The ultimate guide to scaling content production

Today’s marketing teams are under pressure to produce more content at a faster pace without sacrificing quality. Maybe you’re looking to promote your latest products and services over paid media channels. Or perhaps you’re providing advice and data-driven insights through downloadable resources. Whatever your marketing goals, leveraging your digital assets to create that content requires careful coordination and proven processes. With the right foundation in place, you’ll be able to create content at scale effectively to keep customers engaged and take advantage of new opportunities.

What are digital assets and what is digital asset management?

When it comes to sharing your content, you may have heard the words “digital assets” get thrown around a lot recently. However, digital asset management has been around for nearly 30 years – but what are considered digital assets? And what does managing them look like?

First of all, digital assets constitute nearly every piece of content your team produces – from social media banners to videos and everything in between. Digital asset management – or DAM – is the single source of truth where all of your files and content can be stored, easily accessed, and searched for by anyone in your organization with access.

When you’re getting ready to scale your content, having something like a digital asset management tool in place is imperative to your success.

What does it mean to scale content?

Scaling content is the process of producing high-quality digital assets in a timely, streamlined fashion. Your content can vary from things like blogs and case studies to social media posts and video projects. The overall goal of scaling content production is to maintain quality and brand relevance while making sure clients and stakeholders stay consistently engaged. This can be an ambitious undertaking, but with these ten tips, you’ll be able to build the foundation you need to scale your content – and do it right the first time.

10 Tips for Scaling Content Production Effectively

1. Set measurable goals

Every piece of content you produce and distribute should contribute toward a specific goal. Without measurable goals to tell you how well your content scaling strategy is doing, you can end up wasting valuable time and resources creating material that doesn’t produce meaningful results. By setting goals like boosting engagement, improving lead conversion, or generating sales, you’ll be able to assess whether the content you’re creating is having an impact on your business.

2. Conduct a content audit

If your organization is struggling to figure out which digital assets are worth keeping and reusing, conducting a thorough audit of content resources is a great solution. An audit helps maximize the value of digital assets by ensuring that nothing slips through the cracks and goes unused after investing resources to create it. Be sure to assess how well your published content is performing as well. Even the most successful campaigns can grow stale after a while, so including performance metrics in your audit can help you identify opportunities for a content refresh.

3. Build a content calendar

Content calendars map out a schedule of what content is being created, who is working on it, and which audience it should reach. They’re valuable for scaling your content strategy because they eliminate confusion over how resources are being utilized, so your digital team can be more productive. Your content calendar should be made available to everyone involved in the production process to keep the creative team on the same page, and can be built using project management looks like the ones mentioned below (check out tip #7).

4. Identify reusable assets

If you don’t know what content you already have, it’s going to be hard to decide what you can reuse! Labeling assets suitable for reuse, or storing them in a dedicated location, makes it easy to distinguish them from unique, single-use assets or content that has usage rights restrictions. You can use reporting tools to identify content that has performed well in the past, so you can deploy them again and review them to understand why they worked so well the first time. Identifying reusable content also streamlines the approval process since the assets were already approved for use once.

5. Look for recycling opportunities

You can get more value out of your content by proactively identifying opportunities to recycle assets. Whether it’s plucking key facts from a whitepaper to create an infographic or incorporating webinar video footage into social media posts, planning to repurpose content before it’s even created can help you think expansively about the ways you utilize assets.

6. Create brand guidelines

Establishing brand guidelines is a good way to maintain consistency. They show how to present your brand’s content in a variety of situations. The brand guidelines should include your organization’s story, values, and overall voice, as well as approved elements like colors, fonts, and icons. If you’re going to be working with external collaborators, brand guidelines can help you ensure that brand content will be consistent no matter who is working on it. Canto DAM features a dedicated location for storing and distributing brand guidelines to support creative teams.

7. Use project management tools

Since every member of a team is responsible for different tasks, using a project management tool, like Wrike or Workfront, can help keep everyone on the right track. The priority level of each task can be easily displayed within the project management tool, showing each team member the order in which the tasks need to be completed. In addition to storing and sharing content, having a universal place for graphic designers, copywriters, and marketers to create content helps to streamline the creative process even further. Content creation software lets team members embrace a creative operations mindset that helps them build and collaborate on brand-new content.

8. Take advantage of digital asset management

Utilizing digital asset management (DAM) software should be at the heart of any marketing tech stack. A DAM platform like Canto provides a central location for all digital assets like photos, videos, graphics, documents, and much more. This allows a creative team to easily locate these assets from anywhere, which eliminates any slowdown caused by lost or missing assets. Since team members are working from the same content library, they can also collaborate more effectively using shared workspaces.

9. Label assets with metadata

If you can’t find the assets you need when you need them, they might as well not exist! You also don’t want to waste time searching through multiple content libraries in search of the right asset. Labeling your assets with easily searchable tags, keywords, and other metadata (including photo metadata) helps you avoid the time-consuming task of sifting multiple folders and storage locations in search of the right file. Organizing and labeling assets also make it much easier for external collaborators, vendors, and partners to quickly find what they’re looking for without needing to ask for help.

10. Optimize workflows & content distribution

Once you have the right technology in place for organizing your digital assets, you’ll also want to establish streamlined content workflows that help your team produce creative projects at scale. When everyone knows what tasks they’re responsible for, where to access resources, and how projects should move from one production stage to the next, you can keep your creative process moving quickly and efficiently. Content distribution should also be optimized to avoid bottlenecks and ensure that your assets are always in the right hands at the right time.

Let Canto set you up for success

As a top-notch digital asset management platform, Canto helps businesses with content scaling by becoming an interconnected content hub for every tool in your tech stack. Organize images, videos, brand elements, and more with Canto’s powerful, AI-driven tagging and metadata tools, so your team can quickly find the assets they need and keep your creative workflows moving efficiently. Canto also integrates seamlessly into leading project management and storage platforms to streamline content creation and help you manage access from a single source.

When the time comes to share and distribute assets, you can use Canto’s innovative Portals feature to set up curated, fully-customizable content libraries dedicated to specific projects and use cases. Whether you need to provide external collaborators access to materials or you’re looking to create a “self-service” resource for partners, customers, or public audiences, Canto’s Portals provide the flexibility to distribute content in ways that work for your organization.
If you’re ready to start ramping up your content production with Canto, download our ebook guide for tips on scaling your content machine.