Content creation can be a tedious task that involves consistent effort and thorough attention to detail. A lot goes into creating a single piece of content – extensive research on the selected topic, planning the creative, necessary editing, and countless rounds of revisions. Similarly, there are several things to account for at the back end, such as identifying the right conversation for your brand, keeping up with your competitors and digital trends, collaborating with the content partners, the list goes on. Amid all these activities, a big challenge for a brand is to save time and optimize it to reap maximum benefit

If you are wondering how you can save time while going about your brand’s content creation, there are a few handy tips to do so

Plan and strategize

As a brand, one of the first things you need to do is set your expectations from content and digital marketing in general. These expectations should emanate from your business goals, your growth targets, the nature of the market targeted, etc. As part of these initial plans, you will have to identify your existing and prospective segment personas, identify your competitors, understand their campaigns and strategies, and understand prevalent content marketing practices. A purpose-driven macro-level content strategy can be a significant time-saver in your regular content creation activity.

Streamline research

If you find yourself running around in circles looking for the ideal information and statistics, you are not alone. Any primary or secondary research can eat up a lot of your time. By picking up a topic and exploring the research method as you go along, you can go back and forth with your research leading to duplication of effort. As a brand, you should instead look into what your target audience expects, refer to analytics to identify engaging content ideas and keywords, and list down research sources for such topics. By identifying evergreen content, reliable platforms and publications, and reusable data sources, you can build a repository of research material that will aid and accelerate your content creation.

Create a stock of ideas 

Don’t rely solely on light bulb moments for brilliant content ideas. Instead, encourage a culture of idea repository so that you never run out of ideas. Having a ready stockpile of content topics can arm you with at least a month’s worth of content. You can create a content calendar and schedule these content ideas across the duration of the calendar. This is sure to save time in your content creation process as you don’t have to brainstorm for ideas afresh. Besides, by working on this content calendar, you will also be familiar with the topics and clarify what you want it to look like.

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

The frequency of content is important to stay relevant to customers, but swamping them with too much content may be counterproductive. To save time and optimize the content generated, the content should be spread across various formats and repurposed if possible. Generating a content piece that is packed with information offers you the possibility of repurposing. Infographics, illustration pictures, slide decks, emailers, etc. can be the obvious by-products of a well-researched long-form content piece. You will not only save time but also reach out to a wider audience by repurposing your content. You would note that the popularity of content formats vary across different platforms. Content of a research piece you posted on LinkedIn can be used to create a Twitter short-content post or a Pinterest infographic post. This will help you reach out to users of three uniquely different platforms.

Make content creation well-oiled machinery

Creative writing can be a leisurely activity, but not when you are creating it for purpose-driven brands. If done at a leisurely pace, a brand is sure to fall short of its content marketing model targets and goals. This can be done by having clarity over the generation and usage of the content. You should know where you will post it, how you plan to promote it and where, how you will handle the subsequent engagement, how you will do the quality check, how and where you plan to repurpose it, etc. A well-oiled content creation-generation-promotion machinery can save time and make your content more timely and effective.

In your bid to save time, you cannot compromise on the efforts required to maximise the impact of your created content. But as a brand that regularly creates content, you can use all the possible innovations to help you cut down on time and effort while creating quality content.

References:

https://eclincher.com/how-to-savein-time-on-your-digital-marketing-tasks/

https://www.convinceandconvert.com/content-marketing/ways-to-

Contributors: Sadaf Zareen and Swapnil Adsul