Making Content Marketing Easier: Remove the Friction

Marketing can feel like a full-time job in and of itself, and for business owners who are already pulled in a million different directions, it can be tough to find the time and energy to devote to marketing efforts.  As more businesses move away from traditional marketing spending on newspapers, radio, and television ads, content marketing is becoming a larger and larger share of how businesses market to consumers.

Here are three tips for how to make life easier when it comes to content marketing.  The first two tips are for do-it-yourselfers.  The third tip is what we believe the best solution is.

1. Automate where possible.
There are a lot of content marketing tasks that can be automated, from sending out email newsletters to social media posts. By automating these tasks, you’ll free up time to focus on other aspects of your business. There are plenty of platforms and programs out there that can help you with this, so do some research and find one that fits your needs.

When you automate your content marketing, you are also ensuring that content goes out consistently, and that’s important for staying in touch with your audience.  If business is in a boom period, the priority has to be delivering for customers, and so it would become easy to neglect content distribution in those busy periods.  If that happens, it can be challenging to develop new leads and sales when things slow down again because your business has slipped from the audience’s awareness.

DIY content marketing can work pretty well when you build a batch production and automated publishing model.  Schedule one or two days each month that are just for content creation.  Crank out a whole batch of videos, or blog articles, or social media posts, and then get them into an automated scheduler so that they drip out for the rest of the month.

2. Delegate where possible.
Just because you’re the business owner doesn’t mean you have to do everything yourself. If you have employees, delegate some of the content marketing tasks to them. Not only will this take some of the burden off of you, but it will also give your employees a chance to learn new skills and feel more invested in the company.

Maybe there’s one person who really enjoys taking photos at the workplace that could be used for image posts on social.  There could be another person who’s good at looking at the company calendar and generating lists of content ideas based on what’s coming up.  Or maybe you’ve got somebody who has a knack for thinking of just the right captions for social posts.  With a team approach, content marketing can get much, much easier.  The key to this approach is having a project management model that keeps everyone on task, because if just one person doesn’t do their job, the whole production line fails.

3. Outsource where possible.
We’ve got a pretty obvious bias on this, but we truly believe it’s in your best interests as a business owner to outsource as much of your content marketing as possible. You didn’t get into business to make content, right?  You got into business to make a great product or to be of service to others.  Your time and energy deserve to be spent on the core activities of running your business.

If you make the best product in the world, but nobody knows about it, your business will struggle.  If people don’t know you can solve a problem for them, it’s hard to get clients.  Marketing is a necessary element of operating a business, and for many businesses the traditional media are just too expensive.  Leveraging social media allows you to have much more reach for pennies on the dollar compared to radio, newspapers, and television.

Content marketing shouldn’t be a burden, but the reality for many business owners is that it is.  The work of creating content is a form of friction.  As a content production agency, we remove that friction for business owners.  When that friction is removed, you have more time and more energy to run your business, yet your brand is still being represented in the digital marketplace.

We can produce social media posts, short and long form videos, infographics, blog articles, and podcasts.  We love making content for businesses that shine a spotlight on your people, that demonstrate their passion and enthusiasm for what you all do, and that illustrate the value you bring to your customers.  If you’re ready to talk about removing the friction of content creation for your business, schedule a discovery session with us and let’s talk about your content needs.