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Growing traffic can be a bittersweet experience when you’re first starting out in content marketing. On one hand, you’re thrilled to see your posts gaining traction as incoming traffic and engagement climbs. On the other hand, your growing audience demands frequent content updates and they expect you to deliver good material.

You might be able to manage the content by yourself initially, or with the help of an in-house employee or freelancer. At some point though, that increase in traffic means your team and your content strategy are going to have to “grow up.”

Fail to grow your content team and you could find yourself among the 57% of marketers who are struggling to consistently produce content. A lack of resources and slow output can limit the top of the funnel content and make it a lot more difficult to properly nurture leads — let alone attract them. 

Is your team experiencing growing pain? Do you think it might be time to add another set of hands … or maybe even a few? Check out the 10 warning signs below to determine if it’s time to make a change, as well as actionable tips to alleviate strain on your team if you do decide you’re not quite ready.

10 Signs It’s Time to Grow Your Content Team

1) Deadlines are looming (or rushing by).

An editorial calendar is supposed to make it easier for you to track everything going through the pipeline. It helps you stay on top of topic areas and ensure that content is published on a regular basis.

But if you find yourself faced with constantly looming deadlines, or worse, missed deadlines, then you might have a problem on your hands.

While some people work well under pressure, feeling it constantly can create a need to just get things done as soon as possible — leaving little time for polishing. And drop in content quality is not going to do you any favors.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Prioritize your writing by adjusting your deadlines for less time-sensitive projects. This will give your more room to breathe.
• Repurpose older content to give your production schedule a break.
• Hire additional writers on contract. (Check out this post for tips on hiring freelancers.)

2) Editing is eating up all of your time.

The magical combination of a great writer and an experienced editor is content marketing gold. Quality posts can be written quickly with minimal editing and a good editor can glance through and add the finishing touches to a well-written piece in a fairly short timespan.

But if content is written in a hurry with little to no in-depth research and hordes of grammatical and spelling errors, then editing can turn into a lengthy process that steals you away from other important business matters you need to focus on. This is especially true when you hire one or more new writers: there’s always an adjustment period as they learn your specific style guide and find their groove.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Improve your onboarding process so new writers have clear direction on your writing expectations, style, and formatting preferences
• Hire an experienced editor on contract to handle a majority of the proofreading duties.
• Gather advice from a former HubSpot Editor here or tips on how to quickly improve any piece of writing here. 

3) Research leaves little room for production.

To build credibility, a lot of your content will require you to collect authoritative data, conduct quality research, and provide proper citations. There are no shortcuts here: It can sometimes take hours just to research and produce a single post.

If the time you spend researching starts cutting into other projects and little time is left for actually writing the content, then you have to take action right away. When this happens, some marketers scale back production or let time slip by without getting content published, but don’t fall into that trap.

When you start skimping on research, you start skimping on quality, so don’t take this one lightly.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Diversify your content to fill schedule gaps. A quick video might be easier for you to publish than a 2,000 word blog post (just don’t skimp on value).
• Expand your pool of writers to more than just one. Hire enough writers to maintain consistency and quality in your editorial calendar.

4) Quality is slipping.

I mentioned this in the above warning sign, and I’ll mention it again: Quality is key. If you have a team of one or more writers and the quality of their content is starting to slip, then you need to evaluate your production process.

Are your writers getting enough down time? Are projects being managed well? Are projects being assigned to the right team member based on their expertise and skills?

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Acquire a project management system to streamline the production process.
• Stagger project schedules for your writers to give them more downtime and promote better work/life balance.
• Change topic assignments if possible to give writers more variety.
• Hire a project manager skilled in content marketing to better handle and manage projects.

5) You’re falling short on engagement.

Content marketing involves so much more than just publishing content. In most cases, your audience wants to engage in the comments, or on social, or via email, too. 

If you’re not responding, then your engagement levels might take a hit — readers often want to see that you’re actually paying attention to them.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Schedule at least 10 minutes in the morning and 10 minutes in the afternoon/evening to respond to comments.
• Hire a social/community manager to handle your engagement across the channels you use for promotion and branding. 
• Issue a survey that asks your audience for their feedback directly to prove that you do value their opinion. 

6) You have a poor promotion plan.

One critical aspect of your content marketing strategy is the promotion of your content across a variety of channels. Although there are many useful tools to help you distribute content online, content promotion is still a time-consuming effort for each piece of content you publish.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Use social publishing tools (like HubSpot) to streamline promotional efforts.
• Use a process management tool such as inMotion, TallyFy or Process Street.
• Use these free social media image templates to create more engaging post promotions on the fly.
• Hire a virtual assistant to handle content promotion for you.
• Delegate content promotion to a dedicated project/content manager.

7) You’re constantly dealing with inconsistent posts and missed opportunities.

If you suffer from irregular posting habits, regularly miss out on great content ideas, or leave trending topics out of your content marketing strategy, then it’s time to reevaluate your approach. Perhaps you don’t have the time to dedicate to strategy and planning right now, or your current strategy is stagnating and you don’t know where to go from here.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Create a documented content marketing strategy so your needs and expectations will be clearly outlined for each day, week, month.
• Allot time each day, even if it’s just 10-15 minutes, to check for changes and trends happening in your industry. (Try these 35 IFTTT hacks to save even more time here.)
• Use sites like AllTop to simplify your content curation efforts.

8) You’re lacking content diversity.

If you limit the types of content you produce, then you also limit your potential engagement. Your audience may have different preferences when it comes to consuming content: Some prefer to read articles while others might prefer visuals, video, or audio.

Diversity is important in content marketing, and you should reanalyze your audience research to figure out what other types of content might work best for your audience.

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Hire a contract designer or video specialist to test out custom images and video.
• Use an online tool like Canva to easily add more engaging images to your content. 
• Check out HubSpot’s 386+ free content creation templates to simplify your process.
• Hire a freelance designer to repurpose older content into new material, like an infographic or SlideShare. 

9) You’re missing out on conversions.

Poor conversion rates are caused by a variety of factors, from minor design flaws to poorly worded or missing calls-to-action. A lack of steady conversions can also be a result of content that isn’t mapped appropriately to your sales funnel or the buyer’s journey. Rather than guessing how you can improve conversions, you may want to consider expanding your team by adding an expert on conversion rate optimization (CRO).

What You Can Do Right Now:

• Don’t just create content for the top of the funnel (acquisition). Adding lead nurturing content to the mix to provide vitiors with a next step can make all the difference.
• Hire a CRO specialist to help you map content to buyer intent and your sales funnel.
• A/B test content offers to see what your audience prefers.
• Leverage heatmap software like Hotjar to get a better read on your website visitors’ behavior.

Are You Ready to Expand?

When you’re ramping up your content marketing efforts, it’s important to continually reassess the function and performance of your team as often as you monitor and evaluate your metrics. Set benchmarks or triggers that let you know early on where bottlenecks might form in your content creation and promotion.

Be proactive in the expansion of your content team to stay on top of your workload and avoid problems that might arise if you wait too long to hire experienced writers and editors to help you.

Have you run into any of these problems as you expanded your content marketing efforts? How did you address them? Share your tips with me in the comments below.

Back-to-school season is here, and it’s bigger than ever. In the U.S., 17.2% of the entire year’s retail sales happen during back-to-school shopping. That’s a cool $828 billion dollars annually.

But, there’s a big way that the back-to-school season differs from the holidays – discounts. 46% of shoppers said that price is one of their main deciding factors for purchasing, and almost 10% of shoppers said their purchases were 100% influenced by deals.

With such price sensitive shoppers, you need to focus on customer lifetime value, instead of the value of this first purchase. Develop a strategy to continue to build your relationship with these shoppers (and at the same time, get them to come back and purchase from you again). With that foresight, you’ll be able to benefit from these customers through the holiday season.

Check out the infographic below from The Shelf for more data, tips, and tricks to get back-to-school ready.

Did you know that the top 20% of your current customers contribute 70% of your total sales? How about that keeping a customer costs 3–10X less than acquiring a new one?

There’s a lot to love about customer loyalty programs, from higher retention rates to the likelihood they’ll spread the word about your business with their friends. The key to a successful loyalty program is offering actual value to your customers.

If that sounds like a program you want to build for your customers, get started by reading through the infographic below from Antavo. It’ll lead you through the process of building a successful program, from giving it a catchy name all the way to creating touchpoints for customer enrollment.

The result? Happy customers that’ll buy from you again and again. (For more ideas, check out this post on seven different types of customer loyalty programs that actually add value.)

When every new knick-knack on the block is labeled “disruptive” within an hour of its launch, how do we know if something actually breaks new ground?

The fitness industry is a perfect case study for real innovation. Estimated to be the next trillion dollar market, it‘s proof that people are more than willing to shell out for pricey equipment, clothing, apps, and tech to improve their workouts and health. But even among constant giants such as Nike and Weight Watchers, people are always looking for the next big thing to emerge.

These six little-known fitness brands are each redefining the fitness space with their business models and advertising tactics. Their ability to carve out lucrative niches in a crowded market is impressive, and any business looking to re-vamp their image should take note.

6 Innovative Fitness Brands

1) Peloton

Using tech to revitalize studio fitness.

This tech-driven cycling startup offers fitness aficionados and amateurs alike an at-home alternative to SoulCycle’s studio classes. Cycling workouts are streamed live from the company’s New York studio, and anyone with Peloton’s touch screen-equipped stationary bike can tune into the action.

While the adrenaline rush is surely a powerful lure for riders to keep on peddling through multiple classes, the brand wants to make the social element addictive. Currently, users can follow each other’s remote workout activity streams and share their progress on Facebook. But they want to take it a step further. The company’s Vice President of Community Jayvee Nava has been working to cultivate a sustainable community on Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube to get Peloton’s 12,000 riders more socially invested. “The group fitness experience needs people to feel that community part,” Nava explained to Fast Company.

It seems to be working so far. Peloton has developed an undeniable cult following, and its new CMO Lori Marcus thinks the biggest challenge for the company has been clearly communicating to the public what they actually do. To remedy this, Peloton recently enlisted the help of agency Partners & Spade to spin up a “comprehensive brand refresh” in the form of print and TV ads aimed at educating consumers.

2) Outdoor Voices

Changing the fitness narrative.

This indie fitness apparel brand is poised to dethrone long-reigning powerhouse Lululemon as the dominant force in the $100 billion athleisure space. Founded by a 27-year old graduate of Parsons The New School for Design, Outdoor Voices sets itself apart in a crowded market by focusing on accessibility above all else. While other fitness brands preach a credo of high-performance workouts and no excuses, Outdoor Voices stands behind a much more attainable motto: “Doing things is better than not doing things.”

The casual, authentic approach to working out shines through in its advertising. The brand’s first campaign was a simple Instagram hashtag — #DoingThings — that invited users to highlight the ways that physical activity is naturally woven into their day-to-day routines. The campaign’s approachable sentiment resonated with young consumers and led ultimately to the inaugural Doing Things Day, a fundraiser to fight childhood obesity.

The brand’s blog also manages to champion the accessible side of fitness, featuring posts about light and social exercise ideas, such as how to play frisbee and stretches you can do at the office.

Image Credit: Outdoor Voices

3) Bandier

Making brick-and-mortar worth the trip.

A three-story, 10,000-square-foot space might seem a bit ambitious for a startup fitness apparel boutique, but there’s a catch: Bandier only uses one floor to actually sell its high-end merchandise. The rest of the multi-use space is devoted to lounges, music, events, and food. The top floor even hosts a fitness studio, offering a wide selection of playfully named classes — like “New York Pilates” and “Yoga for Bad People.” 

Converting traditional brick-and-mortar spaces into multi-purpose venues for social events and other activities is a growing trend among retailers. When people have the option to shop online, it takes considerably more effort to get them off the couch and through the doors of a flagship store.

But Bandier’s expansion into a hybrid retail and event space is unique for its industry. The athletic apparel space might be a booming market, but the vast majority of brands are adhering to a digital-first ecommerce business model, avoiding permanent storefronts altogether. “We don’t have competition in the format that we are in,” said Neil Boyarsky, one of the stores‘s founding partners. “Other companies sell activewear online, but they don’t have brick and mortar.”

The risky business model has paid off. Bandier already has multiple locations in the U.S. and is looking to expand into Europe. 

Image Credit: Racked NY

4) Kit and Ace

Redefining fitness apparel for luxury consumers.

Founded by the former head designer of Lululemon and her son, Kit and Ace has carved out a uncommon niche for itself as the athleisure brand for the luxury market. While other fitness brands are immediately recognizable for their flashy patterns and neon color schemes, Kit and Ace has positioned itself as the grown-up antidote. Its subdued palette and classic tailoring is more reminiscent of Banana Republic than Nike, enabling the brand to comfortably straddle the line between fashion week and yoga class.

So what actually makes its clothing athletic apparel? It’s all in the materials. Namely, its signature “technical cashmere”: a stretchy fabric made from synthetic materials and a hint of real cashmere sourced from mountain goats.

More important than the fabric itself — which is flying off the shelves — is the way they market it. Cashmere isn’t the main component of “technical cashmere”, but adding it to the name certainly screams high-end. And its not stopping at that; the brand is perfecting a stretchy athletic silk-based material as well: “technical silk”.

By giving an athletic update to traditional luxury fabrics, Kit and Ace has been able to break into the upper echelons of the fashion universe — a place no athleisure brand has been before.

Image Credit: Christopher Deagle

5) EVEN Hotels

Adapting to a powerful demographic.

IGH hotel group saw a gap in the travel market for health and fitness-centric hotels, and it  decided to fill it. EVEN Hotels presents travelers with an appealing alternative to the typical gluttonous breakfast buffets and crowded leisure pools of most hotel chains. Health-conscious travelers can expect world-class fitness centers, standing work stations, high-end spas, and a carefully curated menu of healthy food options — complete with small dessert portions (because even health nuts enjoy some balance).

As part of its marketing plan to make a big impression on the wellness industry, the brand launched Wellwellwell by EVEN Hotels, a hub for articles on how to remain healthy while traveling. The initiative has allowed EVEN Hotels to capture thought leadership real estate in the coveted health junkie space. Articles such as The Best Restaurants for Vegan Travelers and Secrets to Staying Fit During Wedding Season deeply resonate with its target demographic.

EVEN Hotels is a perfect example of how the fitness craze doesn’t stop at the gym or even with gym clothes. The wellness industry commands significant consumer power, and other industries can benefit from catering to the health-conscious.

Image Credit: EVEN Hotels

6) Lark

Developing an accessible and personal approach to wellness.

What if you could carry a health coach around in your pocket? Lark is just that: an app designed to monitor your movement, ask about your meals, and help you be healthier through friendly, natural conversations. For example, if you tell Lark that you ate “bacon and eggs” for breakfast, the bot will kindly remind you, “That’s the third time this week you’ve had bacon,” and offer up some better alternatives. It’s all about changing behavior patterns. “The interface of empathetic coaching and chatting, having a conversation with people, is a big part of that,” explained CEO and co-founder Julia Hu.

The App Store has no shortage of fitness apps, so what really sets Lark apart? It takes a more holistic approach to health, forgoing the tedious calorie and mile trackers of other fitness apps in favor of personalized recommendations and positive reinforcement. Lark knows when you’ve been stationary for too long and encourages you to get up and go for a quick walk. It monitors your sleep patterns and knows when you might need to clock in a few more hours. Most impressively, it acknowledges when you make progress, cheering you on for the extra mile or when you reach for an apple instead of chips.

Lark’s human touch comes from real health coaches. “We basically cloned tens of thousands of conversations and interventions that these health experts knew would be effective in helping people get more active and eat healthier and sleep better,” Hu said.

Image Credit: Lark

Featured image credit: Outdoor Voices