What Comes After Content Strategy?

The difference between Starting and Scaling

There’s no doubt that we are living in the age of the startup.

Starting your own business used to seem like a Herculean task reserved for a select few with the right support and right funding. But not anymore. The U.S. has built a startup ecosystem where anyone with an idea and some technical knowhow can launch the next Uber or Facebook.

And that ecosystem is working. In fact, it’s estimated that more than 500,000 new businesses are started every month in the U.S. alone — a half a million! By god we’ve done it! Our economy is going to be booming and the billion dollar startup club is going to be bursting at the seems!

But that hasn’t quite happened yet. Why?

You’d think that with all the tools and a thriving startup culture, there would be a new SpaceX, Tesla, Uber, or Facebook announced every few days. Something’s amiss. Turning a good idea into a ­billion-dollar company is still a dream for most. Despite all the focus heaped on startups, 90% still fail.

Despite all the focus heaped on startups, 90% still fail.

So where is the disconnect? I think at least part of the fault lies in or relentless focus on starting things, at the expense of scaling them, and unfortunately that part of the equation has not gotten much easier with technology. That part will alwaysrequire work.

Content is Not Immune

It’s easy to start, it’s hard to scale. That’s as true of content marketing as it is of starting an entire business. Starting your content strategy is new and exciting. You’re feeling out a market and a message that will grow to define your work and your company.

However, there comes a time when you need to move from starting your content strategy to scaling it. This is where I see a lot of companies hit a roadblock. Starting becomes a comfort blanket. Once you admit to yourself and your company that you’ve built a solid foundation for your content marketing, the pressure is on. You need to put your strategy to work and start generating results.

This is where the rubber meets the road in terms of getting real results from your content marketing, but it’s also where many content marketers shy away.

Starting vs. Scaling

Before you can determine if it’s time to scale, you need to understand where you are at in the arch of your content lifecycle. Below is a helpful list outlining the differences between starting a scaling, adapted from a wonderful Fast Company article by David Butler and Linda Tischler:

• Starting is all about agility. When you’re starting, you’re developing assets (your brand, your message, your personas, your blog, your workflow).
• Scaling is all about leveraging your assets to get the most value out of them.
• Starting requires lots of exploration and rapid iteration to get to your content strategy dialed in.
• Scaling is all about standardizing and executing your content strategy so that you can take advantage of network effects.
• Starting is all about being ready to pivot when you need to — the whole team must be ready to rethink everything if things aren’t working.
• Scaling is all about planning — developing a core competency in planning is critical.

Know When it’s Time

Take an honest look at your content strategy and ask yourself the following questions:

• Have I nailed down my audience and brand voice with some degree of certainty?
• Are my distribution channels in place with a moderate audience (blog, social channels, email list)?
• Do I have workflows in place for producing blog posts and e-books?

If you answered “yes” to two out of three questions, your content strategy is ready to scale. It’s time to shift your focus away from planning and towards leveraging the hard work you’ve already put in.

Have courage. Scaling your content beyond mere strategy can be frightening, but it is the only true way for you and your team to have a significant impact for your company. Don’t be like the 90% of startups that fail. Be bold and push for growth. Scale your audience, your production volume, your quality, your team, your revenue, your impact. Push to scale everything.

Scale everything.

While this drive for growth may seem strange and foreign to some marketers, I can tell you that it is the battle cry of just about every other department in your company. If content marketing is to truly come out from behind the scenes and become the influental business unit it deserves to be, we all need to do a lot more scaling. We’ve done the work of starting. It’s time for the next chapter.

About the author: Matt Wesson is the content marketing manager at Salesforce. Follow him on Twitter or see more articles on his LinkedIn page.