6 ways to speed up the content creation process without sacrificing content quality

It’s often said that you can’t rush creativity, but that can’t be further from the truth. Creativity thrives when given boundaries and guidelines.

Boundaries give your creative process a clearly delineated field on which to play. Guidelines give your creation process a head start. They set the basics up for you, reducing the time you spend and your mental load each time you make something new.

Any kind of content creation involves a lot of creativity. Your teams can make their content production workflows faster and create more engaging content by taking a few simple steps to organize their work and support it with the right content creation tools and supporting systems.

Use templates so your team doesn’t have to build every piece of content from scratch. Create a library of templates for frequently produced content formats, like articles for your blog, case studies, long-form content, white papers, landing pages, LinkedIn posts, videos, and social media posts.

Use the Pink and Black Duo Tone Seamless Carousel Instagram Post and the White Traveling templates

Your team can build templates for the content they publish on a regular basis. You may also use a production tool that offers pre-built templates as a jumping-off point for creating new content.

Your team can increase their productivity by modifying those templates, preloading your brand assets, and quickly resizing content for various platforms instead of having to build a new file for each format.

Your design workflow will run faster if you keep the actual assets needed to create content clearly organized and easily accessible. Your brand guidelines instruct how your brand will be used, and they should link to an organized source of downloadable brand assets. With that resource, your team won’t waste time hunting them down or accidentally use the wrong file.

Use the brand kit you created to link all of the brand assets that content creators need to design and build digital content. Include links or downloads of various logo files, downloadable typefaces, stock images, video content to embed, and even a centralized list of quotes and case studies to enrich your content.

Use a digital asset management tool to keep already created materials in one place. Your team can create content faster when pulling from existing materials. They can streamline design reviews and repurpose existing designs instead of starting from scratch every time.

With AI assistance, your team can produce content much faster. There are now content creation tools that can produce images and write content based on your team’s instructions.

What’s important to remember is that AI tools don’t have to create perfect, seamless finished products to be useful. Many creatives describe the “fear of the blank page.” Often, starting the first few lines of a project is the most challenging and time-consuming part of the process.

What an AI tool like Magic Write can do is generate a solid first draft that your team can use as a foundation. It can help bypass writer’s block, brainstorm ideas for structure or content, and get the busywork of writing the basic words on the page done in an instant. Your team is then free to refine as needed.

Image creation tools can also speed up your content creation. Content catches the eyes of your potential customers more effectively when it has a visual element.

However, it can be time-consuming to search for stock images or have designers create custom illustrations. In Canva, use AI to generate illustrations quickly with the text-to-image feature and add visual interest to articles, create infographics for landing pages, or produce beautiful backgrounds for social media posts. Alternatively, you can also access millions of high quality images, videos, audios and content with Canva’s premium content library.

There is no need for content to be created fresh for every platform. Repurposing your content to cross-post via your blog, email marketing campaigns, and various social media platforms will help you reach a wider audience without spending more time creating content.

For example, you can turn a video format into a blog by adjusting the transcript. You can take the key takeaways from a podcast and publish them as bullet points on social media, etc.

To repurpose content, adjust the length and tone of voice to suit the medium. Blog posts can be long form and thorough, while an Instagram post might be better if it’s short, punchy, and attention-grabbing.

Use a tool to easily resize images so you can post your content across all your social media platforms. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media platforms need different sized images for the content you post. Choose a tool that allows you to use presets to adjust your image sizes faster.

No matter what types of content they are making, your team needs to create content that is visually aligned with your branding. Develop clear brand guidelines they can use to make good content faster that is on-brand and in line with your content standards.

Having easily accessible brand guidelines will save team members the time and labor of seeking out that information and ensure all their content is on-brand. This reduces the risk that your team will have to revise work they’ve already done because it doesn’t fit the overall direction of your branding.

Brand guideline development should be part of the brand management process. Put together a brand kit for internal teams to use. Your brand kit will describe what your brand represents, what makes your brand visually unique, and how your brand elements should be used.

• An about us page with information about the company and the brand identity.
• All versions of your company logo and instructions on when and how to use each one.
• Your brand colors, including primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Those supporting color palettes will help content teams create materials that are varied while retaining a unified brand feel.
• Brand fonts and typography guidelines. Include a primary font or font pairing and a selection of supporting fonts that your content team can use across web, print, social media, and anywhere else they publish.
• A selection of brand images that can be downloaded and used or a mood board that will show your team what kinds of imagery will work best with your brand’s content.
  

Use the Grey White Minimalist Brand Guidelines Presentation and the Beige Orange Earthy Organic Travel Brand Guidelines Presentation templates

Each piece of content produced should be part of your wider content strategy. Content marketing requires coordination across channels and careful timing. Content management and planning tools make it easier to stay organized and focused on the big picture of your content plan.

Create a pool of approved content ideas to draw from, including keyword research, ideation, SEO goals, and information and how they fit into your content marketing strategy. Add these to your content calendar, so your team has visibility into what is coming down the pipeline.

To create great content efficiently, your team needs to have visibility into each other’s work, access to past work for reference, and an easy organization system for all their files. This will prevent them from losing files or duplicating work unnecessarily. It will also help them get into a better design flow. With resources easily at their fingertips, they can focus on the real work of creating and publishing content that is high quality.

Content management and planning tools help your team streamline the production process and collaborate more efficiently. Set up shared team folders as a centralized location for all of your content. Find a tool that allows you to collaborate in real time, share feedback, and get approval quickly, so you can get things published.

Your team also needs systems for planning upcoming content work, so everyone on your team knows what needs to be done and when. Create a social media and editorial calendar that is easily accessible to your team. Use a content planner that lets your team easily schedule posts and publish across all your channels and social media platforms.

Your team’s content production workflow can become much faster by combining all of these strategies.

However, the value added to your team by this additional efficiency is so much more than just saving hours of work. It’s what your team can do with the freed-up time and additional mental space they aren’t using on repetitive, basic tasks.

The best content will be eye-catching, stand out from the competition, and engage your target audience. It’s responsive to your customers’ needs—driving conversion, broadening brand awareness, and helping you meet your marketing goals.

With strategic content planning and preparation, you’ll set up a content creation workflow that increases efficiency and productivity across teams. When your process is more efficient, your team has more energy and time to be creative and produce high-quality content. They can be faster and more responsive, jumping on opportunities as soon as they emerge.