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Introduction
Let’s get right down to business. If you want to engage and convert more leads and retain a loyal customer base, you need to scale your content creation.
Effectively scaling content creation helps your brand to:
- Produce and distribute higher volumes of quality content (on the same or less budget)
- Reach more of your target audience, more quickly
- Increase brand awareness and make sure your business remains relevant
- Build trust and customer loyalty
- Improve rankings in Google and other search engines
- Create marketing campaigns that hit just the right notes with your readers
- Streamline the customer journey
- Save money and improve the use of resources.
When we speak to clients they are unsurprisingly excited about every benefit on that list, but they are often stumped by one particular point. How to create more content on the same (or less) budget. The answer is simple — empowering more people in the business to create content.
This page will talk you through the end-to-end process of scaling content creation. There are plenty of links to valuable guides along the way and some use cases so you can see how scaling content works in practice. We hope this guide will act as an information and guidance hub for you and your team as you continue your journey to scaling your content creation.
Why is scaling your content important?
Scaling your content creation is important to brands because it enables them to do more with less. To create better content, faster, in a way that is sustainable in the long-term.
This chart clearly illustrates how the content creation needs of marketers and their audiences have changed over the last 40 or so years. The available marketing and communication channels have surged, brands have to meet the needs of both highly localized and highly globalized audiences, and customers now expect a bespoke content experience based on their interests and preferences.
So, how do you create an effective and scalable content creation strategy? At Foleon, we believe it comes down to three areas of focus;
- Defining, organizing, managing, and optimizing roles
- Promoting good content governance throughout the business
- Empowering your team (and not just your content creators)
Want to know more about our methodology? Listen to this clip from our webinar:
Let’s look at each of these three areas in turn to discover best practices for scaling content creation and production and how to create more content with less.
Defining and managing roles
Effectively scaling your content can only happen if you make the most of your most precious resource: your team. Everyone should have a clear idea of their roles and responsibilities and a good understanding of how all the different content mechanics all fit together.
Plotting out your processes from ideation through creation to publication and subsequent analyses is key to this. This approach helps to address and iron out any bottlenecks in content production and makes sure people know what is expected of them and what to expect from each other.
Listen to this clip from our webinar on How to Scale Content Production Faster and Safeguard Your Brand which explains what the ideal distribution of roles might look like:
It takes a fair bit of work to get your processes and checklists in place and to make sure that everyone in your team is on the same page. But trust us, once you and your team have taken a project through the content lifecycle a handful of times it will become as second nature as buying your team a round of their favorite coffees (which can also help to smooth the process).
While you're getting your workflows, checks, and balances in place, you’ll want to make sure that you don’t miss a thing. For tips on best practices, take a look at our step-by-step guide to scaling content creation with content operations.
If you have a medium to large team or your creators are spread out over multiple sites it could be a good idea to use a content creation platform to help you collaborate and manage projects more efficiently. Sounds good? Check out our interview with Foleon's product management guru, Stijn Dijkers on our mighty new collaboration feature for more details.
Customer case: Discover how Université de Moncton cut content creation costs by 75% and tripled production by scaling content
There’s a popular misconception among businesses that scaling content requires a significant financial investment. In reality, as long as you develop a robust strategy and choose the right tools, scaling content can help you save money in the long term — even if you have a modestly-sized team. Université de Moncton successfully moved from a physical alumni magazine to an interactive digital product using Foleon Docs. With just one writer, one designer, and one project coordinator, they managed to cut content creation costs by 75% and tripled production. Plus, they wound up winning an award! Check out their video and story here.
Promoting good governance
Safeguarding your brand is vital at all times. When you’re scaling your content production it’s easy to take your eye off the ball in terms of protecting content quality standards. It’s also important to stay vigilant in monitoring performance and identifying areas for improvement.
Here are some ways to safeguard your content quality and your brand:
Streamline content processes
The first step to protecting your brand is to create robust, streamlined processes that ensure your team is focusing on quality every step of the way. Content production and quality processes are worth nothing without good documentation. Make sure you write up every workflow, quality check, and sign-off process and that these docs are readily available to the people that need them.
Need more information? Foleon’s Content Operations Specialist, Jerry Virta has some excellent advice and guidance in his blog on how to guard quality throughout the content creation process.
Produce brand templates and guidelines
When you are working with content creators from other areas of the business you might need to cut them some slack when getting used to your ways of working. Content managers run a tight ship, and rightly so. But it’s not always second nature for your sales or customer service team to check the tone of voice or branding guidelines every step of the way. You’ll want to oversee them and sign off their final output, of course, but you can also nip any issues in the bud at the point of creation.
How? By equipping your team with beautifully designed templates to work on. This approach helps you stay 100% on-brand at all times, plus it speeds up processes and mitigates errors. Two of the most important aspects of scaling your content are covered in one fell swoop!
Check out this clip from our webinar to hear Julie explain how templates can bring your brand to life.
Find out more about how to scale and elevate content creation with templates.
Empowering your team
Following the above steps will enable your team to make positive, long-term contributions to scaling your content creation. To empower them even further, you need to choose the right tools and technology. With the best martech stack in place, you can ensure every element and activity in your content scaling strategy is optimized. You’ll know that your team can collaborate effectively and efficiently and that you are using the best digital content formats to reach and delight your audience. It also gives you more time to create personal content while scaling.
Customer case: Find out how Curative scaled their content to optimize lead generation
Empowering your team to get more valuable content to market is particularly important when you need to scale your lead generation activities to meet up with escalating demand. The last thing you want is to keep those potential new customers waiting!
Learn about how this works in practice from our customer, Curative. Their team exceeded content demands and increased their readership by an incredible 200% by using Foleon’s content creation platform. Check out their video and story here.
Choosing the right content distribution tools for scaling
When seeking ways to empower your team to scale content you need to bring optimizing content distribution into the mix. There’s no point in producing tons of content and pushing it out of the door at the speed of light if you don’t know it is hitting the right notes with your audience.
Ineffective legacy content formats (static PDF, we’re looking at you) just don’t cut it these days. Engagement insights are severely limited and — frankly — they just aren’t that much fun to read. Furthermore, when you are approaching new leads for the first time, they stand a far higher chance of bouncing in the recipient’s email. Not the ideal start to the buyer journey.
Far better to scale your content using media-rich interactive documents that hit the inbox right away and return a wealth of user engagement insights. A better understanding of which content is working and which isn’t means more efficient content creation processes and a better standard of marketing collateral.
Client case: Find out how Dice benefitted from this new approach and decreased their bounce by 50%. View the video testimonial and story here.
Sourcing great content creators from outside your team
We mentioned earlier that empowering your team to produce great content isn’t limited to your brand’s experts. Far from it. Tapping into the knowledge and talent of your wider business can present some really interesting opportunities for diversifying and improving your content output.
Your customer service team, for example, might have some valuable insights into enhancing your FAQs. Your product development team may be able to help you script a how-to video addressing barriers to use. Someone on your sales team may be a whizz at TikTok and be able to help you create credible content to reach a different demographic.
The best way to go about this is to talk to the different teams in your business. Explain your goals and objectives and workshop some ideas. Encourage them to share their ideas freely. You could even suggest a regular meetup to keep the conversation going. The more everyone understands how their roles fit in with the customer journey, the more value each person can offer.
Need some first-hand insights into how empowering your team works on a day-to-day basis? Check out our very own Sim Samra’s Secrets on Scaling Content Successfully.
Watch the full on-demand webinar today! 🎧
Conclusion
We hope this guide to scaling your content has given you some great ideas and inspiration on how you can make this valuable strategy work for your brand and people.
For more insights from our very own content experts Julie and Jerry, watch our free on-demand webinar today!
