Marketers must keep up with constant demand for relevant and consistent content that drives conversion rates. Here are five tips to help you optimize your content creation process to scale.
In a fast changing and competitive market, businesses must be ready to go to market with quality content in a short amount of time. As a result, marketers can no longer rely on the old ways of content creation.
Improving productivity is the number one incentive for change. According to AgileSherpas 2018 State of Agile Marketing report, 64% of marketers surveyed said productivity was the primary driver for considering an agile creative process. Increasing innovation and improving priority management tied for second at 48.4%, respectively.
Process optimization is seldom a matter of changing just one small thing. It takes dedicated effort. The following five steps can help focus your efforts to drive effective and efficient change.
1. Build Partnerships for Content Creation
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Brand relevancy relies on real-time marketing. Marketers and creative teams must act fast when opportunities and challenges present themselves. This means being able to produce content fast enough for situations such as:
- Supporting new or unplanned business opportunities
- Capitalizing on trends, news, and viral events when they happen
- Communicating fast and effectively when a crisis hits
Building the right partnerships for content creation can help improve your creative team’s ability to react quickly to unplanned events. Creative agencies, technology solutions, and internal teams all play important roles in the partnership mix.
Agencies are useful for situations that need planning, ideation, and concept building for creative. Additionally, technology solutions help manage the day-to-day needs of content teams of every scale. In-house teams manage stakeholders, quality control, and resource use.
Building the right partnerships doesn’t mean favoring one type of resource over another. Instead it’s about striking a balance between all of them. Collectively, these resources help optimize content creation processes to produce as much high-quality content as possible.
By diversifying your content production resources, you can also mobilize more effectively when unplanned events hit.
2. Document Your Creative Processes
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Scaling content creation isn’t a simple task. Ensuring that your creative team increases their output while adhering to brand guidelines requires you to document processes. Try building and documenting a creative process that aligns with a multi-channel digital marketing strategies. While documenting takes a little extra effort, it removes the guesswork of who will do what and how it will get done.
Documenting your content creation strategy helps align your team’s efforts and makes it easier to gauge your effectiveness. According to Content Marketing Institute research, just 37% of B2B marketers and 40% of B2C marketers have a written process for their creative team. At the same time, marketers with a documented process report overall higher levels of content marketing success than those with only a verbal strategy or no strategy at all.
3. Develop Audience Segments and Personas
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Content is most effective when it speaks to an audience in a unique way. Utilize consumer and customer data to segment your audience and get the most out of your content efforts. Developing simple personas for your audience can help you create a deeper understanding of what audiences may respond to. Knowing factors such as age, gender, interests, consumption habits, and purchase habits all help develop creative that fits personas.
When you segment your target audiences, consider individual pain points or challenges. This will help you make effective decisions about how you present content. You can determine what creative nuances best engage your audience personas, and pair them with the right message. As a result you’ll be better able to move people through the awareness, consideration and decision phases.
Consider the targeted approach of Direct Advice 4 Dads (DAD), the Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 winner for Content Marketing Launch of the Year. Western Australia’s oldest and largest private health insurer HBF launched the DAD brand to establish a fresh approach in the crowded maternity market. DAD content focuses on pregnancy and parenting tips and best practices for new and expectant fathers. In just five months, the brand generated 171,000 unique visitors and 21,000 followers on Facebook, while the DAD platform became a powerful referral path for HBF.
4. Offer Quality, Not Clutter
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Content marketers today are competing for the attention of an oversaturated audience. Havas surveyed 375,000 people across 33 countries in 2017 about their thoughts on content marketing. The results show that participants describe 60% of the content they’re exposed to is “just clutter” that is “poor, irrelevant, or fails to deliver.”
Make decisions to optimize your content creation process by always keeping the audience’s interests in mind. People today don’t want generic promotions. They want to understand how the product, solution, or service will impact their lives. For example, Nicorette’s Incredible Stories video campaign showed what people accomplished by quitting smoking. This content was less of a product pitch and more about inspiring others to try to make similar changes.
5. Measure Content Performance
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Establish key performance indicators to measure the effectiveness of your content creation. Ensure that your team (and your partners) are planning ahead and setting measurable goals. Also, focus your content on your audience’s pain points at each specific point in the funnel so that you can achieve those goals.
There are many tools and platforms that can help you measure the impact of your content, including:
- Marketing automation software
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Content management systems, such as WordPress
- Webinar or online presentation platforms
- Google analytics
Track your success with data from these and other platforms. Use this data to determine what content is generating interest or engagement. That way you can scale production of the most important types of content.
Top image via GaudiLab.
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