Content production is the beating heart of modern marketing campaigns. The more you can create content that engages audiences, communicates your offering, and features on your most relevant channels, the more success your brand will experience in the long term.

And while there are many moving parts to the content creation process, the foundation for success can often boil down to two main factors:

The most effective content creation strategies understand how crucial both these components are to reaching and capturing the imagination of potential customers. Prioritising one over the other – or failing to fulfil either – limits your marketing strategy, making life more difficult for you and your colleagues.

So, how do you properly balance story and scale in content distribution? In this article, you’ll discover the importance of both pillars and uncover strategies to help you make the best of both worlds.

What is storytelling in marketing?

The world’s most successful brands have a story to tell:

• For Apple, it’s a story of challenging the status quo through innovation and creativity
• For Dove, it’s the idea that beauty is diverse and should be celebrated in all forms
• For Patagonia, it’s making the world a better place through eco-friendly initiatives

These companies, and many more like them, invest a substantial amount of time and resources into crafting marketing narratives that go beyond facts, figures and features. Why? Because what truly captures the hearts and minds of consumers is a compelling story that explains who you are, what you do, and how you can help them.

In a world where you’re competing with dozens, if not hundreds, of companies for people’s attention and custom, your brand story must set you apart from the crowd. When done well, you foster more meaningful, emotional relationships than data can do on its own, speaking to audiences in a way that’s digestible, universal and inspiring.

Take TOMS as an example. Their “One for One” model is built around their founder Blake Mycoskie’s experience seeing children struggling without shoes in Argentina. They consistently publish content that emphasises this altruistic message, helping people understand the vision behind their business.

Why is brand storytelling so important for content creation?

Brand storytelling inspires and motivates people to act

Tapping into people’s emotions through a relatable, empathetic or compelling story helps people get behind your brand. If people understand the narrative behind your products, services and actions, they are more likely to buy into you as a business.

Brand storytelling simplifies complex messages and concepts

A huge part of modern audience engagement is keeping things simple. A well-crafted story makes it easier for people to understand who you are and what you can do for them, and also makes your offering more memorable in the long term.

Brand storytelling enhances people’s trust in your brand

Brands that use storytelling to strengthen their content strategies are instantly considered more credible and authoritative. A story helps to humanise your brand, which in turn creates more trust with customers than speaking to a faceless business.

Brand storytelling stops you from sounding salesy

Fundamentally, storytelling allows you to communicate authentically and empathetically with your audiences. Rather than simply tell them why they should use you, a story presents your offering in a fresh, compelling way that speaks to them on a deeper level.

What is content scalability?

If storytelling is the message at the core of your content, scalability is how you get this message to the masses.

As you might expect, content scalability (or content scaling) refers to how you distribute your content across the numerous channels and formats available to modern marketers.

Content production at scale – while simultaneously delivering high-quality output – is arguably the biggest problem today’s CMOs and marketing leaders face.

But as the range of content marketing channels grows, as well as customers’ expectations to receive content at multiple touchpoints, scalability is something that cannot be ignored.

Effective content scaling means identifying ways to produce content faster, simpler and more cost-effectively, without seeing any dip in the quality or relevance of your assets.

Why is scalable content marketing so important?

Scalable content marketing builds your brand awareness

Maintaining a constant flow of physical and digital content goes a long way to raising people’s awareness of your brand, your story and your offerings. The more you can appear on your audiences’ preferred channels, the more their understanding of your company grows.

Scalable content marketing improves your authority

Similarly, having a consistent and frequent presence on various marketing channels makes your brand appear more authoritative and a “leader” in your space. If you post infrequently or have a smaller presence, that can be a red flag.

Scalable content marketing drives more conversions

Simply put, the wider the spread of your content marketing campaigns, the more avenues there are for customers to engage with your brand. This can significantly boost your website traffic, direct purchases and other conversions you track.

The need to balance story and scale in content creation

As you can tell, storytelling and scalability are both fundamental pillars of success in today’s marketing landscape. However, simply being aware of their importance isn’t enough to achieve the best results – you must balance both in your content creation strategy to unleash your marketing’s full potential. 

To demonstrate why, let’s look at what problems can occur when you prioritise one over the other:

Too much story, not enough scale

The art of storytelling requires a great deal of attention and creativity to nail down. However, if you prioritise this over the scale of your content production, it can mean:

• You limit the reach of your marketing campaigns, curbing your potential for growth
• You miss opportunities to connect with potential customers on certain channels
• You fail to convert customers due to a lack of engagement across touchpoints

Too much scale, not enough story

On the flip side, if you prioritise producing content for all channels at the expense of story and visuals:

• You risk diluting the impact of your narrative and its emotional impact on audiences
• You fragment your storytelling, creating a disconnect that alienates your customers
• You produce content that lacks creativity and uniqueness, turning your marketing bland

In a nutshell, both story and scalability must be equally prioritised to make your content creation as effective as it can be. To make this ambition a reality, you need the right strategies behind your marketing efforts.

6 content creation strategies to balance storytelling and scalability

If you are keen to ensure your content marketing tells stories that capture people’s imagination, and that this can be produced efficiently and consistently to the largest possible audience, here are 6 good ideas to help you find the perfect balance.

1. Let your creatives craft the narrative for your campaign storytelling

While story and scale have equal weight in the content marketing spectrum, story must come before scale. As we highlighted earlier, there’s no benefit in creating a tonne of assets if the story behind them doesn’t connect as intended.

So, designate a creative team to nail down the story behind your brand, and the core visuals, copy and imagery that will best communicate that message. How you construct this team is up to you:

Partnering with a marketing agency can be a beneficial first step. Their ability to look at your company from an objective, outside perspective can help prevent any subjective bias from compromising the power of your brand storytelling.

By giving your most creative minds the freedom to create and mould your story, you lay the foundation for content to flow with the right intent.

2. Make your brand story accessible and understandable for all content creators

After you cement the story behind your campaign and establish the templates for conveying it in your content, you must share this with your teams around the world – not just your marketers.

A crucial key to content marketing at scale is giving more people the power to produce assets that reflect your overall brand story (we’ll discuss this further in tip #3). However, if you don’t make this story and its supporting visuals easily accessible, your creators may veer off course, affecting the consistency and strength of your message.

A printed brand guidelines booklet doesn’t cut it in today’s digital-first, globalised world. Instead, an online brand portal and Digital Asset Management (DAM) system can help your people understand the story behind your brand, and reflect it as intended for their own audiences.

A brand portal allows you to present the digital assets behind your campaign in the context of your brand story. This helps your teams engage with and understand your vision, so they can execute content with this direction in mind. 

Meanwhile, a well-structured DAM system does more than manage your content and distribute it across your teams. It gives your people a complete overview of your campaign assets and messages, so they can learn from and apply them in future.

Plus, if your DAM solution allows you to categorise assets according to their campaign, location and other parameters, your teams can find and reference these exact examples for their ongoing content creation efforts. 

Essentially, the combination of a brand portal and DAM system has the power to educate your entire workforce on your story, which then gives them the power to create content that evokes this message themselves.

3. Harness technology to publish great content at an even greater scale

Of course, not everyone is a skilled designer or evocative copywriter. But the right content creation tools can help anyone produce on-brand, studio-quality assets – and do so at an unprecedented scale.

Investing in template software that provides a safe framework for your users, with the wriggle room to get creative within these parameters, allows you to significantly speed up content production and open this avenue to frontline employees who lack the requisite design skills.

These smart templates do more than make the content creation process smoother and simpler:

• Individual teams can personalise and localise content so it tells your story in a way that resonates with their specific audience
• Multiple templates enable your marketers to adapt content to different formats seamlessly – video, digital banners, social media posts, posters, etc.
• Content stays consistent on all channels through centralised brand governance

Explore the content creation software available and bestow your people with the ability to scale up production to another level, all without compromising the strength of your storytelling or the quality of your output.

4. Coordinate a content calendar that lets your story flow

No matter how strong the story behind your campaign is, or how many people have the tools to produce content at scale – a disorganised campaign is doomed to fail.

Plotting out a structured content or editorial calendar helps you publish content at the right time, on the right channels, to best deliver your campaign’s narrative. More than this, it also gives you an outline of how much content you’ll need for your campaign to guide your creators.

This stops over-scaling from diluting your messages. By spending time on a calendar or schedule for each campaign, you can coordinate your content requirements to deliver the maximum impact for your audiences worldwide.

5. Repurpose content for multiple marketing channels and formats

A smart first step to scaling up your content is through repurposing. This is when you take a central asset and adapt this to other formats and for other audiences. 

For example, you may have a 10-page brochure that breaks down your organisation’s mission, vision and purpose. That one brochure could then spin off into:

• A series of animated videos for YouTube or TikTok
• A collection of carousels for your social media channels
• Several blog posts on your website
• A group of banner ads with key messages from the booklet

By repurposing, you do more than extend the life of a more comprehensive piece of content. You ensure that everything that spawns from this central point shares the same story, visuals and values on your wider channels, so your brand consistency is never in jeopardy.

6. Prioritise brand consistency at every touchpoint of your marketing

Whatever story you want to tell, on however many channels you want to utilise – brand consistency is key.

Being authentic and constant in how you portray your content’s story is the foundation for building trust with your audience. If any stage in your customer journey breaks, it can make your story feel disingenuous, reducing its emotional pull.

Using content creation tools, such as intelligent design templates, helps ensure that you develop content fitting your brand guidelines and convey your unique creative vision, no matter how much you produce.

Marketing content in balance: Making both story and scale your priority

There is no questioning the value of brand storytelling in making your content as captivating and engaging as possible for your audiences. It’s just as true that without a scalable approach to content marketing, you won’t be able to get that message out at the speed and frequency it needs to succeed.

We hope this article has helped you consider the importance of storytelling and scalability in your content production, and whether you have found the right balance in your organisation.

By taking stock of our tips and strategies, you can take a significant step towards marketing that captures attention, sustains audience engagement, and delivers impact at every touchpoint.

Content creation is the lifeblood of modern marketing.

From a consistent cycle of blog posts, emails and social media posts, to powerful one-off videos, landing pages and billboards – great content campaigns are the key to connecting with your audiences worldwide.

With 97% of professionals saying they experience at least some level of success with content marketing, brands must keep up with growing consumer demands. But this is much easier said than done.

Maintaining a constant flow of content across multiple channels is a prevailing problem for marketing teams. Despite innovations in AI software and automation tools, the struggle persists, placing a lot of demand on creatives, designers and your head office to maintain pace with an ever-growing number of platforms – all in the face of ever-shrinking budgets.

If you’re reading this and you can relate to this familiar strain, your frontline staff – the people who interact with your customers, manage your outlets and take care of your day-to-day obligations – may be the key to scaling your output to new heights.

Here we’ll explain how, with the right tools, strategies and incentives, you can empower your frontline employees to become the beating heart of your content marketing efforts.

What do we mean by frontline employees?

First, we should clarify what we mean by “frontline employees”. As noted above, your frontline workers are the people who directly engage with your audiences and keep your operations running smoothly.

They’re the baristas serving customers in your cafe. The shop assistants stacking shelves in your supermarket or department stores. The customer service representatives answering people’s questions and concerns. Simply put, they’re the backbone of your organization.

The challenges impacting today’s content marketers

Now, what are the prevailing challenges today’s content marketers face, and which of these could be resolved by a helping hand from your frontline workforce?

Lack of trained personnel

First, there’s the simple problem of demand for content outstripping available resources. With 51% of companies saying they use over 8 channels, many marketing teams need additional personnel to produce and maintain a continuous flow of content on each of their active platforms – especially if they have visions of scaling up in future.

Personalisation and localisation

Beyond the number of channels, global companies also have to consider the pressing need to tailor content for specific audiences and regions. With personalized content now a growing expectation among consumers, this adds another layer of complexity for already burdened content marketers.

Maintaining brand consistency

Attempting to churn out content at pace can allow inconsistencies to creep in – mistakes which can subsequently damage your image in the eyes of your customers. Brand consistency is critical to a strong reputation and sustainable brand equity – when this falters, it can take a long time to fully recover.

Managing content and campaigns

With multiple marketing campaigns in motion across several locations, maintaining control and oversight of every asset is a time-consuming, painstaking burden. The more time your marketing team devotes to coordinating assets, the less time they can dedicate to evolving your content strategy.

Dependence on designers and agencies

To relieve the burden on the central marketing team, many organizations delegate content creation to freelance designers and specialist agencies. This can reduce the stress involved, but it comes at a cost – and not just a financial one.

Using professionals outside your organization places your content production schedule in their hands, adding complexity to the pipeline and concerns over their capacity to fulfill your needs.

How does empowering your frontline employees address these issues?

A lot of the fundamental issues affecting content marketers could be resolved if there were simply more people who could contribute to your content creation process. People who understand your business, your brand and your customers. So, what better than boosting your frontline employees into this role?

Now if it were as simple as that, every company in the world would already be doing it. If you’re keen to mobilize your frontline workers, there are several hurdles you have to clear first:

Tough obstacles that, with the right combination of tools and some top-line direction from your marketing leaders, can be overcome to make frontline content creation a very real possibility in your organization.

6 steps to enhance your employees’ involvement in your marketing

1. Utilize intelligent design templates

The biggest barriers between your employees and your content are a lack of design expertise and available time. Using on-brand design templates addresses both of these concerns and can instantly inspire your employees to share quality content.

Content creation solutions with this capability provide an intuitive framework for users, fixing all necessary brand elements in place so there is zero risk of inconsistency. From there, your employees then have the freedom to create and adapt materials to their requirements, without compromising your company’s identity.

This can have several practical benefits, such as:

• Enabling anyone to produce high-performing assets, no matter their skill level
• Cutting down asset creation times to a matter of minutes
• Allowing users to tailor languages, imagery and wording to their audience or region
• Permitting the production of content for multiple different channels in one location

By also incorporating safety measures, such as approval workflows and a library of professionally designed content templates, you lay the foundation for an employee-generated content revolution – one that can scale up your in-house marketing and reduce your reliance on freelancers and agencies.

2. Centralise brand guidelines and directives

Your content production tools shouldn’t stop at design templates. While these tools help lock down consistency while reducing production times and costs, it’s just as important that your frontline employees understand your brand inside and out before you allow them to start generating assets.

Your brand guidelines are the crux of this requirement, so it’s essential that they’re accessible to your entire workforce. You might think that this is a given, but while 85% of companies say they have documented guidelines, only 30% enforce them consistently.

Establishing a central, online destination for your brand guidelines and similar resources helps ensure that your frontline staff, wherever they’re based, can engage with and educate themselves on your identity. A brand portal can be a valuable tool in this process, storing this key information in one online place that your teams can access whenever required.

3. Provide education and training

Alongside these capacity-expanding tools, it’s beneficial to introduce designated training sessions with frontline workers who are interested in content creation. Hosted by members of your central marketing team or other executives, regular sessions with your team can help them understand what’s expected and feel more confident engaging in this process.

While on the surface it may seem like trading one time-consuming task for another, it’s all a matter of perspective. What is more time-costly: a monthly training session with your internal teams, or the hours you devote to creating, proofing, amending and distributing content to your outlets worldwide?

Plus, opportunities for learning and development are massive motivators for the latest generation of frontline workers. So not only can this scale up your content development – it may also enhance your overall employee experiences and job satisfaction. 

4. Incorporate content creation into your onboarding process

The employee onboarding stage sets the expectations for your new recruits, so they can fully understand your processes and their responsibilities. By introducing your content creation tools and brand management solutions at this early phase, you can help ensure that this is understood and embraced by your newest employees.

This means that by the time they have fully settled into their new role, your content creation process can already be second nature to them. Over time, this can create a culture of content production throughout your frontline workforce, rather than the sole responsibility of your central marketing teams.

5. Create a single source of truth for your content

If your entire frontline staff are engaged in content generation, assets can quickly become muddled, misplaced or lost altogether, adding to your workload instead of streamlining it. Preventing this requires a single, centralized repository for assets developed across your organization – a Digital Asset Management (DAM) system.

Investing in a DAM solution allows you to consolidate all your branded content, assets, imagery, videos and beyond into one combined library – accessible to your teams across the globe. With the ability to tag assets, set permissions and distribute these to your outlets worldwide in real time, a DAM can put you in total control over the consistency and frequency of your content.

If you want to learn more about DAM, check out our ultimate guide to Digital Asset Management.

6. Establish an employee recognition and rewards programme

Finally, encouraging your employees to play a more conscious role in your marketing operations through tangible incentives can help ensure that this is not an on-again, off-again occurrence, but a fixed, reliable approach. 

While each employee will have their own unique motivations to get involved in such a scheme, some examples to help inspire your staff include:

Reap the rewards of empowering your frontline workers

Empowering your frontline employees to be at the core of your content creation efforts is not straightforward. But by following the techniques above and investing in the tools and training required to execute this, you open the doors to a whole host of benefits:

Scaled-up content output: With more hands available, your teams can create more content than ever, with increased productivity and better cost-efficiency.

Greater consistency: As work is created in-house by professionals who know your brand, consistency can be locked down on every channel and location.

Extended reach: Scaling up your content generation means you can build a bigger presence on new and existing channels, and tailor content to specific regions and audiences.

Faster times to market: Turnaround times for content can be cut significantly, and employees are enabled to capitalize on fleeting opportunities to capture sales.

More engaged employees: By getting involved in your content generation, your employees can forge stronger, more meaningful bonds with your brand.

Capacity for strategic thinking: With the pressure of content generation eased, your marketing team will have more room to plan, reflect and evolve your brand.

Empowering your frontline employees to create collateral takes time to perfect, but with every piece of content your teams produce, the closer you come to a state of marketing self-sufficiency.

We hope this has given you the motivation to see where you can scale up your content creation in the long term, and harness your professionals at every level of your organization to make a positive impact on the future of your brand.

Planning out a marketing strategy is no easy feat. But turning these concepts into content is where the biggest challenge lies for 44% of marketing teams. 

It doesn’t matter if you’re a startup trying to get a foothold in your industry, or a long-established name with an extensive marketing department – even the best-laid plans can fall apart if you can’t keep up with content creation.

To meet the rapidly growing demand for high-quality, on-brand assets, a recent study revealed that 69% of digital marketing departments rely on one or more third-party agencies to create the content they need to build trust, attract leads and drive success.

While the relationship between an agency and an internal promotional team can often reap wonderful results, utilising these specialist skills for day-to-day content creation can come with a high cost. At a time when marketing budgets continue to fall across the board, this is a burden that is far from sustainable.

Even those blessed with the privilege of in-house design and development teams find it difficult to maintain pace with the rising call for marketing content. When creatives are pulled away for vital tasks and projects, their focus on the day-to-day churn of content can slip, leading to broken campaigns or drops in quality and consistency.

With all this in mind, how do you empower your marketing teams to deliver the masses of branded collateral you need to reach new and existing customers, aid lead generation, and achieve the long-term goals laid out by your leadership teams? 

It all starts with self-sufficiency. Below we explore what this means, the challenges involved, the practical steps you can take to promote independence in your company, and the benefits associated with this approach.

What is a self-sufficient marketing team?

A self-sufficient marketing team operates independently, efficiently managing all aspects of campaigns without relying on frequent support from outside the business. 

This means that, with the right skills, tools and resources, independent marketing teams can meet the increased demand for content throughout your organisation, creating collateral, executing campaigns and adapting to changes to drive positive results.

However, self-sufficiency doesn’t necessarily mean zero involvement from design agencies or external partners. Instead, it’s about reducing the dependence on these groups for the daily demands that drive campaigns and keep marketing content rolling at a consistent pace.

The greatest barriers to self-sufficient marketing

Thanks to rising customer expectations, the prominence of personalisation and a growing fight for audience attention, the burdens on marketing communication teams are heavier than ever.

Even if these challenges aren’t hampering the capacity and capabilities of your content supply chain right now, two-thirds of marketing professionals expect the demand for promotional materials to grow between 5 and 20 times in the coming years.

To make sure your marketers are prepared for this future, they need to be independent and equipped to handle content creation themselves. However, making this a reality is easier said than done.

Quality content is in high demand

When you consider how multichannel marketing has become the standard for the majority of brands, and that more than 50% of companies use at least 8 channels to interact with their customers, you can start to see how insufficient capacity is such a prevalent problem for professionals in this space.

Coupled with the predictions for even higher levels of collateral being required to make an impact, and it’s immediately obvious the sheer scale of this challenge.

Put simply, your team needs a lot of content going out to make an impression. Content that not only covers multiple touchpoints, but is also completely consistent and able to deliver genuine value to your audiences.

With each platform having its own additional specifications, such as file formats, aspect ratios and sizes, creating the various types of content your marketing teams need to get campaigns off the ground is one of the biggest hurdles to self-sufficiency.

Production processes can get crowded

It’s rare for a single person to be responsible for the end-to-end creation of an asset; this presents a key problem for true marketing independence.

Whether a piece of collateral first requires strategic input from the department head or the assistance of copywriters and graphic designers along the way – being reliant on so many individuals from start to finish leaves room for mistakes, oversights and inconsistencies.

Organising these moving parts is essential to mastering the art of marketing self-sufficiency. Getting it wrong can delay projects, strain resources and impact your business’s bottom line. Furthermore, crowded content supply chains tend to be slow and cumbersome, making it harder for your brand to tap into timely marketing opportunities. 

To independently produce the pieces of content that guide your brand to long-term success, it’s crucial to streamline the important parts of your content creation ecosystem.

Localisation can weigh down operations

If you have a presence in multiple territories, you know your identity must be more than consistently presented. Resonating with regional audiences demands content that is localised to specific markets.

In practice, that could mean updating imagery to respect the cultural sensitivities of a certain group or producing collateral in the local language of your audiences. 

These added layers of complexity go beyond extensive research and adaptation. In some cases, localising collateral means crafting entirely new designs, which can further strain the finite time and resources available to your self-sufficient marketers.

If you want to establish independence throughout your marketing department, your team must have the tools to tackle the immense burden that localisation brings to their day-to-day operations.

6 tools and techniques to unlock true marketing self-sufficiency

Despite the challenges involved, taking a more independent approach to marketing throughout your organisation can lead to meaningful long-term cost savings, greater brand consistency and true marketing scalability. 

But how do you enter this era of self-sufficiency? We’ve rounded up 6 essential solutions and strategies to get you there.

1. Rely on template libraries

Template libraries are an integral part of any self-sufficient communication department, giving marketing management and support teams the ability to produce high-quality content rapidly.

This means there’s no need to build materials like social media posts, infographics and email campaigns from scratch over and over again. With a library of digital design templates by your side, this technology helps solve the problem of speed and consistency in your content production pipeline. 

Templates can also democratise the design and delivery process, meaning your colleagues no longer need to rely on the costly services of an agency, or wait for a gap in your designers’ schedules to get creative. Couple this with easy on-brand asset creation tools, and you’re well on your way to building a truly autonomous marketing department.

2. Develop clear brand and style guidelines

Few things can disrupt the independence of your marketing operations as unclear brand guidelines can.

With no clarity on what elements should and should not be incorporated across your collateral, the job of content creation becomes increasingly difficult, forcing your marketing department to bring on outside help or rely on rounds of amends from higher-ups – outcomes that can slow production to a crawl and undermine your team’s self-sufficiency.

Solving this problem requires comprehensive digital style guidelines; a foundation from which your marketers can produce consistent, on-brand marketing materials across any channel, enabling them to take full ownership of this important task.

3. Establish a centralised brand portal

Another essential piece of technology to inspire self-sufficiency in your marketing is a brand hub or brand portal.

These platforms act as a single, central ‘home’ for all of your brand’s key building blocks, from style guides and colour charts, to tones of voice examples, exemplar assets and more. Everything your marketing professionals need to understand and represent your brand accurately in one destination.

But the advantages don’t end there. By placing all this information in one, easy-to-reach digital place, a brand portal can help ensure your people are spending less time finding the information they need, and more time managing your brand in-house, helping your campaigns go to market faster.

4. Implement robust marketing automation tools

Carrying out the entire content production and marketing pipeline in-house involves a lot of work, especially if this is something you currently rely on third parties for at the moment. 

Marketing automation platforms can streamline many of the more menial tasks to ease the pressure on your teams’ workload. Be it aggregating customer interactions, posting on social or coordinating email marketing campaigns – the more you can automate, the more self-sufficient you become.

This does more than free up the capacity of your marketing creatives. It allows them to focus on higher-impact activities that demand strategic thinking, so they can deliver greater long-term value.

With automated workflows to reduce the strain of your routine operations, your team can function with greater autonomy, better adapt to market trends, and become a more self-sufficient unit.

5. Use AI-powered content production tools

As we mentioned earlier, the call for content isn’t just becoming greater; audience expectations are also rising. Meeting the pace and quality today’s customers are looking for demands agile, intelligent technology, and marketing AI can be a game-changing addition to your content production workflows. 

Whether that means employing AI writing tools like GrammarlyGO to help you proof content and produce long-form blog posts, or ideation-focused software such as ContentShake AI to generate data-driven ideas for your content plan – this technology can turn your marketers into fast, multidisciplinary creators.

With the ability to do more themselves, your marketers can deliver a steady flow of content without completely depending on in-house creatives or third-party agencies, enhancing their overall self-sufficiency and productivity.

However, while AI can be a powerful tool, it’s important to remember that it works best as a complement to your marketing professionals rather than a replacement for them. Prompts still need human input and oversight to achieve the human-centred quality key to long-term success.

6. Commit to regular training and upskilling

Finally, when you invest in regular training for your marketing teams, you equip them with the skills to handle more tasks in-house. 

Be that mastering new tools or honing creative traits, enabling your professionals to become better at what they do reduces their reliance on external resources. 

Plus, upskilling your employees allows them to stay sharp in the rapidly-evolving landscape of digital marketing; knowledge they can draw from to enhance the overall performance of their ongoing campaigns.

After all, it helps if your marketing team not only understands how to accomplish their role, but also has the confidence to innovate and tackle the challenges that stand in their way.

What are the benefits of self-sufficient marketing?

When you empower your marketing teams to become increasingly self-sufficient, you unlock the ability to produce content, reach target audiences, build trust and achieve objectives without relying solely on outside assistance.

As you can imagine, reducing the costs associated with outsourcing marketing can be a great way to maximise your promotions’ bang for their buck, and allocate resources that can be used to drive your business toward greater success. 

Handling content creation in-house also opens the door to increased marketing agility. In practice, that means your marketers can react to timely opportunities and data-driven feedback much quicker.

Plus, with consistency the foundation of brand trust, another advantage self-sufficient marketing can bring to the table is wall-to-wall brand alignment. With everything handled internally, there are fewer opportunities for errors and inconsistencies to sneak into a customer’s journey.

Involving fewer external stakeholders in the marketing pipeline can also lead to effective communication. This promotes inter-department collaboration and allows proposed strategies to take flight far quicker.

Perhaps most importantly, self-sufficiency gives your team members a strong foundation from which to scale their operations. As well as priming your brand for the content-rich future ahead, this approach allows your departments to more readily adapt to your ever-evolving business needs.

Successful, sustainable marketing begins with a self-sufficient approach

Content is the lifeblood of every campaign. It’s what reaches your target audiences and entices them to become repeat customers.

But keeping up with the ever-growing demand for collateral is hard. Many teams rely on the assistance of third parties to deliver the quality and scale required, even as marketing budgets continue to decline – an unsustainable combination for even the most well-prepared brands.

As you’ve discovered, self-sufficiency gives you a competitive advantage in your ongoing efforts to engage, inspire and delight your consumers. By harnessing the tips and tricks we’ve showcased in this article, you can unlock the shackles on your staff and make content creation a seamless, swift and structured process across your departments.

By striving towards self-sufficiency, you free your company from unwanted bottlenecks and breakdowns in communication and guide it towards a future of sustained, effective performance.