What it Takes to Sustain Content Creation

This one comes down to intention, and it’s often why we find ourselves employed by our customers. Creating content is a full-time job.

Understanding and building an audience, building rapport, testing new concepts, and having a plan are all important components of creating content and engaging in content marketing.

Content must also become a priority for your business. It won’t happen unless you, your staff, or your hired help agree to make it happen. This means investing time and resources into the process.
Consider content creation broken into a basic 5-step process.

Content Creation: 5-step Process

1) If it’s Not Written Down, it’s Not a Plan

An actionable strategy document for your content must be devised. This process is similar to how you might go about setting personal goals.  In general, you’re more likely to achieve your goals if you write them down and break them into actionable steps. This helps you to hold yourself accountable and has a higher likelihood of success compared to winging it and hoping for the best. The same concept applies to content - you need to write down what you want to achieve and how you want to get there. Goals might be to define your overall mission, your audience personas, the mix of content you’ll create, and your distribution and promotion tactics.

To summarize: Set goals. Break goals into actionable steps. Commit to a time frame.

2) Make Use of Analytics and Insights

One of the biggest challenges facing content creators is keeping track of it all. You’ll need to be able to review your work and spend time organizing all the insights you’ve learned about your customers and your industry while engaged in content creation. Using this analytical data, you’ll then devise ways to leverage your previous content ideas to create evermore relevant content to your target audience.
This is one advantage to utilizing social media channels to deploy and measure content. Most channels, such as Facebook and Instagram provide analytical data for you and your team to review.

3) Build the Right Team

Whether by utilizing your existing staff, finding a freelancer, hiring an agency, or developing a new internal team, building content rests upon the shoulders of people. Look for those who have experience and are organized, or use online research to understand how best to develop a team yourself.

4) Use an Editorial Calendar

If your only use for your editorial calendar is to schedule your upcoming posts, you’re missing out. You can also use your calendar as a focal point for brainstorming ideas, planning your social media campaigns, and organizing your overall strategy.
The editorial calendar is a core organizational tool. By having everything is in one place you can streamline the entire content process.

Once you settle into your schedule and process, you will find that you have become more efficient and now have more time to focus on diversifying or creating newer and better content.
A content calendar will also help your team make more informed decisions in the future. You might find that content posted at a certain time of day or a particular day of the week tends to outperform the rest, you can make changes accordingly. This is a great way of optimizing your content and the channels you place it on.

5) Know Where it Goes

While the aforementioned steps will help you be consistent in your content creation, there’s more to it. A strategic, consistent approach is imperative. You need to know where you’re deploying your content. Social Media? Local news? Radio? YouTube bumpers? Newspaper ads?  If you fail to be conscientious about your distribution, you will just find that you’ve increased your output without much to show for it.
Always think ahead - how is the content you create a tool to connect more profoundly with your audience? What does your distribution plan look like and how will you measure its effectiveness?

A good rule of thumb is to try and focus on one medium - dominate the space rather than making a number of smaller forays. Diversification comes after you’ve shown success or failure at a given strategy.

Do it In-house, or Hire a Freelancer or Agency?

The final consideration in your content marketing planning process is: who’s going to do this work? If you’re not doing it personally, you’ll be managing at least one other person who is.
As has been outlined, making and distributing content requires a great deal of planning, strategic distribution, various incurred costs, and analysis. So how are you going to get it done? The answer to your question really revolves around talent. Do you have a super-sharp “do-it-all” employee who can sit down and study these concepts and create a working model? If so, see what they can do!

If not, you can hunt around for local freelancers or use sites like freelancer.com or upwork.com. These sites allow you to check out reviews from previous clients about what it’s like to work with a given freelancer. It is likely that a freelancer has the ability to help scale a team of fellow small businesses and one-person shops they’ve collaborated with in the past. This could be an affordable way to get your content marketing going.

Finally, we have agencies. They typically range from 2-15 people and are able to do most things in-house or with the help of freelancers and contract workers of their own. Agencies can be very expensive, but they are built to handle your workload and provide necessary staff such as project managers, designers, copywriters, and ad-placement specialists.

The right agency partner can really help you scale your marketing operation.