Five Steps To Devising A Content Creation Strategy For Your Brand

This content was originally published in ANA’s Marketing Knowledge Center.

By Andrea B. Ruskin, Strategic Consultant & Partner at Blum Consulting Partners

In today's advertising world, where marketers are fighting every day for consumer engagement, it is essential to develop a content production strategy which aligns with your marketing goals and takes advantage of your current resources.

Here are 5 simple steps to help guide you through maximizing your return on content production.

Define Your Content Needs

What assets do you need to create? Writing editorial content is very different from creating "How to Videos". Will you be sourcing user generated content to support your messaging, producing original content, leveraging existing assets or a combination of all of the above? Knowing what you need and what to create will help define the creative partners you need to generate content.

Define In-House Capabilities vs External Vendors

A lot of brands are taking stock of their in-house resources to exploit their internal capabilities for content production. Analyze your current capabilities for video production, print production, and management of current assets that you may be able to repurpose so you can determine which services you already have and which partners you will need to support your on-going content production needs for your brand.

Set Standards and Expectations

Defining expectations for production value, frequency of production, responsiveness and social moderation are all key components of your content production strategy. Whether you produce in–house or with external partners, or both, you need to have standards that are readily available, clearly delineated, and easily adopted by internal stakeholders and external partners. A lot of brands don't prioritize the need to develop standards but clients who have clear standards and best practices are able to make better and faster decisions during production without compromising the quality of their final product.

Defined Production Process

With the growing trends in workflow management and new tools and technology, there is really no excuse for not having a consistent process for quality control and internal approvals. Since the majority of content production is responsive and constantly changing, no one wants to get tripped up because they missed an email with important creative or legal approvals and requirements. Find a system that supports your needs and adopt a workflow platform that is user friendly.

Implementation Plan

After you have defined your content needs, evaluated internal capabilities, set standards and expectations and defined your production process, make a plan for implementation, and don't forget - make it scalable, and make it repeatable.

Blum Consulting Partners works with Fortune 500 companies and their creative partners to define production process and maximizes creative results.