We’ve all heard of economies of scale, right? The more you produce of a good/service the easier and more cost-effective it becomes. However, there is also a term called “diseconomies of scale” which states that as you produce more and more, you begin to lose control, which could ultimately lead to lower quality and higher per-unit costs.
The positive and negative aspects of scaling are issues that many content marketers are starting to face as the demand for content production, specifically quality content production, continues to rise.
Whether you are an enterprise brand with an entire content marketing department producing daily content, or just an SMB with one Swiss-army-knife marketing employee creating a handful of blog posts every month, you inherently have a point at which the production level of content becomes too difficult to control.
Don’t fret, as with everything on the internet, there is a way to “optimize”.
Increasing your company’s level of content production is a necessity in today’s marketing environment, and if you can learn the tricks of the trade for maximizing your critical point, then you will be able to produce high-quality content and more of it.
My company, CopyPress, has built a successful platform for scaling quality content, and I’m going to walk you through our process and show you how you can scale content without sacrificing quality (This interactive graphic also shows the process).
The best part is, while these steps are highly applicable for brands, agencies can also use the steps to improve their processes for handling large production orders.
Disclaimer: This post will only focus on the process of content production. It takes the presumption that you have an effective strategy already in place and are looking to increase the amount of created content.
Step 1: Identify What High-Quality Content is to You
Probably the most important step in the entire process is identifying what your expectations are for the content’s quality.
There are several ways to go about understating expectations, but a good place to start is with a thorough questionnaire that covers the following main points:
- Who is your target audience? You will most likely have two targets. The first is the holistic target audience. Second should be the target buying stage the content will be directed to. These “buyer personas” should be outlined prior to ever creating content.
- What is your brand voice? This question requires a great deal of information about the subject matter of your brand, the style associated with the brand’s identity, and the general personality that you want to portray.
- What is the purpose of the content? This will vary depending on the content, but it is a vital question to consider before scaling any campaign. Are you creating the content to inform, entertain, generate traffic, improve backlinks, or increase sales? Knowing how the content will be measured before it is created will help to ensure expectations are met.
- What are the parameters of your content? With the objectives out of the way, it is time to start considering the specifications and scope of the content. If you are creating articles, how many words and how many articles do you need to create to reach your goal? Try to develop concrete parameters when you can.
- Find an example that matches your expectations: Your content will likely fall into a similar structure whether it is a blog article, white paper, infographic, interactive, vide, etc. Look for an example of a form of content that matches your goals. Even if it doesn’t match your industry or topics, you might like the design or flow, so use that to provide a concrete idea of your expectations.
Step 2: Put Your Expectations Down into a Style Guide
After you’ve collected the information about what level of quality you are looking for and you have a clear idea of expectations, you need to put it into a style guide. Each project will have different parameters and should also have a different style guide.
For instance, if you are looking to produce a thousand 500 word blog articles over the next 12 months, you would create a style guide for that project much differently than if you were producing a hundred 2-minute videos over the next 12 months.
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