Scalable Content Strategy: 4 Easy Wins For Your Brand

Content scalability is essential as your business reaches new clients — existing content must be evergreen to provide continual value, and new content pieces must deliver clear, concise messaging through structured content that appeals to search engines.

In this article, I’ll outline CopyDash standards for content scaling and why they’re vital to your expanding brand:

• Successful content strategy is inherently scalable. Quality content isn’t just measured in words, but in lasting value. Focus on evergreen topics that serve your brand’s readers and customers long-term — you’ll decrease wasted time on edits, and increase search engine visibility.
• Structured content is key to scaling content production. Establish content creation standards that apply to all net new digital content. Utilize internal linking, topic clusters and pillar pages to create a logical flow to keep readers on your site.
• Streamline your content marketing strategy to scale. Standardize every aspect of your content production process. Create a content calendar, implement a single workflow for keyword research and outline development, utilize a branded tone and style guide, and get your entire content team on the same apps and digital workspaces. 
• Understand user intent behind search engine queries. Don’t just target a popular keyword. Understand the search intent behind that keyword. Why are your readers searching this information? What questions do they have? Answer them honestly and succinctly — you’ll capture lasting SERP results and featured snippets.
• Be flexible with your definition of quality content. Your content creation process must evolve with changes to search engine user experience, like Google SGE and “zero click” AI snippets. 

Schedule a free consultation and strategy session with our founder and kickstart your content scaling process!

What is Scalable Content?

Scalable content is any piece of digital content that easily expands, shifts and adapts with the growing needs of your brand. 

These content pieces allow you to scale content creation quickly and efficiently based on 4 key ideas:

1. Streamlined content efforts. A scalable strategy establishes benchmarks for all stages of content development. Your content creator(s) work within your expectations — this means faster research, creation and content delivery.
2. Standardized content format. Every content type must have preset expectations for tone, style and format. No time is wasted on multiple rounds of revision — your writers understand your definition of high quality content from day one.
3. Evergreen idea generation. Each content idea must have lasting appeal and impact. Content pieces must have time to entrench on search engine results pages (SERPs) — this won’t happen if you’re making frequent edits or creating content with an expiration date (i.e. “Best Practices for 2023”).
4. Effortless content repurposing. Measure quality content in its ability to be repurposed across platforms. Can you utilize parts of the same piece as blog content, social media posts, landing page snippets and personalized content campaigns?

Content Scaling is the Only Way to Win as You Grow

There’s no time to waste when you’re a scaling brand. You’re already stretched past your core compentencies— onboarding new staff, creating workflow automations, and cultivating relationships with new clients and investors.

The last thing you need is a portfolio of digital content that you — and your clients — have outgrown.

It creates a catch-22 with no pathways to victory: either you waste precious hours, resources and budget updating all your existing content, or you rely on a bank of existing landing pages that don’t convert and blog content that doesn’t reflect your evolving client base.

Scalable content strategy is the only way to ensure that doesn’t happen to you.

Scaling Content Relies on Exceptional Content Structure

The easiest way to scale content production is to establish and rely upon a clearly defined content structure. 

Great structure benefits your brand’s digital marketing strategy holistically. Readers have a logical pathway through your content from one piece to the next, with internal linking guiding them through their journey. Search engines use these same pathways to analyze, interpret and rank your content.

TL;DR? The better your structured content, the greater your audience retention and search visibility.

Our Favorite Format for Structured Content

At CopyDash, we love writing topic clusters that link to a pillar page. Each pillar landing page focuses on a core business offering or service. The adjacent topic clusters are a combination of blog posts, articles and social media posts that speak to various aspects of that business offering — from initial consumer education to deep dives aimed at customer decision points.

These topic clusters and pillar pages link to and from one another effortlessly in a way that always makes logical sense. Human readers love your content’s flow, and search engines love your easily digestible URL structure.

Standardize Your Scalable Content Production Process

Every stage of your content development process must be standardized. Wouldn’t you rather spend a portion of one work week defining structured content workflow — instead of a few hours every week making the same copy edits and chasing your content creators down for re-training?

Make sure you have documented content creation standards in place for these 7 phases of production and post-production:

1. Topic selection
2. Keyword research
3. Outline development
4. Draft copywriting
5. Copyediting
6. Content delivery
7. Performance analysis (Google Analytics, etc.)

3 Simple Tools to Standardize Content Production

Simplify your efforts to streamline and scale content production with 3 valuable tools:

1. Branded tone & style guide. Create a tone and style guide for your brand that defines the core components of how your brand talks, looks and presents itself. Learn more about the key elements of a tone and style guide here.

2. Central workspace hub for teams. Centralize your content marketing team(s) and their workflow on one digital workspace. Find a CRM that includes a content calendar and integrated access to documents in progress — for example, recent CopyDash clients used Airtable, Notion, and Clickup. 

3. Get everyone on the same apps. If you have a writer on MarketMuse, copyeditor on Ahrefs and content marketing manager on Semrush, you’ll have disconnect on core content expectations. Choose your preferred apps, and get everyone on them.

Understanding User Intent is Crucial to Content Scaling

Scalable content strategy is reliant on understanding the user intent behind search engine queries. Great content agencies don’t just target a keyword — they understand the reason for the search.

Example: There’s a huge difference between “strategic content marketer” and “strategic content marketing” as search queries. The first search wants to find a content marketing professional to obtain industry expertise or make a hiring decision. The second search is simply looking for a definition or core components of a content marketing strategy.

Content creators must understand these nuances when conducting keyword research to create copy that’s truly scalable. If they miss the mark, the resulting content speaks to the wrong intent, the wrong part of the sales funnel, and fails to bring value to the reader.

Think About Why Your Audience Searches

Your overall content goal is four-fold:

1. Introduce people to your brand,
2. Provide value to build loyalty,
3. Establish consumer confidence, and
4. Lead towards a conversion.

Every piece of content you create must serve one of these components of the customer journey.

Define where each piece of new content sits in the customer journey (or sales funnel). This decision point allows each new piece to become scalable content with a clear intent, able to be repurposed across multiple platforms with one coherent message.

Quality Content: The Goalposts Are Always Moving

Smart content marketers don’t marry themselves to one digital marketing strategy. That’s because the goalposts for high quality content are always moving — whether it’s due to Google updates, advances in generative AI or evolving consumer preferences.

The true hallmark of content quality isn’t meeting temporary standards at one point in time. Truly scalable content must remain as evergreen as possible, able to withstand trends and changes to search platforms.

At CopyDash, we were never scared of Google SGE, AI snippets in search results or the rise of chatbots. Because truly scalable content is flexible enough to be trend-proof.

Flexibility is the Key to Scalable Content

We understand that content marketing is just part of your overall brand strategy. As your brand grows, each subsequent content marketing effort must be flexible enough to stay relevant and valuable. 

It’s why we’re so passionate about scalable content at CopyDash. You’re busy scaling your business — the only time you should spend on your content strategy is celebrating its success and visibility. 

We’d love to handle your content production process on your terms, by your set of KPIs and metrics. Then, you can get back to your core competencies, and back to winning.

Your scalable content journey starts with a free strategy session — talk to our founder about your evolving goals!