How to do more content with less

22 Jan

It’s the eternal question. The holy grail. The never-ending quest. How can you create more content with less people, less resource, less time.

There are people out there who will tell you that’s not possible. That to create content you need more. But that’s not strictly true. Instead you need to refocus your thinking away from doing more and turn that into being more effective.

It’s the whole work smarter not harder. When resources are limited it’s not possible to do more so instead we have to get creative and start thinking about how we can do more with what we already have.

Repurposing

It all starts with repurposing. Each individual piece of content shouldn’t exist in isolation, that’s for a few reasons. Firstly your audience will get confused. If you’re talking about one thing here and something totally different there it doesn’t make sense. Secondly, you’re under utilising your resources.

If you’ve spent time and effort creating a blog then let’s use it to inspire a podcast theme, let’s use it in our e-newsletter, let’s chop it up into multiple social media posts. When we start to look at what else we can do with what we have, suddenly we’ve got 10 times the amount of content we thought.

We’re doing more with less.

Where to start

When we want to be more strategic and impactful with the content we’re creating we need to take it back a step. That means having a solid strategy in place for what topics you’re going to cover and what content creation schedule you’re going to follow.

If you want everything to link then you need to start with the topics, then bring them to life in their juiciest format.

Let’s look at an example.

For a recruitment agency who is always time poor and ambition big. With 2 distinct audiences - clients and candidates, there’s always content to create. Taking each audience in turn we can then start researching topics for those audiences so say we’ve decided to target candidates with some content on upcoming job trends in the technology sector. The next decision is what’s the best format? What’s the biggest format?

A long-form blog or article. So we create that first. Then when that’s finished someone can turn that into a talking head video for social media. We can then break each trend into an individual social media post, plus a couple of promo posts. The blog can be emailed to candidates on their CRM.

By my counting we’re up to at least 10 pieces of content all of which are linked and all tied directly to the audience. If you think about how much time it would take to create those 10 individual pieces of content separately it’s far more than via this method.

Piggybacking

So we’re repurposing as much as we can. We’re starting big and working small. The other way to create more content with fewer resources is through piggybacking. What is going on in the world that you can jump on?

Has there been research released about your topic area?
Has someone in your industry commented on something that you can agree/disagree with?
Is there an older piece of your own content that you can refresh and re-release?

We’re always thinking about new. But sometimes we need to look at our peers and our industry and see what already exists that we can expand on.

Having that starting point makes it far easier to create content from. Getting a colleague to comment on an article then turning that into a social post or a quick and dirty blog cuts out some of the thinking and research time, giving you the framework to build on.

Again, we’re working smarter not harder.

It’s strategy time

But the best way to do more content for less time, resource and energy is through having a strategy. When you know what content you need to create, when and who’s doing it you’re going to be working more efficiently.

We all know what it’s like to be stuck in that reactive mode where you feel like you’re firefighting. When you’re writing blogs, articles and white papers in that mode you’re going to be reacting to whatever or whoever shouts the loudest OR you’re going to be doing what’s quick and easy.

Instead you need to shift to a content plan that supports your business objectives and your digital marketing strategy. When you do that you’ll find that you’re creating written content that resonates, that hits the mark, that drives traffic and helps to generate leads.

That’s how you do more for less.

You can’t do more with fewer resources. But what you can do is be more efficient in how you work and create content so the content you put out there is more impactful and effective.

Starting with a plan, going big and creating smaller pieces of related content and piggybacking on what’s going on in the world are 3 ways that you can do just that.

Of course, if you want to free up even more resource in your team while still creating quality long-form content you might want to talk to your friendly neighbourhood content writer. Drop me a message here.