How to Speed Up Your Content Creation Without Losing Quality
In order to succeed in our rapidly paced world, your brand needs to create great content — and lots of it. The average adult in the U.S. now spends over 11 hours consuming content each day, so if you’re not giving your audience what they want, they’ll find what they’re looking for elsewhere. With feeds refreshing every second with the latest trends and products, high-quality content creation needs to happen faster than ever.
Content creation can be overwhelming when you’re first getting the hang of things. Many companies hire entire content marketing teams to handle the enormous task. But once you can pair an established, repeatable process to follow with easy tools to speed up your work, you’ll be able to produce the best content for your followers and customers on multiple channels without wasting any time.
Here’s what you need to know to become a skillful content creator for your brand.
Start with a content marketing strategy
Like with all quality strategy-building, effective content creation begins with planning. Prioritizing time to brainstorm is key to building a successful content marketing strategy. Brainstorming allows you to generate content ideas with your audience in mind so you’ll know what the next steps are before you dive into the deep end of content creation. At this stage, you should also identify on which channels you plan to reach your audience and how you plan to engage with them. Think about your tone and voice now so you have a baseline from which to work going forward.
The following four steps can help you solidify your content strategy efficiently.
Step #1: Identify your content categories
Begin to build your content foundation by identifying three to five core content categories for your brand. These categories will be the overarching themes or topics that every piece of content you create should relate to in some way.
Say you run an Etsy store that sells vintage tees; your core categories could be product listings, style, and sustainability. Anything you post would then align with at least one of these concepts.
Setting your categories first will not only make your specific market niche clear to potential customers, but it will also keep you focused on what’s most relevant in your ideation phase.
Step #2: Establish content formats and publishing platforms
Admittedly the simplest step in this process, deciding which types of content you want to create for which platforms is helpful for picking up the pace with your content creation. All you need to do is identify your most important marketing channels (e.g., Instagram, LinkedIn, blogging, email marketing), then figure out the exact content formats you need for each channel (e.g., Instagram post, Instagram Story, Instagram Reels, IGTV).
If you don’t already know the appropriate channels for your brand, consider your target audience. Where are they spending most of their time? What kind of content would be most engaging for them? How can they access your brand through each of those channels?
Step #3: Define your visual identity
A distinct visual identity can turn an average-seeming company into a recognizable and memorable brand. Decide how you want to present your brand to the world to take out the guesswork of content creation in the future. Example questions that can get you started include: What colors and fonts are most popular among your customer base? What should your logo look like to best represent your brand? How can you relate your products to each other through your visual branding?
Once your visual identity is set, you can set up your brand in Adobe Express Premium to maximize efficiency. Just plug in your chosen colors, fonts, and logo to access a vast array of personalized and customizable templates for your brand.
https://express.adobe.com/sp/branding
With Adobe Express Premium, you can transform any logo ideas or future projects into branded content with a single tap, saving precious time while maintaining on-brand consistency for all your visual assets.
Step #4: Gather assets and share them with your team
Sourcing visuals eats up time during content creation. If you’re starting from scratch with every post, your brand’s image may end up diluted in the process. To keep that from happening, organize your photos and other visual assets into a library so that you have a curated collection of source material to parse through before you go down any stock photo rabbit holes.
The integration within Adobe Express Premium's Creative Cloud Libraries makes it easy to stay organized and continually share with team members, so everyone can work from the same on-brand assets.
Refresh your library seasonally or when you update your content categories so that you always have a backlog of on-brand visuals to use in your content creation.
Create your content calendar
Your editorial calendar will serve as the comprehensive homebase for your content strategy. Having a singular place to lay out your plans will help you stay organized as you finalize your content ideas and serve as a storyboard where you’ll insert the content you create to get a fuller picture of your strategy.
Now, this calendar doesn’t need to be fancy; all you really need is a basic spreadsheet. At minimum, create columns for the following:
- Publishing date
- Publishing time
- Format
- Category
- Post topic
- Copy
- Visuals
The first four columns of your calendar will establish when and where you’re publishing content, as well as what your content will be about. The “post topic” column — addressed in the next step — will allow for specificity before you create your content to fill out the final two columns.
Plan a month ahead
Bonus tip: Follow @adobecreativecloud on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook to get new content and hashtag ideas each month!
Once you’ve completed the first four columns of your editorial calendar, you should feel confident enough to generate specific ideas for each day and time you plan to publish. Do this on a weekly or monthly basis to stay ahead of your own calendar.
Another way to save time is to utilize the same concept across all the marketing channels you’ll be posting on each day.
Say you own a record store and you’ve decided to post from the content category “music history” on Christmas Day. You can then use the topic idea of “background info for the most popular Christmas songs” across all your chosen content formats. As you go through the content creation process, you can then optimize the same content for every platform — like editing a YouTube script into a blog post — instead of creating brand new content for every post.
A few sources that can inspire engaging content material for your brand include:
- Industry news
- Google Trends
- Trending hashtags and topics on Twitter
- Upcoming national holiday or social media holiday calendars
- Similar or competing social media accounts
Helpful content creation hacks
When you’re ready to bring your ideas to life, a streamlined process can really make a difference. These five content creation hacks can help you produce content for a variety of platforms faster than you’ve ever been able to before.
Hack #1: Create content in blitzes
It can take a while to get into the rhythm of regular content creation, but once your creativity is piqued, you can set your own pace. Instead of stutter-stop activity, carve out some time to create all your planned content for the week, or even the month. This way, you’ll already be in your creative flow and production will feel more natural.
Hack #2: Write copy first
A standard rule of thumb for efficient content creation is to start with the copy. This way, the visuals you pair with your written content are sure to be relevant to your pre-selected topics and themes. Plus, if you’re planning to create graphics, you can have the copy prepared for your visual as well.
Any longform content should come first. When optimizing for different content formats, it’s always faster and easier to edit down copy than to extend it.
If your first piece of content will be more than a few paragraphs, however, make sure to create an outline for your message before you start writing.
Need some help finding creative ways to express a topic idea in your brand voice? Consider these tips:
- Utilize search engines to seek out content on similar topics
- Use a tool like RhymeZone or The Idioms to experiment with wordplay
- Read through our list of 100 Instagram caption ideas
Hack #3: Start from inspiration
No one should have to start with an empty canvas. Search on Adobe Express for a relevant graphic as a foundation for your content. Scroll through thousands of templates and find the one that gives you an apt starting point for your desired message.
As you customize your chosen template, browse through over tens of thousands of design assets — including frames, shapes, and texture overlays — to find the best features for your brand aesthetic. With this asset library, there’s no need to DIY every single element of your designs.
Hack #4: Pivot to video animation
Evolve your copy into something everyone can enjoy by turning it into a trendy video animation! On Adobe Express, you can add motion to your graphics and pull in additional users as a result. With just a single tap, your graphics can level-up in their audience engagement.
Hack #5: Resize in a single tap
Every platform has different recommended dimensions for visuals. To make your content stand out on every platform you use, resize your designs in Adobe Express Premium with a single tap.
Select a free design template of your choice, then tap “Resize,” and choose your content type to create an instantly optimized graphic for additional platforms. Tap below to try the feature:
https://www.adobe.com/express/create
Bonus: Handy keyboard shortcuts
When you’re on a deadline, you need all the time you can get. So, we’ve coded some handy shortcuts to speed up some common editing actions. You can find the current list of available keyboard shortcuts in this Help Doc, with many more to come in the future.
Here are a couple of our favorite shortcuts:
- [Shift + Return/Enter] to quickly confirm your text edits without having to click the “Done” button.
- [Option/Alt + drag] allows you to duplicate the selected element and place it where you want by simply dragging it.
- [Cmd/Ctrl + G] to group selected elements together.
Templatize and remix what works
As you release new branded content on your channels, you’ll start to develop a sense of which posts resonate with your audience. Regardless of whether your most popular work leans toward bold and inspirational quote graphics or more refined, educational designs, whatever is garnering the most engagement should get the most space on your account. Challenge yourself to give these posts new life by remixing top performing designs or content types, then build from those projects to create your next round of content.
Content edits can be as simple as swapping out the lead color for another in your brand’s palette or tightening up the copy in a high-performing infographic. The more you can avoid starting from scratch, the faster and more efficient your content creation process will become.
Take a look at how these brands continually incur social media success by relying on templatized platform content:
Co-Star
Astrology app Co-Star proves that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you post. While the brand’s Instagram page offers new content every single day, its designs follow the same template — a simple switch between black and white backgrounds to denote new content.
Co-Star found the design that resonates most with their audience and capitalized on it, giving their 2 million followers consistency while keeping in-house content creation as low-effort as possible.
The Depression Project
Similarly, The Depression Project sticks to the same templates, posting educational content with consistent cover image templates each time. When they switch it up, it’s for a specific purpose. They communicate what the audience can expect from the full post by designating different icons and colors to each of their content categories — a simple way to build interest with minimal changes to a familiar template.
Find new post inspiration by browsing through Adobe Express' Instagram templates library, and start your own content creation process through templatization today!