How to Scale Your Content Marketing Without Breaking Your Back — or Your Bank

Review your goals, diversify the team, and automate what you can.

Photo by Kyle Glenn from UnSplash

Small businesses cannot grow into large corporations by keeping the same content marketing strategy they’ve had since day one.

But how should your strategy evolve to continue working for you instead of just increasing demands on both time and money?

After all, digital marketing is an incredibly fast-paced industry, with techniques, best practices, and technology changing all the time. What’s more, creating quality content takes time, effort, and resources.

Many companies cannot afford to hire a team to manage their content exclusively. Outsourcing can be equally challenging, and the more content that is produced, the more management it needs. Promotion, auditing, optimization, and analysis all take up valuable time, too.

Here’s a process to help scale your content marketing strategy for growth without breaking your back — or your bank.

1. Review Your Goals Regularly

Your needs will change as your business starts to grow. Therefore, it’s crucial to take time to sit down and think about your content marketing goals and what the marketing process needs to achieve.

As your business starts to attract a wider audience, your goals will naturally begin to grow. Some companies can lose track of why they started their content marketing campaigns as they chase social media shares, increased traffic, and the next viral piece of content.

Ask yourself the following questions

• Is your customer base changing over time? If so, who are you creating content for today?
• What content do you want to create? How will you allocate resources to create better content?
• How do you create content? Are you using in-house staff, or are you outsourcing? Will you consider using software to streamline content promotion, production, and strategy?
• What are your content marketing goals? Why are you creating specific types of content?

You will need to decide what metrics are important for tracking and make sure they align with the goals of your business.

If your site traffic is increasing but conversion rates are low, you’ll have to revise your strategy and make sure all your content goals are linked to your overall marketing strategy.

2. Diversify Your Content Marketing Team

One person alone can only write a finite amount of content during a set time. Tasks such as social media content creation can easily take up a whole day for a one-person marketing department.

If you’re going to scale up your content marketing efforts, you will need more people. So, will you hire staff for an in-house team? Or will you take advantage of remote freelancers and agencies to meet your growing needs?

Outsourcing content production to agencies and freelancers comes with a range of benefits. It enables businesses to expand the voice and point-of-view of their brands using professional writers.

Businesses have the luxury of being able to scale as fast as they want while producing as much content as they need. Additionally, they no longer have to deal with management issues that come alongside an in-house team.

Many businesses rely on a core marketing team and outsource specialist content to writers, videographers, and illustrators. Others may choose to outsource their entire content marketing requirements to an agency. The most cost-effective option for you depends on the needs of your business.

As teams grow, it can be a challenge to maintain brand consistency through your content. Businesses can reduce this risk by developing a unique style guide and making sure that all parties follow the guide at all times.

3. Take Advantage of Technology and Automation

Cutting edge technology has helped to eliminate repetitive work. Modern-day marketing software has helped to increase the efficiency of many content marketing processes.

There are plenty of marketing automation tools available that can help with everything from scheduling posts on social media to personalizing content and automating sales funnel processes.

There is even AI-powered software that can help with writing content. Smart algorithms optimize content to increase click-through rates and help to generate the perfect headline for articles at the click of a button.

If your current marketing department is struggling with content production schedules, it’s worth investing in some tools that can help to streamline and automate content marketing processes.

By automating processes, marketing teams have more time for creative thinking, strategic planning, and business development.

Collaborative tools are also available to aid communication between in-house marketing teams and specialist freelancers. Cloud-based technology means that multiple team members can now work on one piece of content without worrying about updating the wrong version or emailing back and forth during the editing process.

4. Focus on What Works for Your Business

There’s no point in wasting resources and time on producing content that doesn’t convert or bring in leads. Instead, use your analytics to identify the best performing content, and use it as a guideline to create more of the same.

Produce a content marketing roadmap for your team to follow that is guaranteed to produce successful results.

Be analytical with your content marketing strategy, sticking with activities that provide the highest ROI. Continue to experiment and adapt accordingly, ensuring that resources are not wasted on ideas that have already failed to prove themselves.