From repurposing your existing content to picking sustainable topics, read on to discover top tips on how to scale your content production.
Key takeaways
- Repurpose and update high-performing content.
- Reposition content for new markets without reinventing the wheel.
- Create buyer personas for different target audiences.
- Develop efficient, repetitive workflows.
- Produce a style guide for internal and external stakeholders.
Why is scalability important for content marketing?
In short, you get more bang for your buck.
7 tips for scaling your content
Scalability is all about planning ahead and knowing which audiences you want to reach. Developing buyer or marketing personas gives you a deeper understanding of what makes your potential customers tick. You can get to grips with their likes and dislikes and adapt your messaging to convince them that you are the right brand to choose.
Need a hand creating personas or tips for refreshing existing ones? We’ve got your back. Check out our blog on 4 steps to creating buyer personas.
Tip #2: Reposition existing content
Content that performs well is ripe for repurposing. You may have to adapt the messaging or format to appeal to the new audience but you’ll save time creating content from scratch and it’s great for building brand awareness across all your audiences and channels.
Refer back to your buyer personas. Try adapting your keywords, headings or the overall angle of the content to catch the eye of these soon-to-be customers.
Tip #3: Establish repetitive processes and workflows
Map all your activities to a sustainable content marketing plan, including goals for the amount of content you want to create each month. We’d also recommend developing a content calendar. They’re a great addition to your marketing arsenal, helping you set and communicate clear workflows, deadlines and sign-off processes. You can also use them to plan your topics around seasonal buyer behaviours, new product launches and so forth.
By working with repetitive processes, you can eliminate guesswork and avoid “reinventing the wheel” each time you want to produce a new piece of content. This turns your marketing team into a content-producing machine.
Tip #4: Create a style guide
Style guides make the content creation process even more efficient. Plus they ensure your messaging is always on-brand and consistent, whether you’re using internal or external content creators.
Include clear guidelines for appealing to each of your target audiences. Encourage your content team to play into the sweet spots that trigger multiple audiences at once. For example, crafting the content with keywords that have a broader appeal or using more universal language throughout.
However, make sure that your writers know how to walk the fine line: if the content is too broad, it won’t resonate with any of your audience segments.
Tip #5: Work with a content creation team
Content creation is time-consuming. If you want to scale your content, it takes a team effort.
Work with a team of professionals who understand how to reach multiple target groups, ideally a fixed team who understand your company’s content strategy and audiences. The result – a smooth content creation process and a library of effective, authentic, valuable content that stands out from the crowd.
Tip #6: Choose scalable topics
When picking topics always start with your target audience in mind (back to those personas again!). Think about the questions your audience has and the challenges they face. Look for the similarities between your audiences.
If you have an international audience in mind, don’t worry about creating content that targets one country. Start from an international perspective but focus on the keywords and topics that resonate equally among your various personas.
Tip #7: Repurpose existing content
Sit down with your team and identify content that could be repurposed for today’s audience. Perhaps there’s a ‘Top trends of 2021’ that could be updated with relatively little effort. Pick articles that made a real impact with your audience and use them as a template for creating new content.
The same goes for scaling from a national to an international audience. If you’ve originally written a piece for a UK audience, it may contain culture-specific references that don’t work in other countries, or brands that won’t make sense to that audience.
If this feels a bit challenging, don’t worry. There are some great creative translator companies to help you truly localise the content.
Scalable content is sustainable content
We hope these tips have given you some good ideas on how to reach a larger audience without multiplying your content creation efforts each time.
As a marketing professional, you want every activity to deliver the best ROI. That’s why scalability is so important. A scalable content marketing strategy is a sustainable one. By adopting a scalability mindset you’ll save time and money and get more out of your content.
