If you consider your content as a business asset, it helps you when thinking forward to scaling your content marketing operation. Rather than just brainstorming topics, writing and hitting publish, a forward-thinking strategy puts into place not only the current content, but how it will build on past content and become a foundation for future content. A well-formed content strategy creates a framework for your message to develop and grow.
Having the process in place to be replicated takes much of the stress out of your content creation system. If you know how to repeat a process, then working to fill the process with valuable content is easier to do.
Structures
Having structures in place to keep your content marketing moving forward is essential. Structures such as style and brand guidelines, a dedicated content production team, a workflow process for creating and delivering content, customer personas and analytics to track performance are important to allow your content to become scalable.
Style and Brand Guidelines
Guidelines are how a company keeps their message and branding clean and united. All content should follow the same guidelines offering a consistent image of the company and message. Without guidelines, your message becomes diluted and distracting instead of unified.
A Content Production Team
A content team is needed for scalability whether you have an in-house team, use contractors or both. A consistent team, together with a great workflow process will produce quality content that can be scaled easily.
Formal Workflow Process
To make the acts of planning, creating and delivering consistent content, a formal process needs to be instituted. The formal process takes the stress of timelines away and replaces it with a set workflow to keep the “production line” flowing on schedule.
Customer Personas
Although content marketing used to be created with vague target markets in mind, increasingly sophisticated search engines now require more focused and personalized content. Customer personas give content creators a laser-focused target with personality and behavior embedded. It makes writing content easier for the writer and better suited for the newest type of search engines including those that use artificial intelligence techniques.
Performance Analytics
Once content has been published, it is critical to determine how well it is performing through the examination of analytics. Most content channels have the ability to track numerous metrics which can help marketers hone in on what works and what doesn’t. Once content is proven to be successful, scaling the successful content offers the best results.
Message Framework
When it comes to branding, message consistency is all-important. Keeping your company’s voice focused, offering a consistent message along with specifically chosen images gives people a clear idea of who you are.
Taxonomies
Taxonomies are how you organize your content. Organization makes scalability possible because customers can always find the appropriate content if it is organized well. It also allows content creators to continually build on older content categories. A good example is blog categories. A blogger can write about several topics over time, but link related posts together in categories that readers can look back on for additional resources. This type of organization makes scaling much easier.
If you’re looking for a platform to help you, check out our content marketing software.