Good content generates clicks, gets people to interact with your brand, and can drive growth through increasing brand visibility and authority. However, good content does take time and effort to make. Marketers and business owners just getting into the content marketing game can often find that starting from scratch with a blank page every time can be antithetical to productivity.
As such, they have developed a series of tools and methods to streamline the content creation process. But how do you make use of them, while still maintaining high standards of quality and value to the reader?
Find your content pillars and build around them
If your main source of trouble or delay is deciding what to write content on, then you should start by thinking about what your content pillars are. Effectively, these are the main themes, topics, and areas that your content is largely going to revolve around. You want to choose the ones that your audience is interested in, but that also fit your brand’s expertise. For instance, a skincare brand might have the content pillars of “clean beauty tips”, “ingredient education,” and “sustainable self-care” that they can then use to brainstorm new blog post ideas a lot more easily. Narrowing down your focus doesn’t mean a narrower range of ideas comes out; it typically means it’s easier to think of even more ideas instead.
Stay consistent with a content calendar
One of the big problems businesses have with a content marketing strategy is starting it, only to leave it for too long. It’s very easy to forget about content in the middle of running a business or a marketing campaign. For that reason, you should consider putting a content calendar together. Take the time, in advance, to plan out publication dates, the types of posts that you want, and who will be responsible for writing, editing, finding images, and so on. Keep that calendar visible, and it will be on your mind more often, meaning you’re a lot more likely to spot post ideas that you can start working on more regularly.
Establish your content workflow
When you have a calendar, you have a set period of time that you can use to plan out how you generate content from start to finish. It can be a good idea to break production down into different phases, such as brainstorming and research for ideas in their earliest forms, and then, once you decide which you’re going to write on, you put them through the planning, production, and editing phases. Having projects in every phase, at every step of the way, can make sure that you’re more consistently putting out quality content that has had the time and work put into it to ensure that it’s truly valuable.
AI can assist, but humans should stay in control
Every content writer and marketer has to ask themselves how much they’re willing to rely on AI. These tools can be highly helpful, but without the creativity and judgment of human interference, they will generate content that brings nothing new to the table and sounds much the same as other content on the web covering the same topic. As such, if you want to use AI to streamline content production, it can be great for brainstorming, keyword analysis, and summarizing research, but you should avoid generating entire articles with it. With the help of an AI to human text converter, you can make sure that your text never has an AI tone to it. Take the time to edit, inject your own insights, and make sure that any AI-assisted content you write fits the emotional context and nuance you’re aiming for.
Let social scheduling tools handle the publishing for you
Pushing the publish button often isn’t where your content marketing strategy ends. In order to ensure that as many people read it as possible, you want to disseminate it through social media platforms, email, and more. There are social media automation tools that can do a lot of that for you, scheduling posts across multiple channels so that you don’t have to spend as much time doing it manually. Use the analytics these platforms provide to find when your audience is at its most active and most willing to click on longer-form content to ensure you maximize engagement as best as possible.
Repurpose your content
Repurposing your content doesn’t mean simply reposting or sharing content that you’ve written before with no changes (although sometimes relevant content is worth sharing again.) By taking your best-performing or evergreen pieces, you can fit them into new formats to extend their lifespan. For instance, a detailed blog post can be split into a series of social media points, short videos, or an infographic. Multiple blog posts can be connected and put into the context of an eBook covering a broader topic that applies to all of them. Or work with a Print Shop to create leaflets out of your best blog posts, where you take the relevant bullet points and combine them with your branding and contact details. You can then arrange a leaflet drop around your local area.
Evergreen content can be rewritten and updated with new stats, information, and insights that make it applicable to a modern audience. There are some pieces of content that are always going to have some degree of value and repurposing them can help them reach new audiences.
Keep reviewing and optimizing
Streamlining your content marketing process isn’t a single, simple fix that you implement once and stop thinking about. It’s a process and a series of systems that you build over time. Make sure that you’re always looking at not just how much time it takes you to get a piece of content to your audience, from conception to publishing, but the metrics of how engaging that content is. Sometimes, you might need to sacrifice efficiency if you need more time to polish content or to help it disseminate before moving onto the next piece.
There has to be a balancing act between efficiency and quality control to ensure an effective content marketing strategy. The tips above can help you find your balance.
