What are your thoughts on the size of your team? Have you ever wished you had more people to help with content planning, creation, distribution, promotion, and analysis?
If that’s the case, you’re not alone. According to CMI research, most content teams have fewer than five full-time team members.
But, if you’re like most marketers, you’re not going to get a bigger budget to hire anyone anytime soon. With so few hands on your content marketing deck, everything your team produces must be counted.
Put these three ideas into action to get results, regardless of how many people are on your content marketing team (or do not have).
1. Create a single page to document your content marketing strategy.
Too often, teams rush into creating, distributing, and (occasionally) promoting content without first developing (and documenting) a strategy. And some small teams believe that documenting a strategy is unnecessary because they already know what it is.
These ways of thinking lead to time-consuming, ineffective content marketing. Consider driving to an unfamiliar location without a map or GPS. You may arrive, but you will most likely waste time on unnecessary turns, stops to ask for directions, and backtracking.
Therefore, you should document your content marketing strategy. However, you do not have to spend a significant amount of time creating a lengthy, complex presentation that no one will read.
Instead, make a one-page content marketing strategy document (yes, you can use the front and back of a page) by answering the following questions:
- What is the purpose and goal of your company?
- Who is your target audience? What are their interests and needs?
- What are your content marketing objectives? What do you want your audience to know, think, or do?
- What are your main content topics? This is where your industry and business subjects intersect with your audience’s interests and needs.
- What kind of content do you create? Determine the formats that can be used in your content marketing program, such as blogs, videos, infographics, social media, and so on.
- Where will you put this content?
- How frequently will you create and publish this content? (Be realistic.) It’s preferable to increase frequency now rather than later.)
- What are your content marketing program’s measurable goals? Convert your content marketing goals into measurable success metrics. Remember to include a time frame for completing each objective.
Don’t just write down your content marketing strategy. Place it somewhere you’ll see it every day. Distribute it to all relevant parties. Then, schedule check-ins to see what’s working (and what isn’t). Also, reevaluate your goals and objectives in light of both internal and external triggers (for example, a new business direction).
2. Maximize the value of the content you create.
Your team puts in a lot of effort to create the content. Here’s how to make that content work for you even harder.
Cut it into smaller pieces.
One article can be cut into into several pieces of content. Some of these contents can be:
- Blog entries
- Podcast episodes
- Single presentations
- Board game
- Tests
- Infographics
Some pieces required no additional work, while others required more. However, it took less time and used fewer resources than creating 10 content items from scratch.
Can your small team accomplish something similar? Absolutely.
Consider the best content you can create for your audience during the planning stage, and how you can break that big idea down into smaller pieces. You can do so by answering the following questions:
- What topic would be most appealing to our target audience?
- What creative approach could we take?
- Who are the potential sources?
- What would be the main point of the content?
- What other content could it inspire?
- What additional work would be required to complete the other pieces?
The final question is crucial for effective content creation. Assume you decide to create a long-form article as your central piece and a five-minute video from it. If you plan ahead of time, you will be aware that when conducting interviews for the article, you should also record them for video. If you came up with the video idea after writing the content, you’d have to go back and interview the source again.
Reuse your best work.
According to the Pareto principle, 20% of your content produces 80% of your results. Your percentages may differ slightly, but I’m sure the concept applies to your content marketing: Some of your content is excellent, but the majority of it is not.
Do more with content that delivers big results. These questions will assist you in determining what to do and how to do it:
- Which content was successful?
- What format does it come in?
- Should it be republished in its current form?
- What changes could be made to make it more current and relevant?
- How might it be repackaged for more channels?
In several ways, the Content Marketing Institute blog follows this repurposing
- The small editorial team adds more recent statistics, corrects source titles, updates outdated links, and adds new angles to articles that perform well and are still relevant.
- We understand how its audience reacts to “best-of” content. The team curates a new article with excerpts from recent top-performing articles at least once a year.
- We look for ways to reach a new or expanded audience with event content. The content team creates blog posts from livestream interviews, Twitter chats, and other events, both in-person and virtual. Writers observe the sessions, read transcripts, or comb through Tweets and comments to add context and their perspectives.
3. Put everything together
Processes and workflows rarely pique the interest of creative content marketers. However, establishing systems should allow you to devote more time to creative development (or other more interesting tasks).
Create a master tracker.
That’s a great first step if you have an editorial calendar. Even better if you create a master tracker, which is essentially an editorial calendar on steroids.
Documenting your process in one place, from content ideas to publication, and making it accessible to all stakeholders, saves time. You won’t have to sift through emails or other messages to determine what has been done, what remains to be done, and how effective it is.
Your master tracker should include the following items:
- Production procedure (assignments, reviews, approvals, deadlines)
- Elements of related content (keywords, headlines, metadata, etc.)
- Metrics and objectives (dated and updated regularly)
Make all relevant content at once.
You’ve finished reading, viewing the infographic, or watching the video. That, however, is not the end of your content creation. You will still require a headline, meta description, calls to action, and so on. So, when you’re creating the original piece, include all of those content accoutrements.
You could include the following in your related content:
- URL optimized for SEO (keywords)
- Headline
- Meta description
- Click-to-tweets
- Alternatives for social media headlines
- Invitation to action
- Text that appears in an email preview
- Newsletter excerpt
It makes sense to get started right away. You’re already thinking about the content – the topic, the purpose, the interesting sentences, and so on. If you put off doing the related content elements, you will most likely have to reread or watch the original piece.
Save time and your sanity.
Increasing the power of your small content marketing team necessitates the development of a maximizing framework. You’ll save time, keep your sanity, and deliver better results for your business by developing a one-page strategy, doing more with the content you’re already creating, and developing one-stop implementation resources.