One common theme I hear when talking about the difficulties of scaling content is that often brands and agencies are solely focused on making new, shiny things. While new, fresh content is important, it’s not the only type of content you should be focused on. There are 3 parts to achieving scale without sacrificing quality.
Originate. This is the first process and the one most of us are familiar with. Originating content is where totally new things are made. The goal of Origination is to collect new stories, thought leadership, influencer content, and other raw materials that will be published as content as well as become the inputs to create derivative (Amplified) content. Original content is often expensive, needs to be plan-driven due to the coordination involved, and has a longer shelf-life.
Amplify. The second process is Amplification. Amplification is all about connecting the messages collected through the origination process with your audiences. This is where we create derivative, channel-native content to fill out the rest of the strategy. While additional content is made through Amplification, it is not net-new it is all derivative from some original content source. Amplified content should be relatively inexpensive due to the short shelf life and the minimal coordination with outside groups required.
Optimize. This is where we look at the best performing content in the past and remix and repackage it to make more. This is a special kind of Amplification in that we know that the content we make in the optimize step will resonate with our audience because they have already voted for it with their engagement. Optimized content can have a longer or shorter shelf-life depending on the learnings that came from the data.
