However, whether you’re focused on building a content strategy, creating and distributing content, or measuring content performance, even one-person teams can successfully implement content marketing.

How? Setting expectations, contracting with outside help, and staying the course with your content strategy can help you achieve big content wins even with small teams.

1. Set expectations (and benchmarks)

Content marketing is ultimately a long-term strategy. Though some content can garner early brand-awareness and audience-building wins, you don’t typically see the same immediate results or measurable returns that you would with pay-per-click advertising or email marketing, for example.

For small organizations that have limited brand awareness or audiences, content marketing can take 6-18 months to bear fruit. For these organizations, the key to creating big wins is to think months ahead and to set realistic performance expectations as part of their content strategy.

Start by assessing your current content marketing performance to create a benchmark for your ongoing efforts.

To collect insight on your website, mobile, and social channels, use Google Analytics, Simply Measured, Mixpanel, or other analytics platforms.

Also use tools such as Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMrush to monitor keyword rankings, SEO, and general search visibility metrics; moreover, to benchmark email effectiveness, look at data from your email service or automation providers, such as Marketo, MailChimp, and VerticalResponse.

After assessing the performance of your current marketing channels, collect these metrics in a spreadsheet. Those metrics could include the following:

• Web traffic, time on site, bounce rate, unique visitors, return visitors, etc.
• Social traffic, shares, comments, mentions, and other engagement metrics.
• Email audience growth, open rate, bounce rate, CTA clicks, etc.
• Keyword rank, organic traffic, etc.

If your team hasn’t invested in marketing, email, or analytics software, you will have to log your metrics manually by grabbing social information from the social platforms themselves, collect blog information from WordPress or other CMS, and so on.

Setting benchmarks is important to understand what type of results you can realistically expect from your content marketing and for identifying high-performing content down the road.

2. Contract outside resources

The reality of working with a small team is that there is a mountain of tasks to accomplish and only so much time in the day. Compound those pressures with performance expectations and the need to maintain content quality standards, and you have the recipe for a stressful working environment.

For small teams to achieve big wins, they must remain focused on their larger content strategy and experiment with outside resources, such as freelancers and agencies, and contracted employees.

The key is to find resources that help your team directly execute content that aligns with your content strategy; to keep a lean team and respect your budgetary constraints, immediately cut anyone who doesn’t fit.

To find success with freelancers or an agency, you must set them up for success:

• Provide clear performance expectations.
• Share brand style guides, contributor guidelines, goals, and other relevant marketing team activities.
• Organize your marketing programs to avoid confusion.
• Concentrate on transparent communication to create win-win scenarios.

Outside resources can make small marketing teams more effective by adding more hands on deck, diversifying the expertise on the team, and providing flexible resources that can be used to scale; the challenge is to build long-term working relationships that can keep costs low.

Small teams must aim to create repeat engagements with outside resources to…

• Execute content more efficiently while maintaining quality standards
• Remain more agile and flexible in their content efforts
• Avoid costly onboarding and industry training time
• Eliminate the need for a W2 hire and cut down on HR costs

Overall, freelancers and agencies can be your secret weapon to highly effective marketing teams. And, if managed well and tactfully, they can be a more budget-friendly option than internal hires.

3. Stay the course

Since content marketing is a marathon strategy, the key to achieving big results is to consistently experiment with new content campaigns, concentrate on building terrific brand experiences, and grow your audience and community over time.

In 2016, fully 70% of B2B marketers rated their content strategy more effective than in the previous year—a testament to their ongoing and evolving content efforts.

To stay the course, set deadlines and create an editorial calendar that keeps your team action-oriented. Doing so can be as simple as requiring an article every week or publishing on social media daily. The key is to set goals and make sure you can execute, day in and day out.

Next, plan a content distribution strategy or a distribution checklist for your content efforts to make sure you are paying attention to promoting your content each time you publish.

Though content distribution can seem straightforward, there are several tactics to consider to make your processes more effective. My distribution checklist, for example, looks like this:

• Share content on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.
• Start discussions on Reddit, Inbound, GrowthHackers, and Quora.
• Add to Post Planner rotation and Sprout Social.
• Tag and mention any organizations, employees, or influencers discussed in the content.
• Syndicate content on LinkedIn Pulse and Medium.
• Add a snippet to my website.
• Promote in Slack communities; #StuffYouWrote, #Promotion, and other channels.
• Share in relevant LinkedIn groups.

Each of your marketing channels has unique audience expectations, variable feature sets, format considerations, and other factors that could affect your distribution strategy.

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Have you found big content wins—even though you were on a small marketing team? Have you ever built a content strategy on your own? Have you scaled your content efforts with freelancers or agencies? Let you fellow marketers know in the comments section, below.

Influencer. It’s a powerful word, isn’t it? It conveys authority, respect, and expertise. An influencer has the power to affect the decisions of other people, who accept or perceive this person’s authority. People from all walks of life can act as influencers, but at this point, we are concerned about the influencers in the online world, and the way you can use them to boost your content marketing strategy.

Influencer marketing uses key leaders in the specific industry to promote a brand’s message to a large audience. Instead of promoting your content directly to the target readers, you use the influencers as mediators, who inspire other people to check out your words without feeling like they are being pushed towards your website.

Influencer campaigns usually carry the content element. This can go in two directions:

• You create content for the influencer’s blog or website, or
• The influencer creates content that promotes your brand or website.

What makes influencer marketing better than the word-of-mouth strategy? These individuals share their opinions and recommendations with a huge audience, and they have the power to influence their actions.

You get the picture: influencer marketing is an extremely important element of content promotion. The only question is: how do you do it? We have some tips that will help you develop your campaign,

1. Identify the influencers

Before you can develop an influencer marketing campaign, you need to identify who influences the opinions, decisions, and actions of your target audience. This step will involve some detective work. Talk to people interested in the niche you’re part of. Then, search for influential blogs, Instagram profiles, Twitter users, Facebook pages, and LinkedIn resumes.

Once you identify few names, create a list of priorities, putting the influencers with the greatest authority at the top.

2. Start making connections

Follow the social media pages of all influencers you identified. Then, focus on few at a time and do your best to build a relationship with them. You can achieve that goal by commenting on their posts on blogs and social media, but don’t be too aggressive. Comment on the blog for the first week, proceed by following and responding to Twitter updates during the second week, and make progress towards the Facebook page later on.

This should be a very natural connection, although it will have a marketing purpose in the background. Before you can get an influencer to promote your brand, you need to become recognizable for them.

3. Write for influencers

Search through the most influential blogs in your niche and see which ones accept guest posts. Follow the guidelines very carefully and start writing high-quality guest posts for their sites. This content marketing strategy will take tons of commitment, but the results will be worth the effort. If you have trouble getting content ideas and maintaining the quality levels high, you can get help from content writing services like  BestEssayTips.

When you write a great guest post for an influential blog, you get free promotion in front of a huge target audience. If these people like your content, they will visit your own blog to see what else you can offer.

4. Build a great blog/website. Then, ask influencers to write for you!

This is the most challenging aspect of influencer marketing. First of all, you need an absolutely awesome website, and you need to make it popular through different marketing techniques. Remember the good old rule: content is the key to success. You need to create unique, high-quality articles that solve the problems and answer the questions of your audience.

It may take you years to get to the point when you can attract influencers to write free articles for you, but who said developing a brand was easy? Once you get there, you can start inviting influencers to write posts, record podcasts and videos, or contribute to your website with eBooks. At the end of the day, you get great content and visits from the influencer’s audience, they get a chance to showcase their expertise, and the audience gets awesome tips. Everyone wins.

Yoga Journal is a great example of a website that harnesses the power of influencers. It’s a very popular online resource, so popular teachers from all over the world are willing to write for it.

Here’s an excellent resource on Key Internet Statistics to Know in 2021.

5. Ask influencers to write reviews for you

This method is similar to the one described above, but there’s a slight difference. You still need to develop a recognizable brand before proceeding to this step, so the influencers will be willing to accept your offer. This time, you offer a package of products or services for free, and you ask them to write an honest review for their audience.

Here’s an example: you’ll find reviews of Vitamix and OmniBlend all over Instagram, YouTube, blogs, and other online resources. These are established brands and influencers from the healthy food industry are already using them, but the principle is the same: the audience gets honest recommendations, tips, and recipes from influencers.

Content is all over the Internet. Every single industry is busy, so it will take you lots of effort to differentiate yourself from the crowd. When you enrich your content marketing strategy with influencer outreach, they will do the marketing for you!

Lucy Benton is a high skilled editor, proofreader, she enjoys sharing tips and stories. She studied Creative and Professional Writing at the Maharishi University of Management. Now she is writing for marketing and business resources. If you’re interested in working with Lucy, you can find her on FaceBook.