Faster content marketing campaigns help supercharge your brand growth and outpace your competition. But don’t tell your content writing team to “work faster.”
A strategic approach addresses bottlenecks in your pipeline without sacrificing quality.
Step 1: Identify roadblocks in your content creation process
Examine your content creation workflow and pinpoint areas where bottlenecks occur.
For example, your content team may have a long backlog of content projects queued up—but not enough writers to complete them on time. Or, you could be missing content project timelines due to slow review and editing processes.
Identify these issues to help you decide which gaps to address first.
Step 2: Use tools for content topic ideation
Speed up your content ideation process with tools, so your writers don’t run out of content pieces to work on. Waiting times between projects delay content marketing campaigns and cause scheduling issues for your writers.
AnswerThePublic, Semrush, and Portent Idea Generator are tools that generate dozens of content topic ideas in minutes.
Semrush — particularly its “Keyword Magic Tool” — lets you discover popular keywords to refine your content topics. Portent Idea Generator helps create eye-catching headlines.
Step 3: Develop content clusters
Group your content ideas into “content clusters” to build detailed outlines and relevant subtopics faster.
A content cluster is a group of related content connected to a “pillar page” via internal links. This enhances the user experience, improves SEO, and accelerates the content planning process.
Suppose you have a content cluster about “making money online.” Your pillar page needs to briefly cover all related subtopics like freelancing, eCommerce, affiliate marketing, and social media marketing.
When your pillar page is ready, create in-depth posts about these subtopics called “cluster posts.” Tie them all together with internal links to and from your pillar page.
Step 4: Build detailed content outlines
Help your writers produce content faster with detailed, comprehensive briefs.
Detailed outlines allow writers to spend extra time researching and coming up with subtopics to cover. This impacts their productivity since keyword research takes time.
Summarize the project’s objectives, target audience, and keywords. Double down with a list of keyword-optimized subheadings and required sections to include.
Step 5: Repurpose old content into various formats
Repurpose long-form content such as white papers, eBooks, and industry reports into other content. This helps content creators save time on research and writing since they can pull content from the original piece.
Aside from blog posts, long-form content can be repurposed into slideshows, social media images, infographics, and short-form videos.
Step 6: Outsource content production to freelancers
A single copywriter or content manager can only accomplish so much on their own. Increase the volume of your content creation immediately with a nimble freelance team. Sharing the workload with some freelance help frees up in-house content pros so they can spend more time focusing on production, strategy, and distribution. This added efficiency increases production output.
Also, freelancers don’t require much training. They can be productive from day one with the skills, knowledge, and tools they already possess.
Step 7: Manage your team’s productivity
Unlock your content team’s maximum productivity with effective project management.
Below are a few tips to improve your team’s productivity:
- Remind your writers to write now and edit later. Writing and editing at the same time causes writers to overthink every sentence. Remind your writers that editing comes after completing the first draft.
- Allow time for breaks. Content writing is mentally draining. If your writers can meet deadlines, avoid stressing them with strict, eight-hour writing schedules. Allow them to have short breaks whenever needed and be reasonable with deadlines.
- Keep communication open. If you work with freelancers or remote-based, full-time writers, go beyond emails and use communication platforms with collaboration features. Slack, for example, lets you organize conversation themes into channels, share screens, host virtual huddles, and share files.
More user-friendly tools and software for content creators
Another way to improve your team’s productivity is to use content creation tools that simplify rather than overcomplicate their tasks.
Here are some examples:
- Hemingway Editor. Improve the readability of written content by highlighting long and complex sentences.
- Google Docs. Streamline feedback rounds by collaborating in real-time, writing comments, and adding suggestions.
- Notion.so. Share outlines, brand guidelines, templates, and other useful resources.
- Trello. Organize, assign, and track tasks using a Kanban-style visual board.
- Canva. Use pre-made graphic vectors, charts, templates, filters, and typography tools to whip up visual content quickly.
Expert services for every stage of content production
With ClearVoice, connect with vetted content experts to streamline every stage of content production.
Our diverse network of freelancers does more than just write. They can help with content strategy development, editing, SEO, and promotions.
Fill out the form below and discuss your content needs with a ClearVoice-certified expert today.
