How to Simplify Your Content Marketing Strategy for 2023

Create Consistent High-Quality Content with Systems

The first step to taming the content creation beast is to set aside unrealistic expectations. It’s okay for sales and marketing gurus to suggest creating fifty to a hundred pieces of content daily. However, it’s quite another to produce it, especially for the small business owner who strives for work-life balance. Consistency is critical to successful content marketing, so your system must be sustainable. 

7 Steps to Simplifying Your Content Creation Strategy 

1. Determine your work style. Do you prefer a fixed or fluid approach? Those who prefer a fixed style are planners and want everything laid out in advance, so they know exactly what to create and when. Fluid creators are just that. They enjoy going with the flow, riffing on trending topics, and working from inspiration.

2. Define the deliverables. Whether you use a digital planner, a notebook, or a virtual whiteboard, create “sticky notes” for each piece of content you want to make regularly. 

This isn’t a place to get pie-in-the-sky. Be realistic, even pessimistic, about the amount of content you can consistently create. What’s the bare minimum for your content plan? One blog post per week? Five social media posts? A monthly newsletter? What is most valuable for your business if you could do only one or two projects? 

3. Define the process. Now that we know what deliverables we want to create, we can define the process with a process map. A process map is a flow chart showing what we want to create and how we’ll create it.

If your two deliverables are a video and a newsletter to promote the video, then the video would come first and the newsletter second. Whatever deliverables you defined in the above step, put them in order of creation from first to last. 

Next, break those deliverables down into steps (timestamp 05:45). If your deliverable is a YouTube video, those steps might include writing a script, filming, editing, and publishing. Now you can focus on completing a single task before moving to the next. 

4. Create templates. Develop templates for each deliverable in your project management software or wherever you manage your tasks. You can apply this template every time you create this type of content. 

A newsletter task template might include research, writing, editing, proofreading, formatting, and sending. You could create a template for the newsletter with sample text blocks, image placeholders, and title spaces. 

5. Adjust for your work style. Review your answer to Step 1. Are you fixed or fluid? 

• If you prefer working in a fixed fashion, you can create workflows and tasks in advance for an extended period, quarterly or annually, for example. You could plan out all twelve of your monthly newsletters and supporting social media content, then all that’s left to do is create!
• Prefer a fluid style? Apply your templates every time you start a new task. Or better yet, automate! Let your project management software apply a template whenever you create a new task.

Pro Tip: Are you a fan of time-saving templates? Our sponsor TextExpander is a productivity tool you’ll want to check out. Take advantage of ready-made content “snippets” and templates by subscribing to TextExpander Public Groups. Find snippets for social media, HTML, WordPress, and even on-demand Star Wars quotes. Watch Layla demonstrate how to use a social media template (timestamp 11:15).

6. Streamline the process. Now it’s time to improve or refine our steps, including deciding what we can automate and delegate to simplify the content creation process and take some steps off our plate.

If there are tasks that you don’t enjoy or don’t do particularly well, those are candidates for automation or outsourcing. For example, you could hire a freelance designer to handle newsletter formatting and design. Or an editor. Take a look at each step and evaluate whether it makes sense for you to complete it yourself. 

7. Leverage your strengths. Hopefully, streamlining your workflow, automation and delegation have alleviated some of the pressure of content creation. You can repurpose some of the time you’ve gained back by looking at what you do well and finding ways to enhance it or add value.

This might look like improving your video or newsletter graphics or adding short-form content to promote your blog posts. Whatever you feel adds value to your work and fits your newfound bandwidth.

We hope this video and blog post has inspired you to embrace and streamline your 2023 content marketing. Do you have questions or comments, or would like to suggest a topic for a new video? Let us know in the video comments, and help others find this content by giving us a thumbs up or subscribing for content updates.

For more examples of how to systemize your marketing and business processes and work smarter, not harder, explore the free ProcessDriven video library on our YouTube channel.