The age of AI is here. 

Marketing teams can afford to churn out hundreds of articles, videos, and images for their marketing campaigns with a lean team. Something like this was unthinkable even two or three years back. 

While this is impressive, this is not necessarily a good thing. 

For one, it is distracting. The ability to produce content at scale means marketers want to experiment with multiple campaign ideas at once; a classic case of the Shiny Object syndrome.

Secondly, quality takes a backseat while quantity drives your marketing agenda. Just because you can produce and publish hundreds of Instagram posts does not mean that you should. 

Auditing your content for quality is difficult when you have hundreds of them.

So, what’s the right way to go about this?

What Drives Your Marketing Agenda?

Let’s be real. A marketer with AI tools at their disposal is like a child in a candy store. This is especially true for someone who has spent all their career justifying every marketing dollar spent.

While it may sound tempting to let AI do the hard work of building the campaign strategy; especially for social media – do not let AI define your marketing agenda. Instead, it is important to treat it as an enabler – a productivity enhancement tool that can amplify the output delivered by each of your resources. 

The right way to effectively scale your social media content creation is old school, and starts with defining your campaign strategy.

Defining Campaign Strategy

The first step in any marketing campaign strategy – social media or otherwise, is in defining your objectives.

What exactly are you going after, and how does this tie in with your overall revenue goals? 

For example, an apparel store could be launching their new Summer collection and want to launch promotional campaigns around it. 

The first step in this case is to work out the overall channel-wise acquisition plan. What percent of the overall target needs to come from the various channels like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and so on. 

This figure is arrived at based on how big you are in each of these channels, how well these channels have performed in your previous campaigns, and cost of content production for these channels. 

If you are looking beyond organic traffic, then you may also have to factor in the CPC (Cost Per Click) costs across these different mediums, and build a plan for what percent of revenues in each of these channels come from organic vs. paid. 

The final product could look something like this:

Work Out The Content Strategy

Once you know what kind of revenue output is expected from each of your social media channels, the next step is to work out your content strategy. 

There are two parts to it.  The first is content throughput. If you have to generate £25,000 worth of sales from your Instagram over a three month period, then what kind of content throughput should you be targeting?

To figure this out, you will first need to audit your past campaigns to know the kind of conversion that is expected from each post. 

For example, you may see that a discount campaign typically sees a 0.5% conversion rate for each post. And if each of these sales brings an average sale of around £10, then you will need 50 such posts to reach your target figure (assuming around 10,000 followers).

It is important to stress here that the numbers used in the example above are representative. A smaller shop with fewer followers will either need to post more, or spend more on ads. It ultimately is a decision that only you, as the marketer or business owner, can make. 

Once the target throughput has been finalised, you need to work out the other elements of your social media marketing campaign. 

While discount campaigns to drive sales are critical to grow revenue, a social media account that posts only this could soon see organic reach dwindle. 

This is because social media platforms incentivise engagement. Your account needs to post content that generates a ton of views, comments, and likes. We’ll call these engagement posts. 

To maximise ROI, you need to go with a specific plan for such engagement posts. Start with what your end-objective for such posts are. Do you want to grow followers? Or, reach a specific number of brand views? Or, drive these viewers to your email newsletter on platforms like Mailchimp? 

Based on these goals, set up specific targets like new followers, or email subscribers and make sure that these objectives are met through such engagement posts.

Ideally, you should publish one conversion-targeted post for every 3 submissions. This would mean that in the above example, the total number of posts required to run your summer collection campaign could be 114 Instagram posts, and 129 TikTok posts.

Once the campaign and content strategies are finalised, the next step is to work on effectively scaling your social media content creation.

Content Planning And Templates

In the example we have used for this article, the marketing team needs to publish around 114 Instagram posts, and 129 TikTok posts to reach the target sale numbers. 

While this may seem like a humongous task, it’s not really that daunting once you have planned the production details. 

For one, Instagram and TikTok have similar content formats. This means that a lot of content produced for Instagram can be repurposed for TikTok, and vice versa. Your marketing collateral may look different if you were planning for two completely different social media channels (LinkedIn, and Facebook, for instance). 

Regardless of which platforms you choose to distribute your content on, you will find that there are always content ideas that could be repurposed and redistributed. This will bring down your content planning and production costs.

In addition to this, you will also notice that not all content needs to be built from scratch. Social media teams typically work with content templates – these are the basic formats that can be reused in different contexts. 

You could get the basic templates ready with the help of tools like Canva and Adobe Express and scaling up production becomes quite straightforward after this is done.

With Canva, you could also use one of their thousands of pre-built templates to use for your brand instantly.

While images for social media content is relatively straightforward, social media videos are a different ball game altogether. 

This is especially true for creative videos that go beyond showcasing your products. Generative AI technology can be quite handy in scaling up production of such videos. 

Once the content has been produced and reviewed, the next step is with distribution. With hundreds of social media posts going up across your different social media platforms, setting up the systems necessary to publish specific pieces of content at the right time could be a time-consuming task.

One way to navigate this challenge is to use AI agents that can be programmed to perform a specific set of tasks like reviewing the content for technical issues, modifying them to the necessary format and file size requirements, and publishing them on the social media channels at the right time of the day. 

You could also further program the agent to monitor these posts periodically and update the engagement metrics in a spreadsheet for your analysis. 

While AI agents can help automate content distribution, a robust social CRM system complements this by organising audience interactions for easy response management. Many viral social media moments come not from the original content but from how brands respond to comments and messages. This two-way communication should be considered part of your overall content strategy and resource planning.

Challenges With Scaling Content With AI

By now, you should have a fair idea of how to get scaling right.

• Start with the end-objectives (sales targets)
• Identify the volume of content production necessary to achieve the target
• Build templates and plan batch production to enable seamless scaling
• Use AI tools to efficiently create and edit hundreds of visual content at scale

While this may seem pretty straightforward, the process is replete with challenges. 

Consistency: As a brand, you have your brand voice, and platform-specific objectives to take care of. While AI-based content can be easy to produce in high volume, getting the prompting right in order to ensure a consistent output each time can be a challenge. A skilled AI-expert could ensure that the right prompts are used each time in order to enable this. 

Quality control: Generative AI is only as good as the dataset that they are trained on. Studies in the recent past have shown that a lot of generative AI tools can deliver sexist and racist outputs; largely due to the datasets used for training these models.  This is not unsurmountable. However, it is important to understand what kind of datasets your AI engine is trained in order to achieve the desired output.

Repetitive: Art and creatives are one area of business that AI has often been touted to have taken over. Ironically enough, one thing that AI still lacks to a large extent is originality. Given the nature of AI modelling, output can often be seen as repetitive and unoriginal. In effect, it can be a lot of work to generate output that is a ‘first of its kind’.

Copyright: An extension of the above point is AI’s issue with copyright. Using generative AI for commercial content is risky business given that users can never be sure about the content these engines were trained upon. This can lead to copyright and plagiarism issues that are not only a legal headache for businesses, but could also be potential PR disasters in the making.

Ultimately, AI-produced content goes through the same level of rigorous review to ensure brand integrity and content quality, and this could require several additional layers of editing; making the whole process less cost effective than they were budgeted to be. 

But this is not to dismiss the entire social media content creation process. As mentioned earlier in this article, AI tools serve as an enabler or a productivity enhancing platform. The process is still largely manual and the success of it depends on the campaign and content strategy that goes in planning the production.

Tracking Results

As a marketer, it is imperative to acknowledge your real objectives. In this case, that would be the monthly or quarterly sales you can clock from your social media campaigns. Ultimately, it does not matter whether you achieve your targets through AI or through a scaled-up content approach. 

Depending on the resources in hand, and your technical prowess, your results from scaling up social media content creation can vary significantly. Understanding the results achieved through your campaigns becomes important. 

Track every post and creative in terms of user engagement, visibility, click-throughs, and conversion to understand what works, and what doesn’t. Scale up the formats that work, and turn off the formats that don’t.

This way, you ensure a perfect balance between content scale-up and the end results.