Scalable content is content that can expand to meet the needs of a growing digital presence. Whether it’s a blog or some other form of digital media, your website needs content for reuse, repositioning, and repurpose across different channels. Since it requires a refresh every so often to keep up with SEO best practices, content must also be accessible and changeable. Therefore, besides building and producing content, creators who wish to make it scalable must also consider its storage and structure.

Below are five tips to help you get started creating scalable content.

Scalable content adapts to omnichannel marketing efforts. Content teams who work within a scalable framework create digital assets in addition to content, interchanging the content “blocks” of scalable architectures like Legos in any order or even deploying them across platforms.

Content production teams can shrink, enlarge, reposition, and crop content pieces to fit various platforms and content-delivery methods for a scalable and sustainable content strategy. That way, teams can readily establish a presence across today’s seemingly endless social media and content channels. 

By repurposing key pieces of content as described above, teams can greatly reduce marketing spend, increase ROI on all the pieces, and reach more customers without significant investment. 

Suppose a piece of your content is performing well on a particular channel. By following a scalable content model, you can easily reformat that content across multiple channels and extend its reach to different audiences.

Follow the five tips below to create a sustainable, efficient, and evergreen digital presence through scalable content.

Content teams with a marketing focus must support their content with in-depth research by crafting audience personas for their target audience so as to reach the right people with the right message. Included in those personas is detailed demographic and psychographic information that shines a light into the hearts and minds of the audience, such as their—

Many marketing teams give those personas a name to add another layer of specificity on who they’re targeting when crafting content messaging.

By distilling each audience down to an individual persona, you can spot overlapping themes and build a single piece of content that resonates with multiple demographics. You can also see where to scale or alter content along the customer journey.

With content modeling, you can visually display all the content you’re presenting across platforms and their relationships, i.e., a big-picture view of what content pieces are in play and how they interact. For best practices, find opportunities to recycle or repurpose content when viewing the model. Since the model serves as a single source of truth (SSoT) for all content production, it also optimizes and unifies your messaging and branding.

For example, if you structure content around content pillars, also called pieces of cornerstone content, they serve as the backbone of your subject matter and cover key concepts within your industry or area of expertise. A content model might take on a hub-and-spoke format with your pillars as the hub. All other content within your model would then branch out from those pillars across other platforms and formats, making them the spokes.

A critical benefit of scalable content is that it can become repeatable for content teams. When using scalable frameworks and a single system of truth, be sure to standardize the content formats as much as possible. Even though media sizes and positioning might vary across platforms, templatize most of the process for simplicity and sustainability. 

This content strategy not only maximizes your ROI with minimal time and energy but also smooths out the process of tackling employee turnover. With a standardized system, the newbies would be just as productive and successful as the veterans who just quit or retired.

A central tenet of sound marketing strategy is test and track. Create measurable metrics for your content so that you can quickly and decisively determine how it’s performing. Content performance then becomes a factor in your content modeling and scaling.

With clear key performance indicators (KPIs), you can see which pieces of content are winners and which ones are duds. Resize, reuse, and reposition the winners across platforms. It’s kind of like dating: When you’re first courting that special man or lady, you want to impress him or her with your strong suits. In content marketing, if the goal is to expose your branding and messaging to larger audiences through omnichannel campaigns, why not show them the content that resonates the most with your base-level audience?

In case of a performance leap, revisit your target audience personas. You might find tangential personas you can speak to and further broaden your reach. Those opportunities would elude you, however, if you weren’t regularly auditing and optimizing your content.

Prioritize scalability when choosing topics to ensure content adaptability to multiple audiences. Additionally, you can repurpose scalable content without starting from scratch. Examples of scalable topics to focus on are common problems among audiences. Also, brainstorm any similarities you might see from persona to persona. 

The beauty of pursuing a scalable content strategy is that the heavy lifting is already done through the creation of a proper content model. A model that follows best practices gives you a 10,000-foot view of your content. Not only would you be able to spot opportunities for reuse, but you would also notice trends that are resonating with your audience. As you add more audiences, the commonalities will unfold right in front of your eyes and expose the scalable topics that land across audiences and platforms.

Uniform puts your scalable content to work in creating omnichannel digital experiences. Business users can rapidly build structures and reassemble content and test variations, overcoming some of the biggest usability hurdles against effectively scaling content, such as the dependencies on developers to change content models and build variations.

For details, contact us to schedule a demo of Uniform Digital Experience Composition Platform (DXCP).