How to Scale Your B2B Content – Without Sacrificing Its Quality

It’s no longer enough to produce high-quality content. B2B marketers also must produce high volumes of content to raise brand awareness and engage customers. Here’s how to scale your content production without sacrificing its quality.

I was always a big believer in producing high-quality content over a high quantity of content.

As content marketers, we’re under pressure to publish lots of content to meet deadlines and keep our social feeds full of fresh posts. According to the 2016 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, 76% of B2B marketers will produce more content this year than they produced last year.

But you don’t want to publish poorly thought-out content just for the sake of meeting deadlines. The only way you’ll engage customers is if you produce high-quality content that speaks to their needs.

However, quantity also matters. At Content Marketing World, several of the speakers talked about the importance of both quality and quantity in B2B content marketing. The more content you produce, the more you’ll raise brand awareness. Each new piece of content also gives you a new reason to connect with customers.

So, how can you increase your content’s quantity without sacrificing its quality?

Here are three tricks that can help:

1. Pick a theme

Picking content themes for the quarter can keep your content marketing on track. When you plan a few themes in advance, you will always have something to talk about.

It’s a good idea to select several broad themes for the quarter – such as cloud security or event marketing. Then, you’ll have lots of interesting sub-topics that you can dive into.

Here are some ideas for picking themes:

• Base your weekly, monthly or quarterly content around a product launch.
• Find out if customers are asking related questions. Turn these questions into a theme and write a series of blog posts that answer them.
• Address one of your customers’ top concerns in a white paper and its related content.
• Make “customer success stories” one of your themes. Share their stories in case studies, videos, blog posts, webinars, social posts, etc.
• Base your theme on a trending topic in your industry. You can use Google Trends to find out what your customers are searching for. Social Mention is another cool tool that shows you how your keywords are trending on social media.

2. Start big

After you select a quarterly theme, create a major piece of content about it. For example, you may have exciting research that you want to share in a report. Or you may want to publish a white paper or ebook to support a new product.

Creating a major piece of content takes a bit of planning up front. But once you have this content, you can easily repurpose it into other formats for your other channels – saving time in the long run. The Content Pillar Approach shows you how you can get 269 pieces of content from a single ebook.

When you use the Content Pillar Approach, filling your editorial calendar doesn’t seem so daunting. It will also help you reach a wider audience across more channels.

3. Create a style guide

To produce a lot of high-quality content, you must get your team on the same page. A style guide is a valuable tool that helps your writers, designers, and other content team members align your content with your brand. Your style guide can include:

• A description of your target audience and key personas
• Information on your content goals
• A description of your brand voice
• Notes on spelling and punctuation
• The name of the style manual that you follow, such as AP or Globe and Mail
• A list of items to include in your blog posts – such as author bios and pull quotes
• Links to your logo and other key design elements

Successful content marketing is as much about planning as it is about producing. The techniques outlined in this article will help you better plan your content, so you can produce more of it without sacrificing its quality. 

3 Ways to Apply This Information Now

1. Download the B2B Content Planning Checklist: 10 Steps to Creating Content That Attracts Leads, Shortens Sales Cycles, and Drives Revenue
2. Check out the Top Dogs of B2B Content Marketing infographic to learn what types of content will help you stand out from the pack.
3. Click here to share this blog post on LinkedIn. Sharing quality content increases your visibility and credibility with your existing contacts, creating conversations and potentially new business.