What if I told you that all the content you need to power your content marketing strategy was already made? For companies that have been in the content marketing game for any length of time, this is probably true. The problem is you just can’t see it. It’s like finding gold trapped in the Earth. You have to know where to look and how to process what you find into something you can use.
So many content planning conversations go something like this. “What are we going to talk about this month? What’s the plan to make that content by the required due date?” Repeat next month. Probably sounds familiar and while this approach does result in a bit of content going out, this project-based content approach leaves a couple of big opportunities on the table.
Opportunistic Content
The most expensive part of the content creation process is the initial production, which we call Content Origination. Origination might look like working with thought leaders to get an idea for a blog post. It might look like a video shoot to make an explainer video about a particular concept. It could be having the marketing team do research to produce something on a topic. Whatever the mode, content origination requires a good deal of time, scheduling and effort to cover the topic. Once we publish that first run content, it’s tempting to move on to the next. But in reality, we have only begun.
Scaling anything is about looking for the points of leverage. Where can we put a little incremental effort and get more return from what we are already doing? When it comes to content marketing, it requires looking at the message separate from the media and coming up with ways to bring that same message to our audience in different and creative ways. Maybe we take that message from our explainer video and build an ebook. Sometimes it means looking across the library of messages that have been developed and combining a few for a new idea. 5 blog posts about a topic become an “everything guide to something.”
Leveraging What is Already Happening
The second big opportunity is that these content projects rarely capitalize on the content that is already being made during the normal course of business. Your salespeople are answering customers’ questions all the time, which is great content. You are probably doing webinars, speaking at conferences, and doing internal training, all great content. If we separate the message (which is the gold) from the media which is often unusable or less than optimal from these sources they become a source of nearly free origination.
Building a Content Factory
What gets tricky is that the gold is hiding and can be tough to uncover. Without an approach to knowing where to look and a method for reliably extracting it, the cost can be more than it’s worth.
A huge barrier is treating your content plan as a series of “projects.” By nature, projects don’t allow for ideas to emerge. Projects define a very specific set of deliverables on day one and we work to the end of the project to build those things. There is little room to develop ideas as we go based on things that happen over time.
Instead of discrete individual projects with specific deliverables, what we need is to build a content factory—a system that can process all the various inputs and consistently produce the content required to power the strategy.
What is a Content Factory?
The goal of building a content factory is for your company to consistently generate the content required to power your strategy. It should be able to adapt to changes in that strategy, changes in the inputs to the system, and get more effective over time.
Building Content Teams
The first thing you have to consider is what skills are needed to make content. The most obvious skillsets required are copywriting, design, and videography, but there are other skills that matter too.
How will you be sure the content is on-message? How will it get deployed through your MarTech stack? How will it get posted to your social media accounts?
For your content factory to be successful it must contain a set of people who have all the necessary skills to go from idea to published content and the people who have those skills need to be able to consistently work together. Only then will you be able to empower them and maximize their creative potential.
Empowering Those Teams
Now that we know what the teams look like, how we will manage the flow of work? If it’s not projects with an upfront set of deliverables then what is it?
To maximize the time spent in origination you must take an iterative approach to content planning. Looking out at the goals for the next 6-12 weeks and building a plan that takes into account all of the origination that has been done to date, and the performance metrics of the content that has been published. Typically that 12-week horizon is firm for the next 4 weeks, well understood but flexible from 4-8 weeks out, and thematic beyond that.
Revisiting this plan monthly allows for the latest information to affect the plan while also having enough timeline to make strategic tradeoffs. Monthly meetings to progressively elaborate the rolling quarterly plan maintains a connection to strategy.
What’s equally important to the planning is how that plan is brought to the teams for execution. It is critical that they understand the strategy and aren’t just given a laundry list of things to make. Giving them the strategic context allows the team to use all of their creativity to deliver the best work to meet the need. It also allows them to negotiate the scope of the individual items allowing the team to help you work smarter and cover more of your strategy.
Getting Better As You Go
If set up your content factory correctly, you should be able to produce more and better work the longer it runs. This comes from a disciplined approach to maintaining your library of stories.
While work items are being completed every week, it’s important that all origination activities get archived in such a way that they become part of the raw materials that can be drawn from forever. More importantly than storing the files is storing the “stories” so that they can be easily found later to be used to make content no one has thought of yet.
The effectiveness with which you can recall past work to power future work is a big factor in how much leverage you have with your origination efforts.
