How Do You Create Content on a Lean Budget?

We hire freelance copywriters to create long articles that can be broken down into other pieces of content such as emails, social posts, and even videos.

We produce many content pieces for one topic. For example, GDPR we'll have 2 webinars, a blog post, a short video, and a customer case study. This allows us to get many pieces of content without researching and writing on a bunch of different topics.

We have a lot of silos in our business. I weasel my way into each and try to discover what they're talking about and what keeps their clients up at night.

In many cases, you can find a treasure-trove of content waiting to be deployed. Look at sales and onboarding decks, engineering slides, video recordings, etc. Take the basic content from, say, a single slide of the sales deck and expand on it to become a specific nugget of content. String them together for an engagement campaign, mix and match to suit your audience.

One idea I've used successfully in the past is to hire a good writer with reporting background (I have recommendations, PM me if you wish) to interview executives and subject matter experts. A half hour conversation may yield several articles.

We are a small marketing team of 8 (spread across 2 offices), so the bandwidth to create new unique content has been a big obstacle for us. As a software provider with a very technical audience, of course our most popular content has a very technical focus that a lot of folks within the marketing team do not have - to make the challenge a little more interesting.

So to combat this, we will repackage tons of existing content. For example: reuse major case studies for news articles/media spotlights - or even bigger topics will be used for press releases. Our popular white papers will be used for blog topics (& vice versa), analyst reports will be used for blog posts & webinars, and many of our white paper content will be used for webinars.

We've also noticed a need for more blog content,  so we sent out an invite to our most knowledgeable team members across the company to bring forward topics they find interesting. While this is still fairly new initiative it's been received very well and has greatly helped us!

Curious to see how others in the community are generating more content!

We make sure to include content that we don't create ourselves but would still be useful to customers and prospects. Even though it takes people onto other sites, it helps promote us as a thought leadership company.

We don't do this, but you can also encourage your customers to contribute articles, blog posts, etc.

Our company works has relationships with other businesses as part of our business model. We're able to leverage those relationships to help generate content. For example, we'll offer to send someone to take pictures for an event their holding. We both share the content. This model wouldn't work for all businesses, but it works for us. In the past, I've coordinated freelancers as well. Find a good one and they can be a fantastic resource.