Scaling Marketing Content: A Proven Way to Optimize Your Results at Lower Costs
September 22, 2021 8 min read
Staying updated in the fast-paced world of digital marketing may be challenging. Yet, it’s crucial to adopt the latest strategies, practices, and innovations for worthy results. As such, it becomes vital for marketers to master content scaling to improve quick lead generation. However, content scaling remains an equally trying skill to execute – as you may know.
Considering the resources, time, and mental energy it takes to craft unique marketing content, this difficulty is understandable. Outsourcing content creation is a viable alternative but not without its shortcomings, particularly failure to meet deadlines. Therefore, that leaves content creators with a clear option: master content scaling to deliver excellence within a budget.
Fortunately, this walkthrough provides comprehensive step-by-step illustrations that may help scale content faster, better, and more affordably. Keep reading.
Six Practical Steps to Produce Streamlined Content
Marketing results don’t always justify the costs incurred during the campaign. The use of small business marketing tools delivers profits only when it gets to the target audience. Let’s find out how to do that.
1. Define Your Specific Content Type
Correctly defining the content type to create requires adequate information on the target audiences, including their needs, optimum solutions, and how best to reach them. Therefore, in-depth research and business analysis are critical as both help identify trends, opportunities, and threats.
Typically, most businesses prefer blogs and videos thanks to their relative simplicity and effective audience reach. You can choose any of these blog content subtypes:
- Case studies: to simplify understanding of a specific case;
- Checklists: to increase engagement using simple information;
- Long reads: to establish expert knowledge and gain readers’ trust; and
- eBooks: to offer far-reaching information on a subject.
If you identify the appropriate social media content to post, influencer marketing can also help to improve audience outreach. Some influencers may have 50,000 followers or lower but still see remarkable engagement rates.
2. Draw Up a Step-by-step Plan of the Content Creation Process
Designing a blueprint of the production process helps pinpoint the ideal creator for each task: writers, designers, editors, journalists, or interviewers. Next, identify communication lines for a seamless workflow. However, effective communication may be difficult as you’re likely to use more than one email for these numerous entities. A resource that collects all your emails in one place may be critical here.
Functioning communication lines ease the assignment of responsibilities and ensure that team members remain in line. The team may also choose how they brainstorm: do a select few handle brainstorming, or should the whole team be present? Whatever you decide, a clear communication line is mandatory.
3. Avengers, Assemble! Who’s on Your Team?
The team selection phase is straightforward, thanks to the fact that you’ve shortlisted the roles to fill in the previous step. You simply have to select the ideal candidates for each position. Typically, a good content manager has a clear idea of the best hands for a specific task, but you could also reassess your talent pool for unconventional options. Why?
A content manager will offer you the opportunity to select who’s willing to be involved in the project instead of who you feel should be. A formidable group comprises participants interested in giving their all. Some skilled creators may be willing to work but already have too much on their plates. Assigning new tasks to such people may result in content that’s below par.
Consider the team’s diversity too. The positions should contain professionals with complementary skills. Essential requirements include brilliant writing skills, vision, attention to detail, teamwork, design skills, and time management.
4. Review Existing Content: Could It Be Improved?
In some cases, improving existing content may be easier and less costly than starting production from scratch. Therefore, old posts or infographics may be an excellent place to start content scaling.
Evaluate the performance of old blog posts on trends that still matter. Satisfactory publications can be left as they are, but you can also improve them. You could present an articulate “how-to” article in a webinar for more outreach.
Analyze blogs that fall below target to figure out where you can improve. Some articles may only be lacking relevant keywords or appropriate visual aids, while others may now offer outdated information or may have become irrelevant. Recognize the issue and compare the costs of improvement with the costs of creating content from scratch.
It’s noteworthy that analyzing existing work also offers a pedestal to build content on. You can identify the topics that gained outstanding engagements and offer more on them in a different style.
5. Work Out Audience Personas
Whether through a blog, media, or email marketing, the success of a digital campaign also depends on the connection you build with your audience. Therefore, it’s critical to develop well-researched target audience personas. An audience persona provides vital data about a target, including his/her identity, family status, home address, place of work, and most importantly, interests. It offers a clearer understanding of the audience’s challenges and how the audience members prefer to solve challenges.
Suppose you’re creating content for a dating app. By the way, dating on the street is a thing of the past now, so you need to know about dating apps trends if you want to find your soulmate. A well-developed audience persona will help deliver content to John, a self-made businessman unable to maintain a healthy work-life balance due to his demanding schedule but who still longs for a life partner. That’ll be more productive than pitching to 40-something-year-old New York engineers who are most likely to use a dating app.
The size and features of your target audience determine the number of your personas. A single audience persona suffices for a small target group, but you may have to draw more for a larger, more diverse audience. Essential data to consider includes:
- Background: family, education, profession
- Demographics: gender, age, income, location
- Identifiers: goals, interests, preferred communication lines
- Challenges: pain points, typical objections
6. Define Content Goals
Every content strategy should be goal-oriented and timely goal definition helps to streamline the content. Knowing your goals also helps to measure the performance of all the content that you put out.
Creators can define their goals by asking two questions:
- What are the actions that you want from readers after reading?
- How will their actions help your business?
Typical content goals include:
- Improving brand awareness and reputation
- Customer engagement and education
- New talent recruitment
- Understanding the market
- Overcoming obstacles
- More lead generation
- Improved ranking on search engines
Five Recommendations to Rationalize Content Pipeline — Churn Out Excellence Routinely
Brainstorm
Selecting the appropriate topic is vital to the realization of optimum marketing results.
To start, do research, develop your personas, and shortlist topics that they’ll find relevant and relatable. Brainstorm with the nominated team members and keep track of all suggestions. You can then filter out the less important mentions and prioritize the top picks. You should consult updated content marketing statistics, check for current trends, review past publications, and check competitors’ websites for ideas.
Develop a Content Calendar
An editorial calendar ensures that deadlines are set and met and assists in the attachment of company goals. You may ask team members to draw up their calendars and unify them to ensure that the schedule doesn’t make anyone uncomfortable. Additionally, an all-inclusive content calendar helps to pre-empt potential issues.
Define the Appropriate Keywords
It’s essential to optimize articles, so they don’t get lost in the myriads of publications on the net and appear on the top of result pages of popular search engines, like Google. To do so, you’ll have to source relevant keywords that your audience may search for when browsing the internet for your products. Use different keywords from your past blogs to avoid competing with yourself.
Review Published Articles
This step requires monitoring published posts to measure performance. How are they faring concerning their goals? Analyze the traffic they’re generating, click and conversion rates, bounce rates, and lead generation. Reviewing your published content helps to figure out whether you need to make corrections.
Establish a Routine
Your flow cycle has to be the first four steps we’ve highlighted, but it’s noteworthy that the process is more straightforward now. The team members have their calendars already, so brainstorming sessions, keyword definition, and reviews are the only requirements. Establishing this routine ensures that content quality is stable.
Benefits of Content Scaling: How to Generate More Leads on a Shoestring Budget
Content scaling offers unique benefits which may help creators achieve more leads while maintaining a tight budget. Let’s see what they are!
Improved Search Engine Visibility
Customers have great trust in the reach and depth of search engine results; therefore, Google and Ask.com dominate customer relationship ranking tools.
These engines rank pages according to their optimization – which is what content scaling achieves by defining the right keywords for every article. A blog with well-researched and organically placed keywords requires no extra cost to appear on Google’s first page.
Enhanced Referral Traffic
Referral traffic refers to the leads that you generate from third-party sources other than search engines. For content to generate referral traffic, it has to be meaningful so that third parties may view, read, find, quote, borrow from, link to, and promote it.
Luckily, properly scaled content is authoritative and helpful; thus, it conveniently gains referrals from others. Articles with well-defined audience personas generate significant referral leads.
More Qualified Leads
Lead generation requires consistency over a long period. Your content has to provide unique value over the customer’s journey to increase the quantity and quality of generated leads. Creators have to routinely produce excellent content to maintain a value-oriented relationship with consumers.
Scaling offers this by establishing a blueprint for rationalizing content. Articles that pass through the brainstorming; keyword definition; and review routine offer outstanding content to attract highly productive leads.
Conclusion
A successful marketing campaign has to routinely deliver excellence to consumers. Having a blueprint to keep makes the process simpler. You may have to change team members over time, but there’s a clear picture of what to do. Generating more leads is much more straightforward with such a system.
Author Bio
Roman Shvydun writes informative articles mainly about everything related to e-mail. His articles have become extremely popular in such areas as Marketing, Business, Productivity, Workplace culture, etc. His articles focus on balancing informative with SEO needs–but never at the expense of providing an entertaining read. See a few more examples of Roman’s articles by visiting the Mailbird blog.