This post is for brands that want to take their content creation to the next level and meet the ever-increasing demands of their customers. Whether you focus on B2B or B2C, your content needs will always increase, and thus you will need to plan to scale product content. With this increasing need comes the demand for high-quality content that can meet different customer needs and remain relevant.
When we talk about product content, it encompasses different forms ranging from video, text, infographics and basically any form of communication which spreads your brand promise across to target markets. It is necessary to maintain a leading online presence, because it’s the medium through which audience engagement happens.
You need to have systems in place to scale product content so that you don’t get left behind. When you scale your content marketing efforts, it leads to more defined processes. Systems should in place for rewriting product descriptions and to ensure that it aligns with your business goals and buyer needs.
Scaling won’t be possible without the use of data as it goes a long way to build out the customer experiences. You need to be able to find data and leverage them so you get useful and relevant information from them. Through product content, companies can achieve efficient resource allocation, greater relevance and produce content appropriate for different occasions, seasons and purchase consideration.
How Can You Scale Product Content?
In order to succeed in today’s marketplace, product content is highly important. To do this effectively, scale product content to the maximum.
For instance, product descriptions are usually written for a particular product or product group in mind, right? When making changes in features or images, you may have to abandon existing product descriptions, because they don’t fit into what’s currently obtainable.
However, content that is scalable is reusable and multifunctional. It is all about producing the right content at the right time for the right audience and delivering it with the right technology. Thus, scaling ensures the production of different content to fit different personalities and exist in different forms for different uses.
The content used should differ for different seasons and occasions. The same content produced for a particular occasion shouldn’t be used for a different one, for example. Product content scaling is all about improving the product content over time, like making the most out of the content that you can afford to produce.
Scaling your content turns it into a growth strategy that can increase profitability. In order to succeed in your product content, you need accurate data.
Benefits of Scaling Product Content
Product content contributes a lot to the overall experience of customers. Thus, proper management is important. When you scale your product content, it makes the message more memorable. This will drive more traffic to your site, helping you win more sales. Google is a lover of original and relevant content that is SEO friendly, and scaling helps you keep your ratings and ranking high.
Content can generate more leads than the traditional outbound marketing. Scaling your product content makes it possible to reach markets not thought of before. Your content is a reflection of your brand voice and promise and this is what people see as your brand.
Scaling your product content saves time
This is because you can allocate internal resources effectively and efficiently to achieve greater returns. Through scaling, a company can achieve greater relevance, because content can be designed specifically for major events, holidays, and seasons. Through segmentation of content, the customers are serviced with a touch of personalization and it becomes more relevant to them because it addresses their exact needs and challenges.
Scalable product content answers questions
Scaling product content provides answers to important questions that are necessary for an effective content marketing strategy. These include:
- Who: those in charge of the content creation and their individual responsibilities
- What: the kind of content that fits the needs of your target audience and the goals you want to achieve with each content piece
- When: publishing frequency and timing release of content in a way that regularly communicates your message
- Where: storing content for easy retrieval and access
- How: the content distribution channels that can best resonate with the customers
All these are important considerations for brands who wish to take leadership in whatever industry they find themselves in.
It minimizes waste as you can reuse and repurpose content instead of abandoning it altogether. Thus, different buyer personas are satisfied with more value created. All these reduce the time you would have spent creating content from scratch.
Tips for Scaling Product Content
Effective product content scaling involves content production that engages your audience and does not compromise quality or reduce your Return on Investment (ROI). How then do you increase your content production without reducing the value and quality of each one?
Keeping content consistent and relevant across different platforms and geographies in a bid to satisfy the needs of customers can be quite tough. Well, this post is going to offer you tips on how to properly conduct your scaling efforts in a way that achieves greater relevance.
The first step to scaling your product content is developing a strategy for your product content marketing that can yield results. The truth is that you can never go wrong with a strategy in place. Your scaling efforts begin when you map out a strategy for your content production and marketing. You need to have a sit-out with your content development team and map out tactics and winning strategies that are feasible. Always refer to company’s existing marketing plan and try to anticipate clients’ needs and desires.
Create an editorial timetable and distribute work the smart way for the production of quality product content. It also helps to save time and reduce frustration when mapping out publication dates in advance for alignment with seasonal demands.
1. Outline Objectives by Specific Campaign
I can’t stress this enough; you need to be clear about your specific objectives before you begin any content production. What is the end goal you intend to achieve with increasing your content production? The proper setting of your content production objectives will help organizations have a purpose that drives their activities.
Through the objectives formed, make a style guide should for each content type you’re going to produce. Your style guide helps one avoid inconsistencies among articles, encompassing brand guidelines, heading styles, amount of images, among others. Your content should align with seasonal demand, product launches and any other important consideration that may demand some alteration to product content.
Have the Right Team in Place
You can’t talk about scaling if you don’t have a team that is capable of producing quality content and making good strategic content decisions. Unfortunately, only a few organizations have content marketing teams. Scaling involves visionary people who can see into the future and map out winning strategies.
Hire strategically
Content creation isn’t an individual effort but a team sport. Creating good content isn’t easy. This is why it is important to hire talented and creative writers that can produce quality content that require little or no editing. Not only talent and creativity, you need people committed to your clients and your promises to satisfy their needs.
If there is an urgent need to scale your product content, you can consider hiring more hands to grow your team. Creatively expand your team to meet the needs of your growing customers.
The end goal is to have content that is relevant, communicates your goals and objectives clearly, meets the needs of your target market, and incorporates the values of your brand.
Establish workflows
There should be an organized workflow for the content production team to ensure excess flexibility is limited. Workflows should be consistent and supported by the right technology for proper execution.
Not only is finding the right team important, you need to use time-saving tools and systems when it comes to your content scaling. Automation is important to save time and cost. Scaling becomes easier when you repurpose content to conform to the needs of a certain group or platform.
Develop Content
The demand for content production is higher and it is important that the supply is sufficient to meet this increasing demand. The major question is how to sufficiently supply this demand in a way that it is of high quality and can meet the different needs of customers.
Always go for quality over quantity
Resist the temptation to produce barely manageable content in bulk just because you want to scale your content. Always have it at the back of your mind that readers don’t return to pages with average content but those with great and exceptional content. Referring to the 80/20 power rule, 20% of your content can drive 80% of the volume of traffic.
You can republish, repackage, repurpose or syndicate existing content.
- Republishing content helps your product information and replacing any stale information that exists within.
- Repackaging content gathers relevant information on a particular topic and repackaged to form an entirely new content that can attract a different audience.
- Repurposing content involves redirecting the same content to suit a different purpose or fit into a different channel.
You can also partner with other media outlets through syndication to republish your content continually on a fixed schedule.
Diversify Content
It is important to diversify content types while bearing in mind the specific type of content your audience would love. “Understand your customers!” is one commandment you must obey. In developing your content, segment it to your customers according to the level in the buyer’s journey. You can’t release content that informs and creates awareness about your brand to a prospect that knows your brand and is waiting for information about the benefits you can over above your competitors.
It is necessary that your content is grouped into the different stages of a customer’s purchase journey (from awareness to purchase action and then to customer loyalty and advocacy) and value is given at each stage. Understand your customer’s purchase journey and how your content fits into it.
Your original content can be updated and revived in place of total abandonment. Beef up thin product descriptions with compelling and engaging content to increase its value. Affiliates should be provided with content that can be editable.
2. Determine Platforms for Scalable Content Distribution
No matter how wonderful your product content is, it is useless if it does not get to the customers that need it at the right time. Without a good distribution plan, all your content development effort may be in vain because no one will know it exists. Strategic content distribution is required for content to be successful.
According to Curata.com, a whopping 75% of marketers increased the amount they spend on content marketing in 2016. I couldn’t agree more with Jayson DeMers who said, “The real value of content marketing is in distribution channels”. Now, you know that the creation of amazing content isn’t the end of your content efforts, rather, it’s the distribution of content effectively to people who will love it and are willing to share.
Content distribution helps to disseminate your brand message to your target audience. Your distribution goal should be in line with the overall objective of your company. There is no perfect platform that is a match for all companies. Your set objective will dictate the content that will be shared and the number of times it will be shared.
Your audience also matters and their media preferences should be considered here in order to maximize your online presence where it matters most. You can use paid media, owned media, earned media or a combination of these categories.
Owned media includes your website, mobile sites, blog, social media accounts and pages and so on. Paid media is used when a brand pays in order to leverage a particular channel. With earned media, the customers become the channel by spreading the buzz about the brand and this occurs as a result of the efforts of paid and owned media.
Summarily, evaluate your distribution options (owned, paid, and earned media) and select the one that can offer you the highest returns looking at your buyer characteristics; develop your distribution strategy and document decisions taken so that everyone involved can have access to it, and promote your content by optimizing it.
3. Compare Content Against Company-wide Goals
There is need to make adjustments along the way no matter the best plans and strategies you have mapped out. The only thing constant is change itself. Track your site’s analytics to figure out what type of content resonates most in your customers’ minds.
Constant evaluations should be conducted to evaluate strategies that are generating positive results and those that aren’t. Through evaluation of scaling efforts, the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of content can be determined and corrections can be quickly made.
Mistakes to Avoid When Scaling Product Content
Never forget the importance of quality. Your scaling efforts should have superior quality content production in mind. Get rid of the mentality that equates content scaling with the endless production of the content without having quality in mind.
It can be quite possible to displace quality when the costs start to get out of hand. Before you do that, be aware of the potential dangers that are sure to follow. It is better to maintain quality within your limited budget and reap the rewards.
This means that product content should be free of grammatical errors, typographical errors among others. According to Hubspot, 59% of potential customers shy away from companies that have poor grammar on their websites. When your content isn’t great, it can affect your brand visibility negatively. Remember, more traffic does not automatically mean more leads or better conversions.
Brand consistency is important if you are to have a place in the minds of customers. Producing more content across more platforms may put content consistency in jeopardy. To avoid the risk of communicating brand inconsistency, style guides can be used in which content teams can reference from the information contained within the guide. This will ensure that basic elements and information pretty much remains the same no matter the platform or channel used.
Conclusion
It can be quite easy to conclude: the more content, the better.
While this may be true in some cases, it’s not always so. Especially when you have so much content it becomes a liability instead of an asset. This is why your product content quality should be as high as possible.
Make the decision as to how much content to create, what your target market is, where to promote your content, and how to distribute it to the right customers. Settle on what is realistic considering the resources you have at hand. You should decide whether or not you want to outsource your processes. Go with the flow and don’t be afraid to experiment until you find out what works best for your organization. Be able to adapt to changes, especially unexpected ones that come.
No one will see your content if they don’t know it exists. You can only increase traffic, increase leads and conversions through the use of both promotional and distribution tools that are within your advertising budget. The best approach is a combination of paid, earned, and owned media for an omnichannel experience.
Scaling product content requires dedication of a lot of resources and it’s expensive. The more time and resources invested in it, the higher the possibility of success. Thus, you need to make use of the judicious use of the resources you currently have and fit it properly into your content strategy.
Focus on the things that already work and produce content around those areas. Don’t get too greedy and pursue numerous channels at once. You can scale your product content by concentrating on a few channels and increase them across the line.
When you scale product content correctly the positive effect is massive. It can go a long way to increase the reach and impact of your content since it is available in the right form, at the right time and to the right people. Well, because customers love to share and they can help spread the word. Technology has made it possible to reach millions of people in seconds. If it is great and not just good enough, people will always share and provide great reviews.
Now that you know why you should be planning to scale your product content, click here to see what Catsy can do for you.
