It starts with a cave painting and ends with a TikTok.
An idea forms in a human brain and through the tools at our disposal – whether mark-marking, writing or video production, we express ourselves. With an infinite supply of human ideation and creativity – and an infinite demand for knowledge, information and concept – humans have produced content for the past 40,000 years.
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Today, the barriers to accessing content have fallen away. We have a delivery system through the internet, consumer electronics (especially mobile devices) and networks, but production remains largely constrained within methods built before the digital age.
Although many need to produce content, many struggle to produce what they want to. The best way to handle content production problems and, at the same time, create a consistent pipeline of high-quality work requiring little maintenance, is to redesign your process around the advantages out there.
Build a Simple, Concise Strategy
You don’t need to be qualified, trained or experienced in planning to make a content marketing strategy.
Start by defining what messages you want to put out there, to what end and who you want to hear them. List what online spaces you want to target and what kind of content you want to publish. After that, assess what you have and define your goals.
The simpler your strategy, the better. Avoid making a big, detailed plan without naturally wanting to: defining your strategy is more important than making an epic 122-slide PowerPoint.
This way, more people across the company will buy into it, and that will turn your content marketing into a bonding experience rather than a chore.
Just as this section is the shortest, less is more.
Prioritize Conquering the ‘Execution Gap’
You cannot be a trusted content source without being a content source in the first place; and you can’t be a content source if you do not consistently produce content.
The biggest problem in content marketing is bridging the ‘execution gap’: the space between having an idea and actually publishing something. Often, ideas are not special, valuable or hard to access: execution is all those things.
Inconsistent content production can burn credibility, as consumers increasingly judge trustworthiness through activity online. If your presence feels inauthentic, or you haven’t posted in a while, consumers can drift away, in the same way an empty, windswept village is less appealing than a bustling market town.
A good rule of thumb is: don’t do things that you cannot reliably do when it’s the holidays, you’re sick, someone’s on leave or has resigned and the new hire is yet to join. You want a process that can still produce something, even when crises strike.
Prioritise getting content published. You can always go back and make edits. As any experienced editor will tell you, there’s no real end to editing – you have to decide when to move on or you never will. Mistakes happen all the time in publications or live newscasts, but almost nobody notices them because professionals just carry on.
Overcome content challenges by building a machine around you
Now that you can define what you want to do and overcome the execution gap of just getting the content out, no matter what – try to re-engineer how you produce it to optimize your content marketing operation.
Break the production of content down into as many stages as possible, then analyze how to make each happen – repeatedly – with as little regular input as possible. Once you solve that problem, move on to the next, then rinse and repeat. Eventually, you will have your own way of producing things that does not require constant attention to function.
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The most valuable contribution you can make is your creative and considered input. Nobody understands your company, its goals and needs better than you. Devote yourself to that as much as possible, even if a low-cost, repeatable process creates bland work, you can then focus on turning it into something great that helps you stand out from the crowd.
The same goes for your strategy – the less energy that goes to execution, the more can go to planning, goal-setting and creative thinking.
As your output rises, quality and content effectiveness increase, and your content goals naturally become more ambitious. This lets you create and then maintain an edge over your competitors.
Rather than burning time searching out iron oxide and clay deposits for your next cave painting, you should be inside the cave, directing an evolving panoply of work. In an age where the barriers to creation disappear, it is the barriers to your own creativity you must banish.
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