Where is the trend of content creation headed? In a world of consumers that are becoming less tolerant of traditional advertising, businesses will start using content creation to cut through the clutter and make an impact. It’s a task that many will struggle with, as Hootsuite’s Australian Social Media Management Study shows businesses find it challenging to create content, distribute it and share it on social media.
Online business resource CustomerThink recently took a look at the challenge of content creation and highlighted the common pitfalls faced. These include not being a native writer, not understanding that marketing copy is not the same as marketing content and not really knowing who the audience is and what they want – all things that are easily remedied by partnering with a full-service marketing agency.
However, there are pitfalls that businesses themselves can take ownership of, at least in part, and one of these is not having a content marketing strategy or development process and workflow formalised.
Why is this necessary?
Because, by deciding on your overarching marketing goals, it simply becomes a matter of translating that one goal into smaller, time sensitive ones. And once you have those smaller, more achievable goals, you (or your agency of choice) can create a working content marketing strategy, as well as any development processes and workflows involved.
When it comes to marrying your strategy with your processes and workflows, we’ve found that using the principles of batch content creation can be tremendously helpful in assisting you to achieve your goals.
Batch content creation is a tactic employed by heavyweights in the digital marketing industry, like Neil Patel, who is considered by the Wall Street Journal to be a top influencer on the web, and by Entrepreneur Magazine, to be the founder of one of the top 100 most brilliant companies in the world.
Patel uses batch tasking to get into the flow of tasks and does them all quickly and at once. Other batch tasking enthusiasts say that batch tasking helps increase quality and accuracy while decreasing procrastination and stress.
By introducing batch tasking into content creation, you’ll find that you are more easily able to come up with ideas and resources for content (either for your in-house marketers or an agency to execute). You can even create separate and specific batches of content to achieve specific goals.
Say, for example, that you are a newcomer to an industry that you want to break into and you need to establish your business as an authority in that area, online. But like most new business owners, you don’t have the time to manage your content personally 24/7 or to sit down with your agencies every day to discuss the details of your day to day content creation.
A few hours every other week is all you can manage.
Here’s where batch content creation comes into play. You can sit down in one meeting (by yourself or with your content creation partner) and create/plan and a batch of content. Orientate this towards three things:
• ensuring that it is relevant to audiences,
• is promoted and amplified on various social media platforms and websites, and
• is optimised for SEO.
Any questions or queries that come up can be dealt with on the spot, as well as any potential snags that could occur in the dissemination of the content. It’s also easier to gather staff members who need to be involved in this single meeting rather than having to juggle several schedules over several days. At the same time, changes can be made and the order of the content can be shuffled around without disturbing the underlying message included. Baseline figures of traffic and other metrics can be captured and noted.
And this is what you get out of it – for just a few hours every other month and week, you can get a regular, automatically scheduled feed of quality, well-prepared content that will help you meet your short term and long term goals. Content that you have personally signed off on and which you can track.
It’s a strategy that we recommend to all our clients that is really starting to catch on. Why? Because it works!
Alice Tancred
Vim + Zest
alice@vimandzest.com
