You already know that creating content is essential for boosting your brand’s online visibility and building trust amongst your customer base.

But it also takes up a lot of time and resources. Two things that definitely don’t grow on trees where businesses are concerned.

If you decide to manage your content creation strategy in-house, you’ll need to make sure you have the time and the talented people to make it happen, as well as sound knowledge of the tools and shortcuts that will make the content creation process more efficient for everyone involved.

Here’s what you need to know to successfully create your content in-house, without the support of external copywriters and marketers!

Know your audience

You need to know exactly who you are targeting before you can create content that answers their questions and provides them with useful takeaways.

If you have not already, create a buyer persona. Knowing the traits, the characteristics and the pain points of the people you need to be targeting will make the following stages a lot easier.

A good starting point is to put together a list of questions for your existing customers that will help you find out more about them.

To get you started, here are 10 questions you should be asking.

Generate a constant source of ideas

Once you know your audience, you need to start getting some ideas together. There’s a lot of content online, but a lot of it is not worth reading. The only way to make sure your content cuts above the noise is to provide genuinely useful information that people will find irresistible. So irresistible, in fact, they’ll want to share it amongst their own connections.

• Use a tool like BuzzSumo to find out which topics in your niche are generating the most engagement, shares and links.
• Research your competitors and find out which of their blogs and social posts are getting the most comments and shares.
• Hold regular brainstorming meetings with your team to come up with topics for your content, and create a shared document in Google Drive where you can all add ideas at any time.

There are many other tools for discovering content to give you inspiration. To avoid a mad panic before deadline day, it’s best to start making idea generation a regular part of your day or week.

And while we’re on the subject of deadlines…

Plan your content

If you want to take your content creation seriously, you need to create a content calendar.

That means deciding how much content you are aiming to publish (one post a week should be a minimum), then writing down the topics you intend to publish over the next few weeks or months.

It’s also useful to write down when each piece needs to be completed by, as it’s easy for teams to focus on other responsibilities if they don’t have a deadline to stick to.

Need more info on this? Read our blog on what a content calendar is and why you need one.

Get creating!

Now you have a clear blueprint for your content strategy, it’s time to start creating your masterpieces!

Choose a few members of your team who are responsible for creating, editing and publishing your content. Then use a project management tool like Trello so the whole team can clearly see the progress of each piece of content as it shifts from concept to creation to publication.

Don’t forget that you don’t always have to create new content from scratch – you can actually save a good amount of time by repurposing existing pieces. Check out this post for lots of tools you can use to help you make the most of your content bank.

Promote your content

Publishing a winning piece of content is not the end of the process – it’s just the beginning!

You need to make sure it gets seen, and that means letting everyone know about it.

• Share your content on your social media platforms over the next few weeks.
• Consider using paid social platforms, especially those on networks like LinkedIn and Facebook, to get the piece in front of a wider audience within your targeted demographic.
• Send an email to your list letting your subscribers know about the new blog.
• Encourage comments and interaction; try to generate a conversation around your content.

For more tips and ideas for keeping your content creation in-house, read up on our favourite content marketing shortcuts.

It’s important to choose a content marketing approach that’s right for your business

As you can see, there are so many tools and techniques you can use within your organisation to help with your content creation strategy, it’s not always necessary to outsource the work to a specialist content development agency.

But even so, keeping on top of your content marketing can start to eat into your working week. And if your staff don’t feel confident in their work, or don’t have the skills needed to produce content to a professional standard, your strategy could end up stagnating pretty quickly. If you think you could be achieving more with your content, it could be time to contact Indy!