Top 10 Content Marketing Tips for Saving Time in Your Agency

10 Content Marketing Tips for Saving Time in Your Agency

Content marketing can be a time-consuming process. But it doesn’t have to be. Try these 10 content marketing tips for saving time in your agency!

Content marketing is one of the best methods to convert prospects into customers, especially for B2B and B2C businesses. However, content marketing efforts can take a lot of time to plan and create.

Luckily, there are some time-saving content marketing tips that will help you streamline your content production. Check them out here to make your life easier!


OVERVIEW OF CONTENT

  1. Create and maintain a content style guide
  2. Create an editorial calendar
  3. Write blog posts ahead of time
  4. Streamline research
  5. Separate writing from editing
  6. Cross-promote content on social media
  7. Repurpose old blog posts
  8. Automate recurring tasks
  9. Plan your strategy in advance
  10. Outsource to a content marketing agency

1. Create and Maintain a Content Style Guide

A style guide is a collection of rules used to write consistent copy throughout your organization. It’s also known as a style sheet in some industries. A style guide will help ensure consistency within your company while providing guidelines for writers so they successfully produce high-quality content in your brand voice.

The benefits of having a writing style guide include:

  • Ensure every writer produces similar content
  • Helps new hires understand how to properly format the content to your brand voice
  • Improves search engine rankings
  • Creates a better user experience design
  • Reduces errors due to poor grammar and spelling
  • Increases brand awareness through consistent messaging

Creating a style guide isn’t difficult if you follow this simple step-by-step approach:

  1. Identify your target audience
  2. Define what makes good copy
  3. Write out rules for formatting each type of writing—examples include: headlines, subheads, body text, images, and video
  4. Test everything with real people—get feedback from users on their experience
  5. Make sure all writers follow the same guidelines
  6. Use an experienced editor or proofreader

You may think creating a writing style guide sounds complicated but once you get started, it’s actually quite straightforward. Plus, having a cohesive writing style guide is among the best content marketing tips for saving time as it creates a foundation and parameters to easily work from.

2. Create an Editorial Calendar

Our second of ten content marketing tips to save you time is to get organized!

An editorial calendar helps you organize all your content creation ideas and activities in advance, so you don’t have to worry about it when you need to produce something new or update existing pieces. It also allows you to schedule posts ahead of time, which saves precious time during busy periods.

Try using Google Sheets to get you started with creating an editorial calendar. It has many collaboration benefits. And it also provides a visual display of all your data for quick reference—making it easy to manage multiple projects at once. You can even share your work with others by using the many document-sharing features.

Playbook Banner

To get started, follow these five steps:

  1. Open up a spreadsheet on Google Drive
  2. Add columns for each month from January through December
  3. In column A, add dates for every day of the year
  4. In column B, write down what type of content you want to publish
  5. Repeat steps 1–3 until you reach 100 days

There are other marketing tools available that will help you craft and execute the perfect content calendar, including Airtable (our personal favorite), Trello, and Asana. These task and productivity tools help keep you and your team collaborating seamlessly.

Content Marketing Tips: Create an Editorial Calendar
Image: Shutterstock

3. Write Blog Posts Ahead of Time

Be proactive!

Rather than scrambling to write pieces of content as you need them, our next tip in the lineup of content marketing tips is to create an archive of already-written blog posts that will help make publishing content smoother.

To do this successfully, you’ll need to take the time to perform some research beforehand. Content in your pipeline should include evergreen content. Evergreen content is made up of topics that will always be relevant to readers. Which makes it a breeze to publish at any time, regardless of the season or any current events.

Evergreen topics vary based on the industry. So, think of some of the topics that are always of interest to your clients or customers. For example, if you sell software products, consider writing articles related to how to choose the right product for your business needs. If you’re selling services, focus on providing helpful advice to prospective clients.

Once you have your backlog of content readily available, it will be easier to publish consistently without scrambling for viable content week after week.

4. Streamline Research

Don’t reinvent the wheel! Use time-saving tools and resources available to you. Many of which are free!

Researching content marketing ideas takes time. But if you want to save time while producing quality content, our third of ten content marketing tips is that you must invest more time upfront. You may find yourself spending hours researching different subjects before coming across anything worthwhile.

Therefore, an excellent content marketing tip for saving time is to use online resources such as Buzzsumo, Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz.

These sites allow you to search keywords related to specific industries and niches. You can use these tools to audit your current position, identify content gaps, and decide on the best content channels.

Plus, they provide valuable insights into competitors’ backlinks and social media mentions. All of this information will give you a better idea of where to spend your efforts.

From there you will be able to more easily develop a useful and effective keyword and content marketing strategy.

5. Separate Writing From Editing

Don’t try to kill two birds with one stone!

Writing and editing use different parts of your brain. Separating writing from editing will not only make content creation more streamlined but will help produce better content. And our prime reason for adding this to our content marketing tips list.

One of the reasons for this is that it’s easier for someone else to identify errors in someone else’s writing. When we try to edit something that we’ve written ourselves we have our own personal autocorrect running in the background. Because you know what you were trying to say you might not be able to notice when something is worded strangely or just isn’t clear enough. Having the editing process separated from the writing will help prevent this.

It also helps to have someone else edit your content because they may have an idea to incorporate something you didn’t think of. They could even suggest ways to improve the flow of your piece by adding additional paragraphs or images.

Publishing really well-written pieces is extremely important. Poorly written articles and blog posts not only encourage readers to click away but may even hurt your brand image.

6. Cross-Promote Your Content on Social Media

Promoting your content across multiple social media platforms is one of the easiest ways to increase engagement and traffic by maximizing your exposure. Not only does it drive more traffic to your website but it helps you to stay active on your social media accounts.

But when cross-posting content, ensure what you are promoting is appropriate for each social media audience. For example, content that is shared on LinkedIn is geared more towards professional development. Whereas, with Facebook, you might share content on content professional development alongside more fun, entertaining content.

It’s easy to crosspost content using services such as Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, etc. These services automatically schedule tweets and Facebook updates making them a great option among the possible content marketing time savers.

Content Marketing Tips: Cross-Promote Your Content on Social Media
Image: Shutterstock

7. Repurpose Old Blog Posts

Remember the above section on creating a library of already-written articles? Well, repurposing old blog posts is another way of filling that archive that is super easy and cost-effective.

If you have an existing library of old blog posts that could use updating or revamping, then rewriting them is a good idea. When you update or revise older articles, you can implement your current SEO and keyword strategies.

Reusing older content is not limited to written work. If you have a video library or webinars, you can turn these into blog posts.

Repurposing content is an excellent way to make the most of your content and save time.

8. Automate Recurring Tasks

Automation has become an increasingly popular and useful solution for dealing with repetitive tasks. In content creation, automation can be applied to some of the more time-consuming and less intuitive aspects.

Automating content marketing means using software to create content for you. This includes writing blog posts, creating infographics, and posting on social media. The best way to automate content marketing is to use a tool like HubSpot CRM, which allows you to schedule all your content marketing activities.

As mentioned above, cross-posting content across social media channels is a great way to maximize exposure. The process of cross-posting can be automated to post at scheduled times.

9. Plan Your Content Marketing Strategy in Advance

Content planning should start before any actual content is produced. You need to know what type of content you’re going to publish, when you plan to release it, and where you intend to share it.

This helps you avoid wasting valuable resources producing content that won’t reach its intended audience. Planning your content in advance ensures you don’t waste money publishing content without knowing whether it’s effective.

The first step to creating a content marketing strategy is to understand what your target market wants. Once you know who they are, you can then determine what kind of content they want to consume. This includes things like blog posts, ebooks, infographics, webinars, podcasts, etc.

Once you have an idea about what type of content you’d like to create, you can begin thinking about ways to promote it. There are two main types of promotion strategies: paid advertising or organic SEO. Both require careful research into your industry and competitors’ websites.

If you choose to go with paid advertising, make sure you do thorough keyword research. This is where tools like BuzzSumo, Ahrefs, and SEMrush come in handy. These tools allow you to find out which terms people use most often on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. They also provide information about popular topics related to those words. By using these tools, you can identify the best time to launch your campaign by analyzing data collected over several months.

Content Marketing Tips: Plan Your Strategy in Advance
Image: Shutterstock

10. Outsource Your Content Marketing Requirements to a Team of Experts

While all of the content marketing tips discussed in this article are time savers, the biggest time saver you can invest in is outsourcing all your content marketing needs to a content marketing agency.

A content marketing agency can help you save hours every week by taking care of everything including creating a content marketing strategy, creating a content calendar, performing research, writing, and editing copy.

Outsourcing these aspects of your business will not only free up huge amounts of your and your team’s time but will also result in better content. This is because you will have an expert team dedicated to producing the best content for your specific needs.

Final Thoughts on Content Marketing Tips

Being organized, proactive, and utilizing your resources is the first step in saving loads of time each week with your content marketing efforts. These content marketing tips will take you far, especially if you take it a step further by outsourcing all of your content management to a full-service end-to-end content marketing agency to save you even more time.

Partner with WriteForMe for All Your Content Marketing Needs

Let WriteForMe handle all your content marketing needs.

Together we will create high-quality content that best reflects your brand while making the most of your content marketing strategy.

Discover what WriteForMe can do for you with a FREE content marketing playbook!

Related Posts

Andy Steuer

Andy Steuer

Andy Steuer is the Chief Marketing Officer at WriteForMe. Andy has been CEO, CMO, VP of Product for 8 fast-growing companies in his career. 3 of those companies became Top 10 Internet companies. Content Marketing has always been at the core to differentiate these companies from their competition. You can always schedule a 1 on 1 meeting with Andy by grabbing some time on his calendar here. List articles below that have Andy on the byline on the rest of the page. Here’s my calendar link:https://meetings.hubspot.com/andysteuer » More blog posts by Andy Steuer

Free Playbook