At Lush, every strategy we write includes a ‘blue sky’ recommendation for how a business should proceed if they had no budget, staffing or time restraints. Unfortunately, for most businesses this isn’t the reality they operate in.
Instead, many businesses come through our doors asking for a scalable content marketing strategy, able to grow and change as their business does. So how do you create a content marketing strategy that’s scalable?
1) Keep it focused on business objectives
The first piece of advice I can offer to businesses looking to create a scalable content marketing strategy is to centre your strategy on your immediate business objectives. What is it you’re looking to accomplish in the next 12-18 months? The more concise you can be, the more detailed your strategy can be. (And, therefore, the more likely it is to succeed.)
At the same time, to be scalable you must keep an eye on the future and how your business objectives might evolve as your business does. For example, if your immediate business objective is to grow brand awareness, you may want to consider how you’ll move on to encouraging engagement, lead generation and lead nurturing as you progress.
2) See the longevity in content
Another useful perspective in creating a scalable content marketing strategy is viewing quality as long-standing and “evergreen”, rather than disposable and temporary. You can reuse, re-edit and re-distribute evergreen content to create multiple uses from the one piece.
My content marketing namesake, Carla Johnson, proposes :
“On average, teams can create 12 additional pieces of content from a single white paper.”
This is because from a white paper, which covers a certain topic in a great amount of detail, brands can create several smaller content pieces such as blog posts and infographics and even longer-form content such as webinars, quizzes and podcast episodes.
A scalable content marketing strategy will consider how each piece of the puzzle can be expanded upon and multiplied. Longevity of content isn’t limited to written content either, as video can also be repurposed to deliver maximum ROI.
3) Cut costs and effort with brandscaping
A particularly effective approach to creating scalable content marketing strategies is to incorporate brandscaping into your plan. Brandscaping is a content marketing practice where two complementary businesses combine their expertise to create content that is distributed to an audience of twice the size at half the cost.
For content marketing projects that seem currently out of reach, brandscaping might help you achieve the same size of project, while sharing the load of the time, staffing and price. For businesses that are in stages of rapid growth, brandscaping also opens the opportunity for strategic partnerships, which are valuable as you grow and expand your business.
If you’d like help creating a scalable content marketing strategy, contact Lush. We write bespoke strategies to suit the individual objectives and circumstances of businesses.
