How to Streamline Your Content Creation in 2019

For a digital marketer, content creation can be a slow and tedious process. As a content creator, it can sometimes feel overwhelming and never ending. In fact, 44% of marketers say that content production is their biggest challenge. However, 61% of consumers are influenced by custom content. Therefore, you need to have a great content creation strategy in place. Content creation may be your most dreaded activity, but what if I told you that it doesn’t have to be?

Content is everywhere. Everything you encounter from the moment you wake up can be considered content. That text from your mom? Content. That cute puppy picture on your Facebook feed? Content. Even the news alerts you receive on your phone are, you guessed it, content.

For a business, content helps you interact with your customers, give more information about your business, create a brand voice, and much more. In this article, we will give you 7 of our best content creation tips and tricks to make your content creation processes quick, easy, and, most importantly, fun!

7 Content Creation Tips to Streamline your Content Creation:

1. Keep all of your ideas in one place

Great ideas can hit you at any moment. To take advantage of these aha moments, make sure you have a dedicated space to write them down. Whether it’s a post-it note, a journal, or a Google doc, make sure you write it down. This will save you time and energy during your brainstorm sessions later.

Don’t have a specific idea? No problem! Write down larger, broader topics to get your creativity flowing. Once you have your ideas and topics down in one place, you can track the topics, using applications like Mention, to see how popular the topics are and how well content involving those topics are performing on social media. This will save you time in the long run and ensure that the content you are creating has a high probability of helping you reach your content goals.

2. Repurpose Content

Who says that the content you create will go out of style? By putting time and effort into your content creation, you can reuse top performing content later on. Lots of your past content can be expanded upon and given new life. Some of our favorite ways to reuse and recycle old content are:

• Turning old blog posts into downloadable guides. Have you blogged about the same topic a few times? Combine them, update them, and turn them into a definitive guide that can be downloaded by your customers.
• Turning research into an infographic. Not only are infographics informative, but they are one of the most widely shared pieces of content. Having important or interesting data and research about your company can help those in companies similar to yours.

• Turning data into social media posts. Everyone loves a good statistic. If you have solid stats, turn them into small, shareable posts and tweets.
• Turning blog post information into newsletter topics. If you didn’t promote your blog post in a newsletter when it was first released, try mentioning the topic in your next newsletter and linking it back to the original blog.
• Turning a blog post topic into a podcast episode. Podcasts are huge right now. Not only will it recycle your content, but it will create even more content for your company.

  3. Have a Social Media Content Calendar

Social Media Content Calendars save lives. Not only will it map out your month, including holidays and other buzz days, but it will show you how many pieces of content you will need to create ahead of time. Content calendars can…

• Help you break up your content. Looking at your content laid out for the whole month can help to ensure that you have new and fresh content going out that will keep your audience engaged.
• Get your team involved. Having the content calendar located on a Google Drive makes it easy for your team members to divide up the work and give you input on your content strategy for the month. If this calendar is for a client, this will allow them a sneak peek at what is going on and time to make any changes before the content is published.
• Allows you to plan ahead. If you are working with a larger team – copywriters, graphic designers, videographers, editors – then it gives them advance notice as to what needs to get done and when it needs to be done by.

In short, if you don’t have a content calendar yet – GET ONE!

4. Utilize Templates

With content creation, it is not important to reinvent the wheel. If you do your research and preparation correctly, there are templates you can use for your content creation process. Whether it’s a free template from a digital marketing resource or a template specific to your company, templates can come in handy when developing content.

Templates can be used for:

• Always having the correct post dimensions for every platform
• Content Calendars
• Social Media cover and profile photos
• Content reporting documents

Overall templates make your life easier and help you to create content faster. Having a template you know you can go to can take some of the stress and anxiety out of content creation.

5. Look into Your Analytics to Determine What is Working

It is crucial to monitor your social media analytics in order to determine which posts are performing the best. Instagram and Facebook make it easy for businesses to view insights on how well posts are performing, how many impressions their page has received, and even who their target audience is. You can also research analytics for content creation using tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, your website statistics, surveys sent to clients and customers, or even keyword search platforms like Spyfu.

Doing a social media audit for the previous month before you begin your social media preparations for the next month will give you a better idea of how your business is performing online and which posts are receiving the best reaction from your audience. Looking at your analytics can also help you determine which content you would like to repurpose in other ways.

6. Scheduling is a Marketer’s Best Friend

If you are a social media marketer running multiple social media accounts, remembering to post for every account, on every platform, at the best time can be a struggle. Lucky for us, there are platforms available to us to help us manage our workflow and schedule out posts. There are many tools that can help in this, but one of our favorites is Hubspot.

On Hubspot, there are tons of tools to make a content creator’s life easier. Hubspot can help in all areas of content creation from Content Planning and Strategy to Content Creation tools to Analyzing Content.

  7. Use Google Alerts for Blog Topic Ideas

Blogging is great. But sometimes it can be a struggle to find a great topic to talk about. Watching the news and looking at what friends and competitors are doing can be a big help when brainstorming ideas. However, it leaves a broad range to choose from. If you have a client in a niche industry, set up Google Alerts for niche topics and keywords. This will inform you whenever there is a new blog or new story published and send a link directly to your Google inbox.

Google Alerts may be useful for more than just getting blog topic ideas. They can also let you know when your content has been indexed by Google, identify bloggers and other companies you can collaborate with, and monitor your brand and brand voice.

Today, we reviewed 7 of our favorite content creation strategies to streamline your content creation plan. I hope that these tips have helped to ease your creative mind. The content creation process can be challenging, but it is one of the most important things to help build your following and brand. If you are a content creator – we see you and appreciate you!

If you have any other tips and tricks that we didn’t mention, we would love to hear them! We are always looking for ways to spice up our content creation process!

Comment below if you ♡ content creation and share this with a follow content creator who may need some new tips and strategies!