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Content is one of the most powerful ways to reach new audiences and promote your product and brand. But with 7.5 million blog posts published every single day, it can feel like an uphill battle to keep up. While you shouldn’t create content for the sake of it, the more pieces you have out there, the more chances you have to capture new customers.
Scaling content is hard, though. It’s time and resource-intensive, which leaves a lot of brands feeling overwhelmed and behind. In fact, a survey from the Content Marketing Institute revealed that 64% of content marketers said their greatest educational need is understanding how to create a scalable content strategy.
This limited knowledge has led them to equate scaling content with simply creating more, without thinking about the quality of what they’re publishing. While having lots of content comes with plenty of benefits, it needs to be good content, otherwise, your efforts will completely go to waste.
What is content scaling?
Content scaling refers to expanding your content creation process to produce high-quality content pieces quickly and efficiently.
It’s not a simple case of churning out more pieces just because you can, it’s about increasing output while still focusing on the quality of each piece, optimizing every word, and creating content that ties into customer needs and your overall business goals.
When is scaling content creation important?
Scaling content creation becomes important when you want to widen your reach.
Producing content in bulk that targets consumers at different stages of the sales cycle will create a slicker funnel, while the cost of acquisition will go down since content is one of the most cost-effective ways to attract new customers.
Once a piece of content is created, it becomes an integral part of your brand that continues to show up in the search results and gets shared over and over again.
Having a large library of content means you have a consistent supply of assets that can be modified, repositioned, and repurposed over time to attract customers on different channels and target different segments of your audience.
7 tips you need to know for scaling content
Before you begin scaling your content, it’s important to make sure you get it right. Writing hundreds of short, 300-word pieces no longer cuts it in the content world, which means your scaling strategy needs to be well-thought-out to ensure you’re producing quality content every single time.
1. Create a style guide
Consistency is important for content; it ensures your brand is recognizable and you’re sending out the same message with every piece you publish. This helps increase brand awareness and solidify your expertise in your industry.
There’s a good chance you’ll be working with a variety of different content writers and stakeholders when scaling content, and keeping them all on the same page can be difficult. Style guides provide them with guidelines they can use to keep things consistent.
Your style guide might include elements like:
- How to structure pieces in terms of headers and subheaders
- What tone of voice to use
- Words that should or shouldn’t be used
- How do you write out numbers (is it three or 3?)
- Acceptable sentence and paragraph lengths
Making sure everyone knows what each piece should look like and the tone of voice that should be used, not only means there will be a commonality among your pieces regardless of who has written them, but they will also be quicker to write.
MailChimp has a public content style guide that everyone can see.
2. Outsource content or parts of the content creation process
Chances are, you have a limited number of people in your content team and there are only so many hours in a day. It’s difficult to scale content creation efforts if you only have three people writing, editing, and publishing pieces. As a result, you might need to expand your bandwidth and outsource parts of the process.
Parts of the process you can outsource include:
- Carrying out keyword research
- Writing content briefs
- Outlining pieces and carrying out initial research
- Actual writing
- Editing
- Uploading and publishing pieces to your content management system (CMS)
3. Use an AI tool
There’s a lot of talk about AI stealing jobs from people. But not unlike many platforms for content marketing, it can be a really useful companion for content scaling. Instead of creating each piece from scratch, you can use an AI content generator to automate content creation at scale.
Jasper has a library of templates you can pull from, whether the format is a blog post, a podcast script, a whitepaper, an email sequence, a social media update, or a Google ad landing page. Simply plug in a few bits of information about your brand and the subject matter, and it will generate multiple variations of copy in a matter of seconds.
This can be a great way to generate lots of new content at once, particularly if it’s the same type of content. For example, if you’re looking to create multiple versions of a Facebook ad, you can do that with the click of a button. Or, if you want to produce a cluster of blog posts that center around a pillar post, you can use the long-form assistant to collaboratively create content at speed.
4. Leverage templates
Templates are your greatest aide when producing content at scale. Having a structure already in place that you can drag and drop new information into can save a ton of time. Imagine you’re writing a series of service pages. If you already have a template in place for the design and structure, it’s just a case of dropping the right words in rather than creating each page fresh.
In the same vein, if you’re about to write a series of blog posts but are stuck at the outlining stage, having a structure in place for the outline can make research ten times quicker and ensure you’re including all the right information.
5. Create similar content for different audience segments
Not all your customers will need the same information at the same time–but they also don’t need wildly different content. Let’s say you’re launching a new time management tool that has a variety of different use cases and you want to send out an email to each of your audience segments.
You can use a similar structure and product information for emails sent to project managers, CEOs, and freelancers but inject something personal or relevant for their own needs among the content that’s the same across the board.
This means you’re not creating three entirely different email campaigns. Instead, you’re creating one, but personalizing it for each segment.
6. Use repetitive processes and workflows
Creating repetitive processes and workflows can really speed things up over time with content production. Start by making a content marketing plan that includes what pieces you need to create, how you’re going to create them, who’s going to create them, and when you need them.
You can then plot this information onto a content calendar with clear deadlines, including the outline stage, editing, and publishing. Each piece will go through the same rigorous process and you can essentially tick off where each piece is in the cycle.
The workflow will likely change over time as you tweak certain parts, optimize it, and learn from your metrics, but the more you improve it, the quicker the entire content creation process will become and the easier it will be to scale.
7. Batch tasks together
We touched briefly on batching tasks earlier. When you’re using an AI tool like Jasper, instead of going through the entire content creation process for one piece before going back to the beginning and starting again on the next, you can create several briefs at once, several outlines at once, and several drafts at once.
This means there’s always more than one piece in play at a time and results in several pieces of finished content at the same time.
Content scaling doesn’t have to be overwhelming
Content scaling is crucial if you want to start producing more high-quality content.
Pumping out post after post can be overwhelming, especially if you have a small team, but these tips will help speed up the process and ensure you’re still creating great content.
Start by having a style guide, a content marketing strategy, and an editorial calendar in place so you know where you’re headed, and then consider using an AI tool like Jasper to generate large quantities of content at one time.
Sign up for Jasper today to start scaling your content creation.
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