10 Content Marketing Hacks to Blog More & Support Your Team's Bandwidth

Marketers being asked to do more—more leads, more traffic, more content—without more resources is nothing new. But especially in a climate in which marketing budgets are increasingly being slashed, the pressure to “hack” our way to improved performance is strong.

With less budget or less headcount, marketers across all industries are looking for ways to increase blogging production or to find extra bandwidth somewhere in the myriad of tasks and strategic initiatives on their plates.

When you hear the term “hack,” it doesn’t always summon the most elegant picture—you might think of spammy articles, unoptimized social posts, and keyword-stuffed SEO—but finding efficiencies in your blogging and greater content marketing strategy doesn’t mean you have to cut corners and create content that doesn’t meet your quality standards. 

Here are a few ways to find those extra few minutes—or hours—in the day to maximize your team’s bandwidth and make more time for strategy instead of pure tactics.

1. Know your available resources.

Who is writing your content? Are they a professional writer? Do you have access to an in-house writer, a freelancer, or an agency? How much time can they spend creating content for you per month?

2. Know your strategy and goal.

Building a content strategy is its own can of worms. But an important step not to be overlooked when building a process is to make sure the answer to the question, “Will this produce content that will serve my strategy and goals?” is a resounding “Yes.”

3. Build benchmarks and time estimates.

Think about the deliverables you create often, such as blog posts. Do you know how long it takes to plan, write, edit, and publish every post? Before you implement your process, determine how long it’s currently taking you or your team so you have something to measure against and so you can be realistic about the amount of time you or your team can spend on content creation per week or per month. Keep in mind that professional writers will often take less time than your teammates, and account for this in your capacity planning.

4. Create templates for common deliverables. 

When you write a blog post, you know the document needs to include information about the target keyword and persona. It also needs social posts, a title and meta description, an image ... and so on. Create a template that makes it easy to plug in the things you need for a blog post to be “complete.”

5. Provide enough information. 

If you’re not the one writing the blog article, you want to make sure that whoever you hand it off to—a freelancer or a colleague—can understand enough about the goals, persona, and desired result that they can create quality content quickly. You don’t want your writer to have to waste time doing research or trying to figure out how to achieve your desired end result.

6. Batch your team’s time.

Because of context-switching, it’s most efficient to work on a single task at once. If your designated writer has frequent meetings that only leave them with 15- or 30-minute blocks throughout their day, they will be less efficient at writing articles.

7. Document your process.

Now that you know how long your process takes, the information and strategy required, your available resources, and the templates being used, make sure that everyone on your team has access to the process and knows what to expect. The best way to do this is by documenting your content creation process. 

8. Repurpose your content.

Creating more is always possible—but real efficiencies come into play when you can get the most out of every piece of content you create. 

Use long-form content to make short-form content.

Does your organization regularly host webinars, podcasts, or trainings? Consider editing a transcript and turning it into a blog post (or several posts!). Create shorter clips with valuable insights and post them as YouTube shorts, insert them into your website and blog pages where valuable, and share them on social media. You can always link them back to the source content and get more eyeballs (and probably SQLs!). Use this short-form content as a part of your newsletter or other email marketing activities.

Repurpose older content.

You don’t have to limit repurposing to when new content is released; give your existing content a second life by reposting evergreen content semi-regularly to introduce it to new members of your audience. Another way to make the most of your content is to refresh older or outdated content. Sometimes this is as easy as updating a few statistics and applying new best practices (and new CTA sets)—a quick win!

9. Take advantage of artificial intelligence.

AI is on everyone’s minds. In fact, Forbes reports that between 2023 and 2030, AI is expected to see an annual growth rate of 37.3 percent.

Many marketers are exploring ways to use AI in their content marketing efforts. But the relationship between AI and content marketing is just at the beginning of a long road of trial and error—there’s a lot of trust that needs to be built before marketing teams start outsourcing the entirety of content production to artificial intelligence. 

That said, there are several tools that, when used with caution, can help increase your content marketing and blogging production. We explore more in this post, but tools such as HubSpot’s AI blog writer and Jasper are new tools worth exploring.

It’s worth noting that, of course, using AI likely means you will have to spend additional time on editing, fact-checking, and correcting voice and tone. So while it’s fun to experiment with new tools, make sure you’re benchmarking your time to see if you’re actually being more efficient when using AI.

10. Remember that good content marketing is delivering helpful content.

Inbound marketing is about attracting customers by “creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them,” so as you are pushed to create more with less, it’s important to remember that sacrificing quality for quantity may not get you the results your marketing team is being held accountable for.

If you’re working on your content strategy, watch our free webinar on connecting your content strategy and SEO for more insights on how to build a meaningful content strategy.