Recently on LinkedIn, Chris Walker, CEO of Passetto and chairman of Refine Labs, told the story of someone—a marketing professional, no doubt—who said that creating volumes of marketing material is not only hard to do but impossible. They felt it is better to create fewer marketing pieces and do them well rather than push for a high level of output.
“My comment back to them was we have a three-person marketing team, and one of those people is me,” Walker says. His trio “puts out more content every day than most $100MM companies put out in a month,” Walker adds.
How does he get so much done?
I, too, work on a small-person marketing team—just two people—at BuildSteel.org, and we produce four to five 800-word blog posts, dozens of social posts and a newsletter on steel framing every week—not to mention ads, videos, banners, posters, infographics that we also create. So, yeah, big output is doable.
The key to producing volumes of marketing content, Walker says, and I agree, comes down to five steps.
Commit.
Most companies don’t commit. They never get started, or they get started but give up when a few LinkedIn posts fail to generate “leads.”
Choose an expert.
Find one subject matter expert (or two or three) who understands your customers. “That is the missing piece into most companies’ content strategies,” Walker says.
In other words, don’t hire an ad agency to write your content. They don’t fully know what your customers care about and may only produce surface level content with little impact. You sell cold-formed steel products, or wall assembly installations or prefabricated exterior finished panels. Who knows those products and services best? Hint: Not your marketing agency’s intern.
Set up a creation framework.
That means you need to block out time each week to do the work. Calendar the days and times where your expert creates posts, podcasts, YouTube videos, TikTok videos, TikTok Live events, Q&As, printed flyers and grant interviews—schedule what you plan to produce.
This creation framework, like pillars in the ground, provides a foundation that supports steady and sustainable content creation.
This creation framework, like pillars in the ground, provides a foundation that supports steady and sustainable content creation. In time, you’ll get better and faster at producing marketing content. You’re a subject matter expert, so you can easily bang out content. The framework makes sure it gets done.
Post-produce.
This is where you repurpose articles, create subtitles and captions for videos, transcribe videos into blog posts, chop up videos into social media teasers and the like.
You can outsource this post-production work, but you might lose time that way.
“We publish recorded content within 24 hours, while big companies take three months to do the same thing,” Walker says.
One tip: Use Hatch, a high-quality, cost-efficient platform to optimize raw video content for distribution across LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, etc.
Distribute.
A piece of content that starts out as a LinkedIn post can also be a letter you send to a customer and a script you lengthen to read on a podcast show. Think in broad terms—there are many channels where the same message can go. The content you put on YouTube, the content you put on a podcast and the content you put on LinkedIn just needs to be formatted specifically to each channel. LinkedIn has a character limit; a blog does not. So, create content that “fits” each channel. To be good at that, spend time listening to and engaging with users on your preferred channels. This will ensure that you create content that gets consumed by those users.
Yes, you can get a lot done with a small team. The key is to be committed and to keep things in-house. So, get going. Start producing today.
