date, though this does not have to be finalized from day one. It should also make sure the responsibilities to team members are clear.
That’s it – you now have a super-effective content calendar that has hopefully taken some of the guesswork out of your content creation schedule and will allow you to feel more in control when scaling up your content creation.
Work On Your SEO
Getting your SEO strategy right will help your content rank highly on search engines, which will lead to more clicks. You can put a lot of effort into your content, but if you don’t focus on SEO, it won’t get the exposure it deserves.
Here are some simple tips to level up your SEO.
- Make sure all of your brand’s websites, social media handles, blogs – absolutely anything your brand touches – are optimized for SEO.
- Don’t rely on keywords alone. Other options are link-building strategies, targeted hashtags, and well-researched topic clusters.
- Keep on top of SEO changes. Google can be fickle with its SEO methods, and they can change like the wind, so make sure you’re aware of any changes so you can tailor your content accordingly.
Diversify Your Content
People are getting bored of the same old content.
Try to think outside of the box to keep your content fresh and interesting. This can be a great way to reach new markets, increase your engagement and build brand loyalty.
Podcasts, guest posts, competitions, quizzes, GIFs, and memes are all options for diversifying your content and will ensure that your customers remain engaged.
Use an Editorial Guideline
This is essentially a document that outlines the voice and style that you want to see across all of your brand’s content. This essential tool makes it easy for all your content creators to create work that has a consistent feel that links to your business.
When creating an editorial guideline, the first thing to consider is the voice you want for your brand. Who is your audience? How are you going to reach them? What emotions do you want to rouse in your audience? How does your brand is unique? Consider all these questions to determine the right voice to use in your content, and make sure your content creators are aware of this.
Another key point is to create a guideline for style. This covers things like punctuation, capitalization, abbreviations and spelling. Consistency is key and you want to ensure that you foster a coherent brand image across all of your content.
Visual style guidelines also need to be consistent. Make sure your brand logo is incorporated whenever possible, and try to always use colors that are in keeping with your logo and wave the flag for your branding even when your logo isn’t present.
Fonts, alignments and images should also be used in the same way across the board.
The key point here is branding. All of your content should be infused with your brand and should be immediately identifiable as something your brand has put out.
Repurpose Your Content
This means using a single content idea to produce a variety of pieces in different formats, all based around the same theme.
Strategies like this are a key factor in why big brands are able to consistently pump out quality content day after day.
Some examples of content repurposing are converting a video into a podcast, transcribing videos or podcasts into a blog format, or taking key points and phrases from blog posts and turning them into visual social media content.
Content repurposing is a great method to ensure that you can extract maximum value from content pieces that have performed well. It can help you spread a high-value piece of content across different channels, increasing the chances of reaching your audience. Of course, one major benefit of content repurposing is that it dramatically increases the efficiency of your workflow, as you can effectively get double the use (or more) of each piece of content you create.
Create A Fantastic Content Team
Good writers aren’t enough – you need a team of specialists to help assist with your content creation strategies. Specifically, make sure you’ve recruited the right people for these key roles:
SEO Specialist:
An SEO specialist helps make your content easily searchable, and any SEO specialist worth their salt will massively increase visits to your brand’s content.
A professional SEO specialist will keep an eye on content rankings and develop strategies to increase reach and engagement. Generally, they manage things ranging from keyword research to internal linking to optimizing your content.
Social Media Specialist:
In 2021, social media were vast, and for many brands, it’s a pivotal way to reach out to their audience. For this reason, getting the right social media specialist on board is critical.
Your social media presence can make or break your marketing efforts, so make sure you go all out to hire the best person for this crucial role.
Content Editor:
Once you’ve scaled up your content creation, it’s essential to make sure there’s one person responsible for editing it all and ensuring it’s portraying a consistent, positive brand image. This is where a content editor comes in.
Measure Your Performance
Scaling up content isn’t linear – sometimes your campaigns will be doing well, and other times they might bomb. Hard. It can be very disheartening, so you must keep track of just how well your content is performing over time to get a real view of the situation.
This can be summed up in three key steps:
- Determine the metrics that matter to you. For example, is lead generation important? If so, you need to track the click-through rate and form fill-up rate. How about engagement and interaction? Then you should focus on measuring comments and content shares. If sales and revenue are more important to your business, keep an eye on the size of each sale and which leads convert to a purchase.
- Once you’ve decided which metrics to track, get tracking. Google Analytics is a great place to start if you want to get data on traffic. If you’re more interested in engagement, each social media channel has its own insights section that provides useful data like post views and comments.
- The final step is to analyze the data and score your content pieces based on the results they achieved, using your selected metrics as the standard. Take time to look into the reasons that contributed to the content’s success (or failure) and analyze what works best – is it the format, the content itself, or something else? Finally, calculate your ROI. This should be done periodically to compare content over a sensible period.
Scaling up your content creation can be a crucial step in securing a great brand reputation and increasing your audience reach. There is so much more ground to cover within this topic, but with the tips in this article, hopefully, you feel confident and inspired to get started with scaling up your brand’s content.
Did you find these tips helpful? Are there any other points that you think are crucial when scaling up? Leave a comment below!
