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Content Production: How to Improve Your Process to Scale Output

Ginny Dwyer August 31, 2023 3479 Views 7 min read Share

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Content marketing yields positive results. And content production is a big player in the increasingly powerful strategy.

That’s the outcome of Semrush, a leading SEO analytics platform provider, who completed its annual State of Content Marketing, bringing insights from over 1,700 marketers and business owners. The survey found an overall improvement in results from content marketing, with

97% of businesses reporting that they have generated positive results—up from 91% in the previous year. (Semrush)There has also been a rise in businesses working toward a defined strategy, with 80% of those who considered themselves very successful in content marketing documenting their content marketing strategies, as do 73% of content marketers who regard their efforts as successful.

These results show a real appetite for valuable, educational content built to attract quality leads. Still, keeping up with the content demand and creating and posting more often can be challenging.

How can you scale your content, remain successful, and maintain quality or value? We address building a scalable content production process, strategies to enhance it, and what a documented process should look like.

What is Content Production and the Content Production Process [What to Expect]

Content production starts with brainstorming ideas, writing the final content for publication, and everything in between. Content production involves the creation of high-quality content in the content format your reader likes most to engage with. From strategic blog posts to thought-provoking leadership articles to social media posts, creative videos, podcasts and more, your reader needs to consume educational content to guide them in their purchasing decision, and your business needs the production to stay on task to deliver the goods and grow your business.

The content production process contains a series of steps to get you to your finished content asset.

Both content production and the content production process are essential to scaling your buisness and creating impactful content for your audience.

What is Scalable Content Production?

Content scaling refers to a company’s ability to produce more high-quality content quickly and efficiently month after month. However, scaling content is hard. It’s a time sucker and resource-intensive, leaving many B2B companies feeling beaten and left behind before gaining momentum.

Content scaling is not only creating new content but can include refining your current content or repurposing old content to match search intent to increase organic reach. Whichever avenue you choose, it goes beyond the significant number of posts you create. It’s more about serving your customer, your intended audience, with as much educational and informational content to guide them in their buying journey.

Scaling your content production allows a business to maximize return on investment (ROI) and stay competitive within your industry. But none of it makes sense if the content being created isn’t purposeful.

Stages of Creating Useful and Informative Content With Purpose

The content process begins with an inbound content strategy focusing on using content to engage your audience, putting their interest and needs above all else. Having a plan will allow teams to manage the content step by step proactively.

Here are the key stages of creating useful and informative content with a purpose:

Strategy – Includes a focus on business priorities and campaign initiatives with the best topics for results.

Research – Review the SERPs and which type of content/format is performing well. What is Google giving preference to in the search results? (match keywords and search intent)

Plan – Content plan: What’s the end goal for the content? Map out different pieces of content that cover a key topic in-depth across multiple pieces helping to build topical authority. We create 12 blog posts with a premium offer for every content campaign.

Expertise – All good content includes a subject matter expert (SME) and content strategist. Speak to an expert on each piece of content. Thin, fluffy content is worthless. Your customers expect more and will go to the service or product that delivers more.

Brief – A solid content brief and outline is your best bet at communicating your expectations from a content piece to the writer who’ll work on it.

Write – Know your audience and aim for clear, engaging, and concise writing.

Strategies to Power Up Your Content Production

Content creation can be one of the most complex parts of any content marketing initiative. Content production relies on multiple elements to ensure its success.

Regularly posting insightful content is a powerful and proven way to build trust and engage your audience. A content plan that helps create, manage, and implement your assets is invaluable.

Let’s look at tactics to help advance your content production.

1. Outline a Content Calendar

A content calendar will give all parties involved a clear overview of your blog from creation to publication. This leaves less chaos and more time for creativity and focuses on the bigger company goal.

There are so many moving parts in content production. A calendar will be a visual map to make content management more accessible and will become effortless to refine the content as each piece progresses.

2. Optimize and Build Workflows

Assign specific roles and responsibilities to team members and implement project management tools to track progress and deadlines.

When workflows are in place, there is no second-guessing about where each piece of content is. Understanding how the process works ensures that the content goes through the right channels for approval. Responsify has a tool that lets you loop in brand specialists or subject matter experts (SMEs.) It pushes collaboration and team communication.

3. Develop Content Templates and Style Guidelines

When content templates and style guides are in place, you’ll maintain consistency across your brand. A style guide ensures multiple contributors work cohesively and provides the best guideline for how your brand should be presented in a graphic and language way.

Your style guide communicates your company’s design standards to all team players. This helps establish a strong brand voice that resonates with your audience. And it prevents having to redo work that is not keeping up with established standards.

4. Leverage Automation

“Leveraging the power of automation allows businesses to increase efficiencies, proactively meet market conditions, and achieve and sustain a competitive advantage. Businesses can choose to automate selected or all operations at a time, decreasing errors and expenses and increasing the bottom line.” (Analytix IT solutions)

Customized software like our app automates specific processes to increase time efficiency. Content production becomes faster and easier with less room for error or things falling between the cracks. There is a heightened sense of accountability that makes for smoother transitions for each stage.

5. Repurpose Content

A quick way to make the most of your content is through ‘content recycling.’ Repurposed content is typically transformed into a new format (for example, turning a blog post into an infographic or a video).

The number one benefit of repurposing content is that it makes content much easier to scale. You’ll save time on content creation and reach new groups of people through other distribution channels.

6. Identify the Perfect Content Your Audience Craves

Creating content is only part of the process. Measuring its performance is an essential piece of the content marketing puzzle. When you can answer a few simple questions, you’ll be able to scale your content for faster, better results.

One of the best ways to find out what your audience likes is through your analytics. Analyze the performance of your content and double down on topics that are performing the best and of interest to your audience.

You can use a tool like Ahrefs and view the top-performing pages or go to Google Analytics to learn how well your page or blog post is doing. You’ll pinpoint the topics that interest your audience.

You can then map out the best topics to create more content on. For example, you can create an eBook on a popular blog topic.

7. Outsource to Handle a High Volume of Content

The longer you create content, the more you find challenges in creating enough to build momentum against competitors continuously.

These barriers, such as needing more time, internal expertise, internal resources, and tools and processes to keep steady uninterrupted progress, can lead to failure to create the right content quality and quantity needed to succeed and gain measurable traction.

Outsourcing B2B content by choosing a content marketing agency or teaming up with freelancers can help expedite content production and assist with all the barriers.

Creating enough high-quality, on-target, and relevant evergreen content with an agency’s help can be invaluable.

How to Scale Content Production with Structure

To scale your content creation, you need to set your goals for the future. Decide on what type of content you want to create and start with documentation.

Documentation trumps all. When you consistently have a workflow with documentation, content improves, and the blogging cadence is met easier.

Start with a strategic campaign with a defined buyer’s journey stage. If you don’t fully grasp what stage of the buyer’s journey you are writing for, the content will be off-target and have less impact than you are after.

Once the campaign name, context, and goal are established with the buyer’s journey stage defined, you’ll start laying out the following:

• Keyword research – Research the keywords that match the campaign, are achievable within your domain authority, and consider search intent.
• Title/Headline – Create crafty headlines that appeal to your audience and segment the exact audience you want to attract.
• Blog brief – Briefs get the job done to hit all SEO goals and align with your consumers’ needs. As noted, they are your best bet at communicating your expectations. The brief should provide all the information a content creator would need to produce the outline based on your specifications. Content briefs should include the target keywords, tentative title, product or service tie-in, and internal links. Briefs save time, prevent rewrites, and reduce revisions.
• Blog post outline – With the brief in hand, writers have a clear direction to lay out an outline for faster approval. Through collaboration, this stage can check the tone, offer additional context, word count, target audience, and verify the overall direction of the piece.
• Final blog post writing – A review of the finished piece by the SME and strategist keeps the post on target and ready for the editing stage. Content editing will refine your writing to the best piece available for your audience. Content proofreading will ensure there are no grammar errors or other mess-ups.
• Proofread and edit blog post writing – At this stage, you should be proofreading for spelling, flow, punctuation, grammar, and so on. If you don’t have the resources for an editor, Grammarly is great for spelling, grammar, and other grammatical errors.
• Migrate and finalize – The hardest part of content creation, the writing is complete. Now you are migrating content to WordPress—or the platform that suits you best (unless you’re writing within the platform). Check for formatting, H1, H2, and H3’s, focus keyword, URL with keyword, meta description, and SEO analysis (internal and external links, image alt attributes, text length, and more.)
• Set up email and social media for automation – What’s better than reaching customers where they are? That’s the benefit of email and social automation. You and your team created a laser-focused highly-targeted blog post; now share it with your audience. Automated emails are an excellent way to provide tailored customer experiences based on their behavior or actions.

Final Words on Content Production and Improving Your Process

Improving your content production process is essential to scale your output efficiently.

Successful content creation and scaling come down to consistency. Consistent writing, publishing, and promotion to deliver the conversion you’re looking for.

Responsify has a platform offering highly skilled and talented writers when partnering with our agency. Scaling content production requires commitment. We offer commitment, collaboration, transparency, a skilled team of professionals, and more.

Scale your content strategically and quickly with Responsify and watch your online presence grow, search engine rankings improve, convert more leads, and feel your overwhelm and frustration subside. We help B2B companies find the right content strategy to engage and educate their audiences to accelerate their growth effectively.

Book a 1-on-1 Content Strategy Session with our lead strategist today!