Content Scaling: A Content Strategist’s Goliath

“Content marketing provides 4x the ROI of our traditional marketing spend.” – Julie Fleischer, VP of Marketing, Neustar 

Content marketing plays a key role in almost every industry, and recent years have witnessed the role of content strategists evolving in marketing. Content strategists plan customer-driven content, based on their preferences and needs.

Today, the trend is building systems that are agile and able to produce content in large volumes quickly. It is also essential to deploy the right kind of content at the appropriate time to the right person. At the same time, scaling content to ensure that audiences are constantly engaged is key. But it proves to be challenging for content strategists. 

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This blog addresses this issue and provides some solutions. 

Defining Scale In Content Strategy 

In simple terms, content scaling means developing high-quality content in volumes, quickly and efficiently. During this process, the focus should always remain on quality rather than just quantity. A good content strategist’s role is to ensure that the scale strategy rotates around creating, optimizing, publishing, and sharing content in a way that is aligned with business objectives and goals. 

Content strategy at scale includes different formats like blogs, videos, whitepapers, podcasts, newsletters, and case studies. Scaling the content strategy also means getting the maximum ROI (return on investment) from the current content strategy.

Creating content at scale sometimes involves many teams like content strategists, copywriters, social media specialists, marketers, and designers. However, creative automation tools assist businesses to create high-quality content quickly. These support a wide range of formats and allow content marketing teams to develop more content while still protecting the creative bandwidth.

The Importance Of Scaling In Content Strategy  

Scaling content is not always about pumping more content. Driving results involves proper planning and execution by content strategists. Content scaling is a key task in a content strategist’s portfolio for the success of the content strategy. Below are some reasons why you should scale up your content.

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• Improves online visibility 

The more high-quality content you generate, the better your chances of ranking higher while being searched by potential customers and getting noticed. However, to avoid content fatigue, the role of content strategists is to ensure there is a clear strategy and process for scaling content. If the keywords used for new content have already been covered with previous articles, then it will not improve visibility. The key to content scaling is to make sure every article or blog offers something unique.

• Establishes authority

Publishing high-quality blogs regularly helps in establishing trust with your target audience. It also helps you build your position, in your field, as an expert. Publishing large numbers of such content will set your brand as an authority in the relevant sector in the eyes of your customers.

• Generates more leads

Developing articles related to products or services that are also helpful to your target audience widen your content’s reach and eventually leads to more qualified leads. And more leads mean higher numbers in your sales pipeline.

Scaling Content Step-by-Step

Scaling content can be challenging if you don’t have the proper plan, process, and tools in place. It is important to plan well in advance while scaling content to ensure your tactics and activities are optimized. The content strategist’s role is critical in developing and executing the scaling strategy. Here are the steps to get you started.

1. Establish goals and objectives.

Before you start the content scaling task, ensure you have your goals and objectives documented. These goals and objectives should be clear and targeted, only then will they increase page views, boost customer engagement, and generate more leads.

2. Choose the right content topics.

Creating content at scale can help brands save time used for ideation and creation processes. Always pick content topics that are evergreen, valuable, relevant, and useful. This will give you the liberty of updating and repurposing the content as per your needs. 

3. Create an editorial calendar.

An editorial calendar shows a daily, weekly, or monthly content publishing schedule. This visual workflow not only guides the content team but also helps them keep track of all the upcoming projects. It ensures that all teams involved in the process work in sync throughout the project.

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4. Create outlines

Once you have a content calendar, the next step is to start working on your posts. However, before you start creating blog posts, create detailed outlines. These give you a complete overview of what you should cover. Writing freestyle, without a structure or guideline, can be time-consuming and can often waver from the topic. With an outline, the content becomes more organized, takes lesser time, and is more structured.

5. Repurpose content

Take a single piece of content and repurpose the same content in several different formats. If done right, repurposing is one of the best ways to scale content creation. You can use your blog with rich content to build topic clusters. 

During content repurposing, the original content needs to be tweaked to fit the new format. Existing content can repeatedly be used to create new types and formats. You can break down larger works into smaller ones, which is more inclusive and also widens the target audience.

6. Outsource the content marketing strategy

Sometimes handling all the content work internally can be quite challenging. Also, assembling a quality team can have its own challenges. Outsourcing the entire process, or part of it, is the ideal solution. The content strategist portfolio can focus on planning, strategizing, editing, and approving the final content. 

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The outsourced agency should work in close association with the internal team in each stage of the production process. Outsourcing helps you free your team from routine tasks, while still retaining quality control.

7. Use tools and technology

Ramping up content manually not only takes money and time but often results in a drop in content quality. However, with the evolution in technology, scaling content can be a lot easier. Several tasks of the content development process can be automated. AI writing tools automate the entire process of blog post creation. These AI tools even generate the SEO title, keywords, and meta description.

8. Don’t scale too quickly

Content strategists should take it slow. Going too fast could be detrimental to your scaling content strategy. Focus on creating original evergreens, rather than too much repetitive content. Plan your scaling process before you jump in and begin creating content.

Using AI In A Content Scaling Strategy

One thing that always worries content strategists is how to create more content, say 10X the current amount of content. Hiring skilled content creators is not always feasible to execute a 10X increase in content production. It can become expensive and time-consuming. AI tools for content creation can help content strategists overcome this challenge.

Businesses may have multiple offices distributed across the globe. The content created by these teams, located across different timelines, must meet the brand standards, and align with the brand’s tone and style. Failing this can eat into the editor’s productive time.

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This is where AI helps in a big way. AI systems ensure that the content you create doesn’t falter from the goal, talks the brand’s tone, and is aligned with the brand guidelines, all in real-time. This AI software analyzes content based on many factors, like approved language, desired tone of voice, terms to avoid, and style and formatting preferences. This helps in standardizing content across teams.

The articles that AI tools generate are optimized for SEO and come out pre-formatted. 

One such tool is Peppertype.ai, which helps with: 

• Creating high-quality content in half the time
• Creating content outlines
• Incorporating preferred keywords automatically 
• Rephrasing sentences automatically for clarity
• Correcting spelling mistakes and checking for plagiarism
• Improving existing content

To Summarize 

The key to sustainable content scalability is systematizing, templating, and repurposing content. The role of a content strategist is to keep your brand identity consistent while going ahead with aggressive content scaling. Content strategists lay the foundation, support, and structure to scale content as the brand grows. Everyone in the content creation team, be it freelancers, agencies, or in-house creators, should be aware of the brand’s personality and identity even when scaling content.

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