Prevent team burnout With Smarter Content Scaling
Feeling the pressure to create more content, faster, and cheaper? Marketing leaders are juggling campaign plans, product launches, and analytics, all while keeping up with the demand for fresh, engaging content. Yet despite these demands, many marketing teams aren’t growing headcount to keep up.
Fortunately, scaling to meet demand doesn’t mean you have to run yourself or your team ragged. With the right strategies, you can increase both output and quality while keeping your team engaged instead of exhausted.
Why Great Teams Burn Out and How To Prevent It
Content leaders today often grapple with growing demand and shrinking resources. Teams are asked to create more, prove ROI, and maintain high standards (often without additional budget or headcount). These additional pressures result in stifled creativity and greater rates of burnout.
Here are some of the most common challenges content leaders face when trying to keep up:
Limited staff and bandwidth: Marketing departments often run lean. A small team can only stretch so far before deadlines pile up.
Tight budgets with high ROI expectations: Leaders want clear ROI but often won’t add resources or wait long enough to see results. 62% of demand generation marketers cite budget constraints as a major challenge.
Quality and consistency at scale: Ramping up production can lead to shortcuts that dilute brand voice and credibility.
Burnout and turnover: Overworked employees are more likely to seek new jobs. Losing experienced team members costs time, institutional knowledge, and momentum.
If these pain points sound familiar, you’re not alone, and there are options to scale more sustainably.
Sustainable Growth Tactics for Content Teams
What does scaling content production look like in action? It means focusing on the activities that lead to results, streamlining processes, and leveraging strategic partners and tools. These strategies will help you meet growing demands while keeping your team motivated.
Prioritize and Plan Strategically
Not all content carries the same weight. Start with a content calendar that prioritizes high-impact pieces tied to business goals. Identify the 20% of content that drives 80% of results (e.g., thought leadership articles, lead magnets, or evergreen guides) and put resources there first.
To get more out of your resources, maximize every strong asset. You can repurpose blog posts into email marketing campaigns or social media snippets. A single high-performing white paper might become three videos and a dozen social updates. Repurposing content can help you save production time while increasing reach.
Streamline Processes and Workflows
Chaotic processes drain energy. Standardize workflows by:
Using consistent content briefs to clarify audience, tone, and goals.
Building a brand style guide to ensure voice consistency.
Defining clear approval workflows to avoid bottlenecks.
You may also consider creating templates for blogs, case studies, or social posts. Repeatable frameworks will help new contributors ramp up quickly and keep brand messaging on track.
Embrace Smart Outsourcing
Your internal team doesn’t have to do everything. Freelancers and agencies can extend capacity and bring in additional expertise. For best results, treat them like partners. Share your strategy, provide style guides, and hold regular check-ins to ensure they align with your voice and goals. When managed well, this approach frees your team to focus on strategic activities while still meeting content demands.
Leverage Tools and Technology
Automation and AI can dramatically reduce manual effort through:
Research and outlining (i.e., AI writing assistants)
Scheduling and publishing (i.e., social schedulers, CMS)
Performance tracking (analytics dashboards)
Content management platforms keep everything organized, and AI can support your processes by drafting outlines, suggesting keywords, and even optimizing content for SEO.
Protect and Support Your Team
Scaling sustainably is about more than processes. It’s also about people. Set realistic expectations with leadership and communicate the trade-offs of pushing too hard. Recognize wins publicly and celebrate milestones to keep morale up.
Employee well-being directly impacts performance. Gallup reports that teams with high engagement experience 18% more productivity and 23% more profitability than those with low engagement.
Heading options:
Gills Onions: From One-Person Team to Scalable Success
Based in Oxnard, California, Gills Onions is the nation’s largest fresh-cut onion producer and processor. Gills operates with a one-person marketing department and a limited budget. Megan Jacobsen, vice president of sales & marketing, wanted to create a cohesive messaging framework that could be applied across every customer touchpoint.
Gills partnered with Comma Copywriters to research and develop that framework. The Comma team gathered data on consumer questions and concerns about onions, interviewed Gills employees, and built a messaging foundation that could scale.
Since 2019, the collaboration has produced 105 content pieces, driven a 105% increase in web traffic, and significantly expanded the company’s social media reach back to its website. Having a strong message in place allowed Megan to run a fully integrated content program without burning out.
“Comma quickly became an extension of the Gills Onions marketing department. This allowed me to explore new initiatives and took the pressure off of marketing,” said Megan Jacobsen, vice president of sales & marketing at Gills Onions.
At Comma, we help marketing teams like yours expand capacity without sacrificing quality or engagement. From strategy to execution, our writers and editors give you the bandwidth to achieve ambitious goals. Book a free 20-minute consultation to see how we can help you scale smarter.
