Save Time and Get Results with These Smart Tips for Creating Content

High-quality, engaging content is critical to sustaining successful marketing campaigns — but that importance isn’t always reflected in the size of the marketing team. In 2024, 74% of B2B organizations reported having 1-5 dedicated content marketing team members, and some organizations don’t even have the luxury of a dedicated staff. But even a small staff can create plenty of great content. The trick? Focus on efficiency. These tips can help you efficiently create engaging content, optimize existing pieces, and learn how to reuse and repurpose some of your greatest creations.

Tips for Efficiency

Before you begin writing, determine the types of content your business needs. Most businesses can focus on creating high-caliber content for the platforms and audiences that matter most. There’s no need to create blog posts, ebooks, webinars, podcasts, social posts, and a dozen other content options if they don’t appeal to your audience.

Additionally, decide on 3-5 categories the majority of your content will cover. Remember, the goal is to create content that matters to your ideal audience. Choose categories that represent your business and align with what target audiences would expect to see on your website or social platforms.

After determining which content adds the most value to your strategy, you can outline a plan for creation.

Know your brand (and stick to it)

Working within a set of boundaries might seem restrictive, but guidelines actually allow for greater creativity. Maybe your team always uses a specific filter on social media images, or you have a predetermined format for every blog post. Establish style guidelines early on so you can focus on getting the work done.

Create a content calendar

Populating a calendar with mandatory posting dates helps when setting a production schedule. Using a calendar can also help to ensure you’re creating an appropriate mix of topics and content types so you aren’t scrambling to create materials for an important category that’s gone unnoticed.

Batch tasks

Focusing on a single content category helps to create a flow state. Block off an hour or two for writing (rough drafts are fine) every Facebook post for the week. Take an hour to rework that copy for Instagram photos and reels. Pretty soon, you’ll be clicking through content with ease.

Make content and related assets shareable

After creating great content, store it somewhere that’s easily accessible to other members of your team, including department heads, salespeople, customer support, etc. Allowing other team members to self-serve content creates efficiency for everyone — always a plus.

Tips for Optimization

Optimized content tends to perform better in online searches and helps to make sure your content finds the right audience over and over again. Make a habit of employing these important optimizations so that your content reaches your ideal audience on your preferred platforms once you hit “publish.”

Get a formatting cheat sheet: Different platforms require different formats to load and display correctly. Create and keep a reference handy (like this one on Instagram posts) to quickly resize and format visual content to the correct dimensions. Even better: create templates for faster formatting.

Optimize your content the right way: SEO trends change regularly, but even if you can’t keep up with every trend, you can plan to refresh your content to meet the most important SEO standards. Building this task into your regular content schedule means you’re going in with a plan and can get the work done in a timely manner. Plan on making these optimizations:

• Add (or update) relevant keywords.

• Write complete meta descriptions that include your keywords.

• Avoiding or eliminating duplicate content.

Tips for Reusing Content

If you have the time, energy, and resources to constantly create original content, then go for it! But most marketers need to be strategic about how they can use content more than once.

Think about it this way: you probably have a few major topics that you cover and a handful of key audience segments you want to win over. Updating and refreshing content that speaks to your business’s most important topics effectively reinforces your brand story while taking advantage of existing, high-performing content. (Plus, repurposing content tends to boost SEO rankings, and who doesn’t want that?)

Identify your evergreen content

Top-of-funnel pieces are great for evergreen content. These are the blog posts or one-sheet guides that introduce the most important information on a topic related to your product or service. You may need to make minor changes to keep the content accurate (such as updating statistics or metrics to reflect current data), but TOF content can generally be republished multiple times a year with great success.

Look for your best-performing content for repurposing

Despite your best efforts to publish relevant, engaging content, not every article is worth republishing, and that’s okay. Find your best-performing content and use it to guide your next steps. Republishing the piece could be enough to see results, but consider other ways you can put that content to work. Maybe you never shared it in a newsletter, or maybe it would serve as a good foundation for a new LinkedIn post. Take advantage of your known winners and engage a new audience with solid, proven content.

Consider where you could diversify formats and fill gaps

Blog posts are a good place to begin looking for new content opportunities. One blog post can turn into:

• A guest post on another site

• Multiple social posts featuring snippets from the blog

• A separate LinkedIn post

• A shareable infographic

• A chapter in an ebook (put more of your posts to good use!)

But blogs are just the beginning. Video-recorded interviews, podcasts, and webinars present opportunities for repurposing high-quality content, too. Here are a few other ideas:

• Use podcast transcripts to create blog posts and multiple social posts that include links back to the recordings.

• Turn video-recorded interviews into long- and short-form content by selecting key clips to share on social platforms or embedding them into blog posts.

• Include recorded webinars on your site’s resources page as evergreen content, and share selected screenshots as visual content for social media posts.

Bonus Tip: Work with Content Experts

Even the most efficient marketers need help with content creation sometimes. Comma Copywriters can help fill in the gaps of your marketing campaigns, with writers and editors with decades of experience creating every kind of content. And if you're too busy to take any of it on? We even handle entire content strategies!

Ready to take back your time and still have great content for all of your marketing needs? Schedule your free 20-minute consultation to learn more.