The Content Marketing Assembly Line from a Survey of 2,203 Companies

Producing a steady cadence of high-quality content is one of the most challenging aspects of content marketing for companies, but that’s often because most people approach it with the totally wrong mentality. I ran a survey of 2,203 companies driving traffic through content marketing, and what quickly became apparent is that most people approach content marketing like a black box. Ideas go in one end. Hours and days are spent doing something creative and mysterious. And content comes out the other end. Only 35% of companies doing content marketing have a documented content marketing strategy, and that means that the vast majority of companies don’t know what they’re doing. What’s startling is that people measure and analyze all other aspects of marketing, but they don’t take that mindset and apply it to the actual practice of content creation. When I interviewed companies that do content marketing with and without a documented strategy, one basic 7-step “recipe” for content production emerged across the board:

• Identify topics: This mostly consists of brainstorming based on hunches.
• Pick a single topic: One person has an editorial role and they pick a topic to start on.
• Research topic: Whoever picked the topic is the expert, and they do research to set up the parameters of the content.
• Create content: This step is often handed off to a specialist—writer, designer, etc.
• Review and publish: Copyediting, revising, and hitting the publish button.
• Promote and distribute: Post to social channels, and sites like Hacker News and Growthhackers.
• Track performance: Keep track of views, time spent reading, traffic sources, and shares.

You need to look at content production as a series of steps, because then you can begin to identify bottlenecks and test ways to burst through them. To improve the efficiency of your process, ask yourself the following at each step:

• How long does it take me to get to the next step?
• How can I use data to make more accurate decisions?
• Are there parts of this that I can outsource?

If you’ve found, for example, that “How-To” posts and “List” posts perform best within your space, create templates for them. Consult an index of trending subjects, and the sites and blogs you frequent most often for research. Fill the template out, and outsource it to an established freelance writer. If you've found that your visitors prefer reading longer blog posts, but that it takes you too long to write them, try combining a few shorter ones into one value-laden megapost. You shouldn't do the same things over and over and expect different results. Instead, use every iteration as an opportunity to try something new, and over time you'll build a hyper-efficient content machine. Building an audience that comes back to your blog or site is like television programming. If you’re able to deliver quality, consistent experiences like clockwork, audiences will tune in every week for more.

Case study: Kissmetrics

My co-founder Neil Patel and I love to accomplish a lot with very little. How we grew the blog is a great example of that. For most of Kissmetrics, we only had two people in marketing, and we were still able to fill our content pipeline with multiple posts a week and reach millions of marketers. This was only possible because we had a relentless focus on breaking down the content creation process and removing bottlenecks. The editor of the blog was Sean Work, a colleague of ours from ACS, our consulting business. Sean used to be a rocket scientist, and he applied that precision to the content on the Kissmetrics blog. He cared deeply about the audience, and in doing so, set the bar for quality. Even if Neil or I wanted to post on the blog, we needed to get Sean’s stamp of approval. That kept the quality of the blog super high, but it also created a bottleneck at the Review & Publish stage. If posts weren’t up to snuff, they had to be sent back for multiple revisions, and if we didn’t have other posts lined up, then nothing would get out. We wouldn’t have anything to Promote & Distribute and we couldn’t Track Performance either, so the middle stages of our pipeline were backed up while the ends were sitting idle. We realized that posts didn’t have to be written by Neil or me, and that if we could break down the types of content we wanted to produce, we could maintain a high-quality standard and increase the rate of production by outsourcing the actual writing to others. We found specific authors with proven track records, paid them for the posts, and empowered them to create great stuff. If a freelancer's work didn’t meet Sean’s bar, we could drop it from the queue as a defective piece without disrupting the rest of the assembly line. What mattered was having the assembly line in gear and cranking. Over time, the quality increased, because something cool happened. As our blog grew and grew in traffic, it offered writers a bigger and bigger stage for their writing. The dynamic totally reversed, and instead of paying writers to post on our blog, high-quality writers would pitch us to write on our blog for free. Writers sought us out to write on the Kissmetrics blog to earn recognition instead of money.