How to streamline your content production

Content is king. Just one of the cliches spouted about left, right and center at the moment. The thing is, it’s true.

Customers are consuming content like never before, across so many different channels. And many businesses are struggling to keep up.

With content teams bigger and busier than ever, we thought we’d look at just a few ways you can simplify and streamline your content production processes – some easy wins and some larger approaches. Because quite frankly, your time is better spent on delivering more, optimizing everything and strategizing for the future.

Content production tip: It’s all about collaboration.

One of the hardest parts of content production is knowing what content to produce. You need ideas. Well, utilizing the knowledge within your business is a must. There are likely a number of different people you work with who have in depth knowledge of your product, service or business that you can lean on to get content ideas.

Take a look around the office (albeit the virtual office), and tap into the resources around you. Customer service and sales teams will have insights into pain points and what customers are asking. Those are all content ideas. Business founders will have information tucked away around how the business started, company values and ethos – all big drivers in brand advocacy these days – all of which are content ideas.

Content production tip: Ditch the code.

You get into content as a job, well, to produce great content. The last thing you want to be doing is spending a load of time writing your content into code. It’s a massive time waster and it leaves you open to human error given it’s such a manual task.

The answer lies in your content management system, specifically your frontend. Making sure you have the right technology in place means you can ditch the code, see your content changes upfront in visual previews, and go live knowing what you see is what will be published. No rendering or responsiveness issues to worry about.

International activewear company Sweaty Betty had this exact problem. See how they streamlined their content here.

Content production tip: Don’t start from scratch.

With more and more pressure to be producing loads of content, and different types of content at that, one thing you can do to streamline everything is look to repurpose your current content.

Now, it’s not just about changing the date on an old blog to make it look like you’ve written it now. It’s more than that. You can:

• Turn certain content pieces into other types. Change up the content type, ie written or visual, long form or short form, and its delivery. For example, you can look to write blogs or articles based off webinars or video content, or glean statistics and facts for social infographics from a conference you hosted.

• Switch up your content positioning. See if you can slightly tweak the messaging to appeal to different audiences. For example, maybe you can create high-level content designed to inspire and/or create brand awareness from a more extensive piece that was originally designed to convert customers further down the line.

• Fill the gaps in older content. Look at previous content and evaluate what is missing, see what would be relevant to your customers now. Educational content, like delivery and returns information for example, will likely need to be updated to reflect any impact Covid has had.

Content production tip: Scrap anything manual, automate it instead.

It’s time to look at your efficiency. The key here being automation and technology.

Different content pieces, like page banners and product imagery, may need to be placed in multiple areas of your site or within different channels, but the last thing you’ll want to be doing is updating every single placement when a change is needed. Do it with one click of a button instead with the right publishing tools.

Similarly, forget waiting until midnight to publish time sensitive content like sale offers or exclusive product drops. There are scheduling options for that. Amplience ticks both the publishing and scheduling boxes.

And, don’t forget about your content planning and tracking, we all know staying on task can be hard when you’re pulled in every direction. Fortunately, there are a range of tools that can help, like Monday.com or Jira – both offering great collaboration tools too (which we know from above can be a game changer).

Content production tip: Cut the red tape.

Content production isn’t as simple as write a blog, publish it on your website. Businesses can have a lot of team members and stakeholders involved, and consequently a lot of workflows and review processes to go through, as per the diagram below. Some are taking weeks even months to see content go from conception to completion. No thank you.

So, let’s cut the red tape, eliminate the bottlenecks and simplify the workflow. Basically, let’s get things done. Perhaps start here:

• Implement Agile approaches. Things like daily stand ups allow your teams to all communicate effectively and know where projects are at.

• Eliminate the need for specialists. Bottlenecks occur when you rely on specific people with key skills, like frontend developers creating content, so naturally a process that eliminates that will likely be quicker.

• Decrease reviews and sign-offs. The less people that get involved the quicker your content production times will be.

Are you ticking all the boxes?

If you’re not taking advantage of all of the above tips just yet, don’t worry. A lot of big brands out there are yet to realize their content potential too. It’s about acknowledging it and then doing something about it, just like Sweaty Betty did.

Similarly, we can help you transform your content production, especially through embracing digital technologies. Simply talk to one of the team.