In digital marketing, content is king. All industries use content to educate audiences, strengthen brand awareness, and entice consumers to generate revenues.
According to a survey with 1,554 respondents, almost 50 percent of marketing professionals aim to increase their content marketing budget in 2023. This statistical representation underscores the heightened importance of content in contemporary brand promotions.
However, content marketing involves a complex content production process. You might need to catch up to your competitors if you are scaling your content creation.
Content production at scale is among the significant marketing strategies you should understand and implement. If you need to become more familiar with this content strategy, this guide will help you learn about it and its benefits. We will also discuss the pitfalls and tips for implementing this tactic efficiently.
Key Takeaways
- Content production at scale is a strategy that augments your content marketing efforts.
- It helps you meet growing demands, streamline workflows, and maintain high-quality content.
- However, scaling content production, quality control, time management, and resource allocation can be challenging.
- Implementing content production at scale involves devising a thorough content marketing plan and hiring the right professionals.
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Understanding Content Production at Scale
Scaling means increasing the scope, capacity, or size of a process. As such, content production at scale means augmenting your content creation process. It aims to expand your content management efforts to increase revenue and reach more consumers.
A robust content production at scale plan aligns with your goals and objectives. This content strategy incorporates various formats, including videos, podcasts, case studies, and white papers. It also involves several team members depending on your business size.
However, the team members aren't just your ordinary staff. A content production at scale team consists of skilled copywriters, content writers, strategists, and subject matter experts. Your team can also include freelancers. They will work to produce content that brings value to your target audience.
The Advantages of Content Production at Scale
Scaling content production enhances your marketing campaigns in the following ways.
Meet the growing demand of your business
As your business grows, your audience increases and becomes more diverse. While this growth contributes to your success, it increases your product or service demand. For example, your growing niche startup needs to produce new content that appeals to different demographics, global markets, and other consumer segments that show genuine interest in your offers.
Hence, scaling content creation lets you adapt to these changes quickly. Moreover, a scaled content plan helps you discover evolving market trends and consumer preferences to meet growing demand.
Ensures consistency that brings a competitive edge
Numerous brands are vying for online presence and attention. For this reason, you should ensure your brand stands out.
Content production at scale aims to strengthen your competitive edge by creating quality content that grabs their attention and resonates with your audience.
Furthermore, scaling your content creation process lets you publish high-quality content that can make your brand stand out—as long as they're consistently entertaining, informative, and educational. This consistency helps reinforce your brand's message, enabling you to establish authority, which is critical in acquiring and retaining customers.
Producing content with consistent quality can also increase your engagement and shares, giving your company a higher benchmark score against competitors.
Attract and retain more consumers
Customer acquisition is one thing, but customer retention is another. While you entice audiences to engage with your brands, you should also be able to retain them.
Treat your content as daily conversations with consumers. When these conversations stop or become repetitive, your existing customers and prospects may lose interest because they no longer find them valuable.
Scaling content production helps mitigate this problem by ensuring the value and relevance of your content to keep customers coming back. It involves refreshing your blogs with the latest information, sharing infographics, or sending newsletters with exclusive offers.
Streamline monotonous tasks to improve efficiency
Your marketing team juggles multiple operations daily. Some tasks are manually repetitive, negatively affecting their creativity and productivity. These tasks can be even more challenging when demand increases.
The good news is that content production at scale lets you automate and simplify monotonous tasks. Automation integrations, like artificial intelligence (AI), help streamline workflows, allowing you to focus more on significant growth projects.
For example, you can schedule your posts in one go or use proofreading software to edit your content. These tools and automated systems help minimize human errors and ensure consistency while speeding up the content production process, improving your team's efficiency.
Make data-driven decisions
Content marketing isn't just about creation and production. You should measure and analyze your content performance after publishing. But how do you study engagement without quantifiable data?
This is where scaling content production comes into the picture.
By producing content at scale, you'll use data analytics tools to identify trends, gaps, and opportunities in your content strategies and marketing campaigns. They provide measurable insights and metrics into what content formats, topics, and styles are successful or falling behind.
Rather than guessing your audience's interests, you have quantifiable data about their behavior and preferences. For example, if your data shows in-depth how-to blogs generate higher traffic and conversions, you'll decide to create more of these formats.
Meanwhile, if data reveals underperforming content pieces, you can refine them or shift to other formats.
These data-driven decisions ensure that every piece of content has a better chance of prompting positive signals to algorithms, putting your posts at the top of social media posts and search engines.
Diversify your content
Businesses like yours shouldn't rely on a single type of content to promote products or services. Content diversification is essential to cater to diverse demographics and preferences within your target audiences.
Content diversification is an essential component of content production at scale. By augmenting your marketing efforts, your team produces different content formats simultaneously. For instance, you dedicate different teams to podcasts, videos, infographics, white papers, and case studies. Not only does this broaden your reach, but it also boosts your chances of getting your content shared across various channels.
Content diversification also leverages the strengths of each content format. For example, a well-written and optimized blog post strengthens your SEO campaigns, while a viral short-form video increases brand awareness and social media engagement. Thus, content diversity gives your brand more opportunities to connect with consumers across digital platforms.
Pitfalls of Content Production at Scale
Like other marketing strategies, scaling content production isn't perfect, as it has its fair share of weaknesses. You must understand these pitfalls to know how to mitigate them when you encounter them.
Maintaining content quality
Since content production at scale involves maintaining quality content, your team may need help to meet high standards. Increasing the quantity of your content might cause oversight if you don't manage the workflow appropriately. This oversight could lead to poor writing, inadequate research, or improper quality control.
To avoid these issues, you should scale strategically. You should dedicate time and effort to investing in more talent and advanced tools. Consider slowing down production to ensure no one is falling behind. The goal is to prevent the quantity-over-quality mindset, so implement suitable guidelines for your team and workflow.
Resource and financial allocation
Scaling content production involves increasing tools, technologies, and people. You should align these expansion needs with your budget. However, increasing talent and resources also means training new hires and managing more work to meet the demands.
Tools like content management, graphic design, project management, and video editing software are often costly and require a learning curve. These upgrades could strain your budget and slow your team's workflow temporarily.
Moreover, hiring new talent can take time. Your teams will onboard the new hires, which involves training and orientation about the company's culture and operations.
You should have a clear alignment strategy to allocate your resources and finances appropriately. So, understand your content marketing needs and growth goals to map out your required tools and personnel.
Time management
Increasing your team's workload requires time management. Your content team may need more people and resources to manage and meet deadlines. This pressure and burden may also lead to burnout, impacting productivity and output delivery.
Implementing an efficient workflow system is essential to maintaining proper time management. You should set realistic deadlines to ensure the staff achieves them. You should also regularly communicate with your team members to know if they have concerns about the workflow.
How do you efficiently implement content production at scale?
Content production is unique to each business. While some content marketing strategies may not work for all brands, there are tactics applicable to most.
Here's how to scale your content production process efficiently.
Outline a detailed content marketing plan
Successful content marketing campaigns aren't done in one go. They require extensive planning to ensure proper execution.
As such, you should outline a detailed content marketing plan. Here are the steps for creating a comprehensive marketing plan:
- Identify your content marketing and production requirements
- Create a content calendar for keyword research, writing, and proofreading to track content creation progress
- Establish an editorial calendar for content setup and publishing to avoid overlapping content creation schedules. Include the distribution channels (search engines and social media platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn)
This outline provides a clear roadmap for your content team's workflow. It also delegates tasks accordingly, ensuring an efficient content production scaling.
Look for areas of improvement and opportunities in your existing content
Previously published content is still valuable in content production. You shouldn't ditch your old content just because it's dated. You can review and analyze it through a content audit.
A content audit involves an analysis of—if not all—some existing content on your website and social media accounts. This audit lets you find reposting, repurposing, or recycling opportunities and gaps to improve.
Here's how to perform a content audit:
- Go through your content library and search for articles. Use a content management solution to ease the manual work
- Using a content audit tool, run the articles to determine which posts are high- and low-performing
- Review the data analysis thoroughly
- Sort the content based on traffic volume, organic engagement level, bounce rates, ranking, and click-through rates
- Create a spreadsheet to scale down your list
Establish a comprehensive content style guide
Content creation requires attention to detail. Without content writing guidelines, your team may compromise the quality of the produced content. For this reason, you should establish a content style guide.
A content style guide consists of company-specific guidelines that set your content's tone of voice, writing style, structure, and format. Although it is a general reference for all writers, this guide should also contain content briefs for different formats.
Here's how to establish your content style guide:
- Define your buyer persona – Based on your market analysis, outline your existing customers' interests, behaviors, and preferences.
- Set your content's tone of voice – Define how your content should sound to readers (e.g., informative, educational, or entertaining).
- List your brand-specific keywords – Curate a list of words and phrases linked to your brand, products, or services.
- Establish formatting guidelines – Set the standard typeface, font size, and spacing for headers and text.
You should also include commonly misspelled words, the number of required images or infographics, and examples that show correct and incorrect formats in your style guide.
You can use style guide templates to ease the burden of manual work. These templates have pre-built and customizable designs, reducing the time spent designing from scratch.
Leverage project and content management tools
Since different team members are responsible for various tasks, leveraging project and content management tools is beneficial for a seamless workflow. These tools help everyone keep track of their responsibilities by sorting tasks to avoid confusion.
Project management tools are software solutions that help you organize projects and centralize planning. They enable your team to collaborate, manage tasks, and track progress in a shared workspace.
On the other hand, content management tools allow multiple collaborators to create, edit, and publish content, streamlining the content production process.
Moreover, digital asset management (DAM) software helps organize your media assets, such as infographics, videos, and documents. This tool lets your team find digital assets more quickly.
Optimize your articles for search engines through SEO
Search engines like Google are among the most significant digital marketing channels.
Google indexes hundreds of billions of web pages, and your content can get lost if it's not high-quality. Thus, search engine optimization, or SEO, is an essential component of content production at scale.
SEO enhances your website to boost its search engine ranking and visibility. It involves keyword research, link building, technical optimization, and local SEO.
- Keyword research – Researching high-volume, long-tail, and industry-specific keywords to incorporate in content
- Link building – Building your authority by getting authoritative websites to link to your site
- Technical optimization – Optimizing your site's technical aspects to improve user experience
- Local SEO – Optimizing your website for local search visibility
Use user-generated content (UGC)
User-generated content, or UGC, is a format that has been making waves in social media. It is brand-specific and original content from customers, which they generally provide at no cost.
UGC is consumer-centric content focusing on authenticity to influence purchasing decisions, strengthen customer retention, increase brand awareness, and grow online communities.
UGC also provides authentic social proof. For example, consumers see someone like them using your products or services positively, convincing them to buy.
Examples of UGC include:
- Testimonials
- Product or service reviews
- Live streams
Focus on creating evergreen articles
Evergreen content stays relevant and fresh even after months or years of publishing. This content typically contains topics that have lasting value.
Examples of evergreen content:
- Listicles
- Tips
- How-to blogs
- Product or service reviews
- Videos
These formats usually perform well as evergreen content but won't always have evergreen topics. Evergreen content involves timeless topics like food, finance, careers, and parenting.
In contrast, here are the formats that aren't evergreen:
- News
- Numerical reports and statistics
- Holiday or seasonal content
- Articles about the latest trends
Refresh your content regularly
As digital marketing evolves, so, too, should your content. Even evergreen content can be outdated over time. For these reasons, you should review and update your content regularly.
To refresh old content:
- Find old posts that haven't been checked
- Use a content management solution to identify old articles or posts quickly
- Create a list and run each content in a data analytics tool
- Review the data and determine which posts are underperforming
- Scale the list down and put it in a spreadsheet. Afterward, update the content as needed and add new and relevant information
Updating your old content helps maximize your return on investment, or ROI, in the original piece. Rather than developing something new constantly, you enhance your existing content to boost ranking and virality.
Hire the right content marketing professionals
A robust content marketing team is essential in content production at scale. Hiring top talent is one, but hiring professionals who bring the utmost value to projects is another. You're also not just hiring copywriters, content writers, or freelancers.
Since hiring can take time, use advanced recruiting software to speed up the process. This platform will help you find and evaluate the best content creation professionals. It also includes a database of proofreaders, strategists, illustrators, subject matter experts, animators, and graphic designers.
Not only does recruiting software help you, but it also makes the job application process easy for candidates. They send their resumes in real-time, and you can evaluate them in just a few clicks. You can also automate interview scheduling and send email invites in one go.
Outsource your content production from a specialized agency
Establishing a robust team can take time. If you don't have an in-house content team, enough resources, or time to build a content production staff, consider outsourcing services from a specialized agency.
Here are the benefits of outsourcing a content production agency:
- Save time and money
- Build a team quickly
- Access to top, skilled, and global talent
- Shorten production timelines
- Reduce your team's workload
Measure your content performance
Scaling content production isn't static. Just because you've increased the workload, people, and production doesn't mean your content will drive faster results. Sure, it speeds up the process, but once your content is live, you should monitor the progress.
Monitoring the progress means measuring content performance. Analyzing engagement, impression, and click-through metrics lets you know what to retain and adjust to ensure successful and effective content marketing campaigns.
Don't rush the process
It's easy to think that rushing content production can drive growth immediately. However, rushing the process can be detrimental to content creation.
When scaling content production, you should review everything to ensure the content is relevant to your business and target audiences. During the ideation phase, remember these questions:
- Who is your target audience, and why are you writing this content for them?
- What buyer journey stage is your content appropriate for?
- How can you repurpose this content over time?
Pro Tip: Partnering with content creators—like influencers—is another way to scale your content production and marketing. This strategy is called creator marketing, which involves collaborating with social media stars to advertise your brand, increase brand awareness, and acquire more customers.
Elevate Your Content Marketing Strategies
Content production at scale is a powerful strategy that can drive more conversions and revenue. However, more than increasing your team members and their workload is required.
While the benefits often outweigh the disadvantages, you should still be wary of the pitfalls of scaling content production. Staying informed about this strategy's weaknesses helps you minimize errors that could harm your marketing campaigns significantly.
Elevating content marketing strategies is made easy with Archive. Collaborate with us today to get access to our AI-powered platform that provides social listening and UGC management services. We will also provide various tools that'll assist you in determining the best tactics to repurpose content and attract and retain customers.
Maximize your content marketing campaigns with the right resources—partner with Archive today to leverage the power of content production at scale efficiently.
FAQs on Content Production at Scale
How do I balance creativity and the need to produce high-volume output?
Balancing creativity and producing high-volume content involves the following approaches:
- Set transparent and realistic goals
- Encourage your team to plan ahead
- Delegate tasks accordingly
- Let your team recharge and have breaks
How can I scale content production without compromising quality?
It would be best if you fostered a quality-over-quantity mindset in your teams. Tell them it's better to produce a few pieces of content that meet high standards than several low-quality ones. Set clear, strict, and realistic deadlines based on the formats they're creating.
How can I scale my content production cost-efficiently?
Before augmenting the process, evaluate your financial resources and capability. Outline a budget plan to align your resources to your requirements. This budget prevents overspending by setting the limits of your fund for hiring new people and buying equipment and software.
