4 Ways Small Teams Can Streamline Content Creation

Kelsey Meyer is the president ofInfluence & Co., a content marketing firm that specializes in helping companies showcase their expertise through thought leadership. Influence & Co.’s clients range from venture-backed startups to Fortune 500 brands.

Before we grew our team to more than 60 awesome employees, my co-founder, our first hire, and I ran every department. The early days of our company saw the three of us spreading ourselves thin to focus time and energy into each part of the business, and we learned, like all successful small business owners, how to do a lot with a little.

While we now have an entire team dedicated to content marketing, we didn’t start out that way. By spending about three percent of our time each day focusing on marketing our services, the three of us made up our “marketing team.” And when your marketing team is only one to three people, the articles with tips on how to build out an entire content marketing team don’t really apply in the same way.

A small team isn’t an excuse not to focus on marketing. Because content marketing is a long-term strategy, the earlier you start, the better results you’ll have.

The Benefits of Content Marketing

The benefits of content marketing for a small company are extensive:

• Content can help you build trust and credibility within your audience.

• Content helps your sales team by giving them collateral that can be used throughout the sales process.

• Content allows you to start building a following you can reach out to with your newest service offerings and get feedback from on company pivots.

In a large organization, a content marketing team might have a content strategist, a publication strategist, an editor, and the expert behind the content. When you’re working on a small team, you may need to be the person who does all of the above, and while it’s not ideal, it’s also not impossible.

How to Grow Your Content Marketing

You can tackle one-person content marketing with the following steps:

1. Rely On Content Ideas From Your Network

Expand your team by crowdsourcing ideas for articles. Ask your potential customers, your current customers, and your partners what type of content they’d find interesting.

A great way to do this is by asking what pain points they’re experiencing — asking flat-out what they want to read puts them on the spot, and they’ll be just as strapped for ideas as you are.

Take 10 minutes to create a survey and send it to your contact list, and you may end up with an article idea bank that lasts you months. This will save your team time brainstorming new content ideas and will ensure that the content you’re creating is relevant to the audiences you want to read it.

2. Store and Reuse Critical Content

When you have one or two people responsible for all of your content creation, you need to get creative with ways you save time. Using a knowledge bank to collect, store, and organize information about your company, key leaders, and customers will save you time gathering and writing information for your content.

Our team uses a knowledge bank for content creation, and we’ve created a free knowledge management template you can use to get started.

3. Consider Outsourcing Instead of Hiring

If your small team is trying to accomplish big things, you have two options: hire another person to get everything done or outsource part of your content marketing strategy. One thing to keep in mind is how much a new hire will cost and how much a content firm will charge per month. My company, Influence & Co., has packages starting at $3,000 per month so we can remain less expensive than hiring another employee onto your content team. 

4. Focus First On Your Content’s Quality, Not Quantity

If you don’t have the capacity to write an article every day, don’t just churn out dozens of OK pieces each month. Instead, focus your efforts on one or two really fantastic campaigns each quarter. One cornerstone piece of content can drive hundreds of leads if you set up the funnel correctly. 

Big businesses start out as small businesses, and each have different priorities. Don’t let the small size of your team limit your company’s content marketing efforts. Instead, let it motivate you to find innovative, creative ways to create engaging content that will move your team and business forward.