Everyone and their boss is talking about content marketing and how “content is king.” But how do you produce great content on a reasonable timeline when you’re a one-person team … or maybe you don’t have a marketing team at all? Here are some easy hacks for scaling your content marketing with a limited team and a shoestring budget.
Set a Realistic Goal
By today’s content marketing best practices, quality content is more important than sheer quantity. Producing quality content helps position you as a knowledgeable and trustworthy industry thought leader. People also spend more time reading quality content, which helps with your overall search engine optimization (SEO). With this in mind, don’t stress about becoming a content machine.
Instead, set a goal that is realistic for your organization. If you’re starting a blog, think about blogging weekly or bi-weekly. Also, if you want to produce lead-generating whitepapers, consider a goal of one per quarter or two per year. If you’re already doing some content marketing, step up your cadence a little bit at a time instead of doubling output right away.
If you’re new to content marketing altogether, identify one business goal you’d like content to work toward. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive web traffic? Generate sales or leads? While the answer is probably “yes” to all of those, each requires a different type of content, and trying to accomplish them all at once can get overwhelming with a small team. If your goal is to drive web traffic or brand awareness, focus on a blog. If you want to generate sales and leads, you might consider producing whitepapers or eBooks that can live behind a form instead.
Your content goal should keep you accountable for regularly producing content without being so aggressive that it leads to stress, low-quality content, and perpetually missed deadlines.
Find a Good Freelancer & Stick with Them
If you don’t have an in-house marketing team or someone who can dedicate time to producing content, find a freelance content marketer who can help you achieve your goals. A freelancer is less expensive than an in-house hire, but when you find the right person, they can become an indispensable part of your team.
To get the most out of a freelance engagement without a lot of extra time or frustration, work with a reputable content community platform and remember these 4 Secrets to Getting Knock-Out Content from Freelancers. Once you find the right person, you’ll find it’s easy to fall into a rhythm for publishing fresh content without much extra time or effort.
Repackage & Repurpose
There is so much content already out there that sometimes, one of the best things you can do is collect it in one place. While creating your own original content is important, it’s also perfectly reasonable to occasionally supplement with repurposed and repackaged content. If you’re in a pinch or suffering from writer’s block, consider putting together a recap blog or a collection of the best advice or recent statistics.
A few examples include:
- Our favorite predictions we’ve seen for 2020 – Recap some of the best advice and predictions you’ve come across in the 2019 and early 2020 articles looking at the future of your industry. If you can, add a few comments on why you like these particular predictions.
- 17 stats about [insert your area of expertise here] – Collect some of the most interesting recent statistics from reputable industry publications and put them in one spot. Making sure the stats are no more than three years old will help your content be timely and relevant (no one cares about a statistic published in 2014).
- [Industry] Weekly News Roundup – You already keep an eye on industry news and probably get tons of daily newsletters. Take a few of the most interesting stories from that week (or month) and write a few sentences about why you think it’s important.
Repackaging and recapping are simple ways to publish some very interesting content but remember to ALWAYS hyperlink to the original source and never copy/paste more than 1-2 sentences. You need to be very careful that you curate this content, not plagiarize it.
Micro Content is Your Best Friend
The beauty of content marketing is that if you get creative, you can get a lot of content out of “one” piece. Once you have a larger content piece (like a blog, eBook, whitepaper, etc.), you can use it to generate a plethora of additional smaller content elements. This is called “micro-content” and is great to use on social media, around your website, on resource pages, in sales emails, etc.
For instance, if you write a blog or eBook that has a series of tips, break those tips out into an infographic or individual graphics for social media. If you interview someone for a blog post or article, record the conversation and publish audio snippets or put a particularly catchy quote into a graphic for social media or your website. This may sound like a lot of extra work, but there are many free (or cheap) tools available today that make it quick and easy to produce micro-content. Here are a few that will make micro-content a breeze without a designer or more marketing staff.
- Canva: Ideal for quick infographics or social media graphics
- Headliner: Fast videos and audiograms that look professional
- Biteable: Templates for short videos ideal for social media or to spice up your written content
Small But Mighty Content Marketing
We all know how important marketing is, but it’s also easy to push it to the back burner when other business matters need attention. The great thing about content marketing is that it doesn’t have to be daunting. Start simple, be kind with the expectations you set at the beginning, and be smart about the content you create, so it doesn’t take up too much time. With a few hours a month and a clever content marketing plan (plus a little help if you need it), you can easily scale your content marketing without a large team or budget.