As a startup marketer, your content can be your greatest asset. And as such, you’ll want to build a content engine that allows you to produce a large amount of collateral to reach your target audience. HubSpot data shows that organizations with a blog have 434% more indexed pages than those without. Long story short? More content generates more traffic.

But, you want to avoid sacrificing quality for quantity’s sake. This is what marketers commonly refer to as the “Content Conundrum.” If you’re churning out content without providing something valuable to your audience, you risk the following:

• Your credibility
• Your chance of sale
• And, even your Google rating.

So, what’s a marketer to do? Keep reading for key tips to create content that is educational, relevant, engaging, and scalable. 

Get Off the Hamster Wheel: Repurpose Your Content 

Often, the most challenging part of content creation is the ideation process. Rather than spinning your wheels each day for topics that will land with your audience, do more with less. You can work smarter by looking at your existing content that’s resonating with your audience and create other pieces of collateral from there. Here’s what your fellow marketers had to say about key contributors to their content’s success:

• 42% cited updating and repurposing their content
• 46% said that content repurposing drove the strongest results for their marketing strategies

Here are some ideas how you can repurpose content if you were to hypothetically produce a webinar about improving patient care with AI:

• Write a blog post recap following the event
• Create an infographic about the rise in AI in the healthcare space 
• Write a case study about your customer who achieved a notable result using your technology
• Repurpose clips from the webinar on social media to give that session more of a runway. 

Repurposing your turns scaling your content from a pipedream into a viable, and often profitable, reality.

Optimize Your Internal Team with Outside Resources

No one knows your product and value proposition better than the marketers within your startup. They can create a vast amount of content that speaks to what differentiates you from your competitors. But, hiring a huge team is not the most cost-effective way to scale your content strategy, especially if your business is in those earlier funding stages. 

Have your internal SMEs focus on the highest-impact work and outsource the other work to talented freelancers, contractors, or other outside support. To ensure that the work you’re getting is consistent with what you’ve produced in-house, arm your outside resources with:

• Style and brand guidelines
• A creative brief outlining your goals, audience, and keywords
• Work examples that they can read to get a feel for your brand. 

BKA Content conducted a cost analysis for a startup looking to create 30 new blog posts monthly to rev up their content strategy. For the average startup, this would cost around $82,000 when accounting for salary, benefits, payroll, and more. When you look at the average cost to outsource a writer to do the same work, that would cost around $12,600 a month. Thus, outsourcing would save this company around $69,000 in savings. 

Before you close your browser in a panic, don’t worry (we also are writers). This is not to say your startup should do away with in-house talent. As noted above, you are the SMEs in your company and how you can elevate your content to continue building your business. But, it makes practical and financial sense to outsource content creation so you can scale at an accelerated clip so you can focus on the work that truly moves the needle. 

Your Handy Pal, Al 

The buzz around AI is more than just buzz. AI is here to stay and the marketers who are learning more about using this tool will surely see the pay off in the amount of and quality of content they produce. 

Among your marketing peers:

• 61.4% have used AI in their marketing activities 
• 44.4% have used AI for content production. 

While AI can be immensely beneficial in driving efficiencies, look at AI as a tool, rather than the end-all-be-all for your content creation. 

You want to maintain credibility with your audience and when it comes to AI, the jury’s still out. When asked whether AI can produce work equal in quality to that of human-generated work, 44% said yes and 40% said no. The Federal Trade Commission noted that consumers have concerns about AI biases, inaccuracies, and misuse. 

While AI has room for improvement, the technology will only improve and marketers should start looking at how they can leverage the technology to scale their content, while recognizing its limitations and adjusting accordingly. 

Focus on Your Distribution

Your content is only as powerful as your distribution strategy. Your audience likely won’t actively seek out your content, especially if you don’t have a widely established brand yet. Therefore, look for channels to reach your audience such as social media, paid advertising, and even email marketing.  HubSpot data shows that 77% of marketers have experienced an uptick in email engagement over the past 12 months. Among the most effective B2B lead generation channels, marketers rated LinkedIn at the top. 

When building your distribution strategy, think about your audience and where they fall within the funnel so you can capture them along different points of their journey. Here are a few examples of how to engage your audience at different touch points:

• Social media is a great channel to build your brand awareness and generate traffic to your website for a prospect to learn more. 
• From there, that person may opt to subscribe to your newsletter where they get more specific information relevant to your value proposition.
• With that email, you can then enroll them in an email nurture campaign that moves them further along the funnel. 
• Once they are well versed in their challenge and how your product helps them solve it, they’ll be more likely to talk to your team about a potential partnership. 

And that, my friends, is the power of quality content and producing collateral at scale.