The Content Strategy Checklist Needed To Scale Your Marketing

You’ve hired a couple of go-to creators who produce on-brand work. You’ve made a few killer pieces of content—albeit, not without some blood, sweat, and tears.

Now, it’s time to do it again. About 250 times. This quarter.

Daunted? You’re not alone. Scaling is one of the biggest challenges of a successful content marketing program. Yet, it’s critical for success: A handful of high-performing blogs or hitting a million video views is a great start, but it’s not going to keep your audience engaged in a TikTok-obsessed, content-saturated, attention-squeezed world.

According to the Content Marketing Institute and Gartner, producing high-quality content at scale with a limited budget is the content marketer’s trifecta of challenges. Thankfully, a content strategy checklist can help you chart a path to scaling without losing your sanity.

If you’re looking into how to scale content creation more efficiently, here’s a quick-hitter list of tips.

1. Expand your talent team

Scaling a content marketing program is a team effort, and you’ll need all hands on deck to do so effectively. But if your own team is too strapped to handle the scope of work involved, you can always seek out support in the form of external content talent: e.g., freelancers, part-time employees, and third-party platforms. (Contently, for instance, offers a vast network of high-quality, pre-vetted, top-tier content creators in our contributor network.)

Not only is this a great way to scale up (or down) as needed, but it also allows you to experiment with new creators and perspectives—without committing to expensive and untested full-time employees.

Below are a few checklist items to consider when expanding your content talent team:

• Assess your current team’s capacity and identify gaps in skills or bandwidth.n
• Establish clear guidelines for content quality and tone of voice to ensure consistency across all content, whether it’s produced in-house or externally. (Investing the time to create a unique style guide can be super helpful here.)
• Establish efficient communication channels and project management processes to streamline collaboration with your expanded team.

2. Audit your content library

Another important element of creating content at scale is getting a handle on all the assets you’ve already created, as well as any half-baked “lumps of coal” with diamond potential. This encompasses everything from old blog posts to that brand manifesto your CEO sent out at 3 a.m. two years ago (hey, you never know, there could be some real gems in there).

When auditing your library, follow the below content marketing strategy checklist guidelines:

• Take inventory of existing assets.
• Categorize them by format, topic, audience, and performance metrics. (This is a place where AI tools can come in handy!)
• Cross-reference your inventory with your most up-to-date content strategy. Identify gaps and opportunities.
• Assess the quality and relevance of each piece of content, prioritizing assets that can be repurposed or refreshed (more on this in tip three).
• Use content strategy benchmarks and analytics to determine which pieces have performed well and should be used as models for future content.

3. Refresh oldies but goodies

Scaling doesn’t just involve creating new content from scratch—it can also include keeping existing content fresh, valuable, and ideally, ranking for SEO.

Tick the below steps off your content strategy checklist when refreshing older projects:

• Identify evergreen content that has performed well in the past.
• Update this content with new information, examples, insights, or expert quotes.
• Optimize existing content for search engines by refreshing meta descriptions, titles, image alt tags, and headers.
• Promote updated content through your distribution channels to drive new traffic and engagement.
• Monitor content performance and make ongoing updates as needed.

Repurpose old posts: A content strategy checklist

On a related note, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time your team decides to venture into a new format, medium, or social platform. You can often repurpose existing content—especially “big rock” projects like e-books, whitepapers, or video series—to get more mileage out of past investments.

This might look like breaking a larger project into smaller pieces, or it might entail reworking a shorter-form piece of social content for a new platform. Want to launch a Substack? You can start by rejiggering blog posts for email. Looking to experiment with Meta Ads? That YouTube series you made last year might have some snippets you can edit to be snappier and shorter-form.

Below’s a quick content strategy checklist reviewing the key steps here:

• Identify content assets that can be repurposed into new formats or adapted for different channels. (Another task that’s great for AI.)
• Develop a content repurposing plan and document it somewhere your whole team can access (e.g. in a shared doc, spreadsheet, pinned Slack, etc.).
• Edit, reformat, or optimize existing content for each new channel or platform.
• Promote repurposed content through relevant distribution channels.
• Monitor performance.
• Lather, rinse, repeat.

Learning how to scale content creation isn’t easy, but it’s essential for long-term success. By strategically supporting your team, auditing your existing library, refreshing evergreen pieces, and repurposing high-performing assets, you can build a sustainable and efficient content engine—without having to work nights and weekends.

Ask the Content Strategist: FAQs about content strategy

What are some best practices for maintaining brand voice and quality standards when working with a large pool of content creators?

Great question. First of all, it’s essential to develop clear guidelines and style guides that outline your brand’s tone, messaging, and quality expectations. Providing examples of successful content pieces and offering regular feedback and training can help ensure all creators are aligned with your brand standards. Additionally, implementing a thorough review and editing process can help maintain consistency and quality.

How do you prioritize which content to refresh or repurpose first?

Start by analyzing performance data to identify your top-performing evergreen content—these pieces have already proven to resonate and yield results. Next, consider the relevance and timeliness of each piece; content that covers trending topics or includes outdated information should be prioritized. Finally, evaluate the potential impact of each refresh based on specific content strategy goals, such as driving leads, increasing brand awareness, or supporting a specific campaign.

What tools or technologies can help with content auditing and repurposing?

Content inventory tools like Airtable or Google Sheets can help you organize and categorize existing assets. AI-powered content analysis tools like Clearscope can help identify gaps and opportunities for optimization—good, old-fashioned human review is helpful here, too. Finally, platforms like Contently can help you manage all your content in one centralized, convenient place.

Scaling your content marketing program can be a heavy lift. Content marketing programs like Contently take some of the load off. Learn more about how Contently can make scaling your content marketing program seamless and streamlined.