Nowadays, content marketing is an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. This is why both individual entrepreneurs and businesses design their own content marketing campaigns to reach their customers through multiple channels.
The problems arise when you realize that content marketing can take up a lot of your time and energy which can ultimately make your efforts ineffective. Hence, here’s how you can speed up your content marketing program.
1. Create a Detailed Content Strategy
First of all, you need to create a detailed content strategy. This is not just your marketing strategy in terms of what you will do (e.g. post on Instagram, send newsletters via email, etc.) but also in terms of how you will create content. A content strategy outlines things such as:
- The content marketing techniques you will be using (e.g. social media marketing, guest blogging, email marketing)
- The content marketing channels you will be using (e.g. Instagram, YouTube, email)
- The types of content you will be creating (e.g. TikTok videos, tutorial blog posts, infographics)
- The standards you will maintain for your content (e.g. formatting, image quality, word count, visual branding, brand voice)
- The tools you will be using to create your content (e.g. grammar and spelling checkers, graphic design software, video editing software)
- The schedule you will be using to publish your content
Crafting an effective content strategy involves careful planning and audience understanding. Begin by outlining your goals, identifying target demographics, and selecting suitable content themes. Integration of Twitter videos converted to MP4 format for broader compatibility, can enhance your strategy. Create engaging video content that aligns with your brand and resonates with your audience. Utilize Twitter’s features such as hashtags and mentions to maximize visibility. Consistency is key; schedule regular video posts and analyze performance metrics to refine your strategy over time. This dynamic approach ensures a compelling and cohesive content plan that resonates across various platforms.
2. Set Up a Content Calendar
To expand on that last point, you need to set up a content calendar. While it is technically a part of your content strategy, it is actually so important that it’s worth discussing it separately. Essentially, a content calendar is a calendar you use to schedule all your activities related to content marketing, especially when and how you publish your content.
For instance, you can add the tasks related to your content creation to your content calendar. This way, you can prepare all the content beforehand. Nevertheless, the main goal of a content calendar is to help you schedule your content in a smart way. Choose the time of the day and the days of the week when your audience is the most active online.
3. Brainstorm Ideas Beforehand
With the help of a content calendar, you can prepare all your content sometime before you actually have to publish it. However, besides preparing the content itself, it’s also a good idea to prepare a list of ideas for your content. In other words, try to brainstorm your ideas beforehand and keep this list at hand.
Obviously, the only ideas you can actually come up with are topics for evergreen content. You don’t know which trending topics will appear and which news will be discussed tomorrow, next week, next month, or next year. Still, you can have a list of evergreen topics that will help you create content regularly and have no shortage of it to post.
4. Repurpose Old Content
Rather than only looking for ways to create new content, it’s definitely worth looking back on what you posted already and how you can use that again in a new way. To put it simply, how can you repurpose your old content? Ask yourself about this and go through your old content to decide what you can reuse.
For instance, you can take an old blog article and update it with new information. Alternatively, you can take an old article and create an infographic based on it to post on social media. If you don’t know how to update old content on your own, you can hire a professional writer from a top writing reviews site who has experience with repurposing old content and can do the job well.
5. Make Outlines Before Writing
There are many reasons why you need to make outlines for your content before you start creating. For starters, it will make the process of writing much faster because you will already have the backbone of what you want to create. At the same time, creating an outline beforehand makes it easier to organize your thoughts and structure them in a coherent way.
In most cases, you will want to create an outline for every written piece you want to create, but other types of content (e.g. videos, infographics) also benefit from an outline. Make a list of points you want to cover about a specific topic and then organize them in a logical order (e.g. chronologically) to create your outline.
6. Use Tools to Help You
Content marketing is much easier when you are using different tools to help you. Here are just some examples of what you can use to assist you:
- Grammarly (check texts for grammar, spelling, and punctuation issues)
- Hemingway Editor (improve the readability of your texts)
- Canva (use templates for designing different types of graphics)
- Slack (message your team members on a protected and professional platform)
- MailChimp (automate your email marketing campaigns)
- Hootsuite (schedule your social media posts)
7. Work with Different Specialists
Speaking of your team members, it’s definitely necessary to work with different specialists to organize and execute your content marketing campaigns. Don’t do everything yourself – you will only feel overworked and will likely make many mistakes that could have been avoided. Even if you can’t afford a big content marketing team, a few people will be enough.
When a single person is doing everything, it becomes very difficult to do, well, everything. Don’t write, edit, design, film, etc. all your content on your own. You can even consider outsourcing some of your activities. For instance, you can hire an experienced writer from one of the best online writing services to help you write your content while you work on your visuals.
8. Write First, Edit Later
One very important thing to remember about writing your content is that you should do it one step at a time. Of course, there’s the planning stage when you brainstorm ideas and create an outline. Then, you have the writing stage, and only later on – the editing.
Don’t combine the writing and editing stages. Not only will that slow you down, but you might also do more harm than good to your content. It’s best to write your content first and edit it later.
9. Utilize User-Generated Content
UGC or user-generated content is content created by your audience. Customer reviews and testimonials, content created for your giveaways and contests, etc. – all of it is considered UGC that you can use in your strategy.
By reposting UGC, you reduce the amount of content you need to create yourself. Moreover, you can engage with your audience this way and build stronger relationships with your past customers.
10. Learn from Your Analytics
Last but not least, don’t forget to learn from your analytics. The metrics you track for your content (e.g. views, comments, likes, etc.) are all important for you to determine whether you met your goals. Likewise, they are valuable for you to decide what you will do next in terms of content marketing and how you can maximize the results of your campaigns.
Final Words
To summarize, creating a content marketing strategy that will guide all your further actions is fundamental. However, you should also utilize other techniques listed in this article to streamline your workflow even more and become better at content marketing overall.
