The scariest part about getting online is not the technical hurdles of setting up a website or various social media profiles. It’s not even dealing with your inner perfectionist as you figure out the right look-and-feel with a graphic designer or branding expert.
No, the worst part of an online marketing strategy is that if you want to succeed, you have to produce high-quality content on a continuous basis.
Since I work for a process improvement consulting business in Indianapolis, I tend to frame every business challenge in terms of a process. What are the steps? What are the decisions? What can be automated and what must be done by hand?
Structured vs. Free Form Content
A considerable proportion of the content you produce as part of your online marketing strategy has a clear pattern. This may not be obvious until you open back the hood and examine text in more detail. For example, this blog post is built around a handful of key phrases. An SEO expert can readily identify them, but so can the casual reader—if they are paying attention.
That means that when you go to create content such as blog post, you can start with the structured pieces, such as the keywords. This makes the entire process much smoother. You’re filling in the gaps between the structure with information that makes sense.
Of course, this is not limited to long-form content such as articles like this one. If you’re writing on Twitter with 140 character messages, you might decide that a certain percentage of your tweets are just quotes. These can be written in advance. You can even use some basic Excel knowledge to prepare Tweets in a common format.
Leveraging Human Weaknesses
A significant aspect of process improvement is knowing where you excel as well as where you don’t. Most people would agree, for example, that’s it is very difficult to edit your own work. Therefore, your workflow for content production should have a one person writing text and a separate person reviewing them.
Likewise, we know that we tend to perform more quickly once we get into a routine. So where it makes sense, try to batch parts of your content production process together. You might do all of your Facebook posts in one sitting, scheduling them out accordingly. Or you might write a variety of posts on a similar topic all at once.
Keep these thoughts in mind as you work to optimize the process of your content production!