4 Reasons Content Quality Declines When You Scale

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To stand out and move the needle, most brands come to a time when they need to increase the volume and/or breadth of their content. But as many brands amp up output, it’s common for content quality to dip. In fact, it’s one of the most common issues businesses cite when we first start working together. 

In this article, we look at four of the most common reasons content quality declines when scaling and discuss strategies and resources we’ve used at Eleven to help our partners scale successfully. 

Top 4 Reasons Content Quality Drops When Scaling—And What To Do About It

1. Inadequate Editorial Guidance

Content at scale means trying new formats, going after new keywords, attacking new subjects, entering new channels, and testing new strategies. That is a lot of moving parts!

As a result, it’s common for things to slip through the cracks or get lost in the shuffle. And minor inconveniences or errors can become major roadblocks at scale. 

At Eleven, we’ve found that the right kind of editorial guidance can help reduce the likelihood of that ever happening. That means investing enough time and resources into clear documentation for different roles and workflows. 

Comprehensive style guides, briefs, FAQs, and other instructional materials allow contributors to work more independently, with less stress, and with greater efficiency. They also let everybody know what they’re responsible for and what standards they need to meet. In the long run, this results in better-quality content, a happier team, less friction, and fewer frustrations. 

Strategies and Resources

• Strategy: Divide your documentation into evergreen and task-specific.
  
  Evergreen documentation stays the same from one article to the next. Examples include style guides, product and feature guides, and your company values documents (to name a few). At Eleven, we create a Getting Started document for each new project or partnership; this includes background information about the project and links to key documents and resources. Changes to evergreen documentation should be made infrequently, noted in a change log, and signed off by writers and editors.
  
  Task-specific documentation provides contributors with everything they need for the task at hand. In the world of content, this usually means a brief. Eleven Account Managers use a standard template as a starting point for different projects, verticals, and clients. Each brief includes sections on user intent, objectives and calls to action (CTAs), the client’s unique selling proposition (USP) and product/service features, audience persona(s), resources, style notes, and more — followed by a suggested outline.
  
  
• Strategy: Field-test new documentation. 
  
  ‍Whenever we tackle a new project, such as a series of articles, we create a purpose-made brief or template. Then, instead of diving in head-first, we have one or two writers test it out and report back on their experience. This approach invariably improves the brief, which leads to better-quality first drafts. And because we work exclusively with topic-expert writers, this gives them a chance to further apply their expertise to the subject at hand.
  
  

• Resource: Mailchimp’s free-to-use style guide is an excellent jumping-off point for creating your own style guide. You’ll want to update the first few sections — “Writing Goals and Principles,” “Voice and Tone,” and “Writing about Mailchimp” — to make them specific to your company.
  
  
• Resource: We created our own ☂️”Practically Perfect in Every Way” Article Checklist for writers and editors. It details what’s expected in every article and our standards for editorial excellence.

2. Driving by Intuition

Human intuition is impressive, but good marketers know it has limits. To reap the full benefits of a large-scale content operation, you must prioritise data. It should drive your strategy, reporting, and decision-making. 

That’s because, when we speak about “Quality” in content, we don’t just mean prose and structure. For a business, quality is also measured in terms of outcomes, i.e., commercial success. 

Unfortunately, many companies fail to grow the reporting and analytical side of the equation in step with production, which makes it difficult or impossible to know which content is generating actual sales revenue and contributing to brand growth.

Over time, this leads to lower-quality content, poor returns on investment (ROI), and an inability to compete with companies that have more sophisticated operations. Not a great situation, given the investments required to scale content!

Keyword, market, and competitor research are only part of the equation. This kind of data can help you determine what type of content to create at the outset, but attribution reporting is what will guide your strategy moving forward. 

At Eleven, we’ve developed a framework called Full-Funnel Attribution that allows you to connect upstream data about content (such as keyword clusters, product or feature mentions, CTAs used, even down to the length, reading level, and contributor) with actual outcomes (such as product sign-ups, demo requests, and sales meetings). 

Thanks to this, we and our partners have a very clear idea of what’s working and what’s not — based on real data rather than intuition. 

It takes a village…

Companies often fail to grow their data and attribution side in tandem with content production because content marketers are often expected to be experts in data collection and manipulation. However, data science is a field of its own. 

For example, we worked with various industry experts when we developed our Full-Funnel Attribution framework. The outcome is a repeatable framework that can be applied to virtually any marketing technology stack and production line — but getting to that point required the input of many different people. 

Whether you choose to work with consultants, hire a marketing data specialist, or partner with an agency like Eleven, you’ll need to expand your talent pool to move from intuitive to fully data-driven marketing. 

Strategies and Resources: 

• Strategy: Set yourself up for success by categorising or tagging content with relevant metadata, such as products or services mentioned, CTAs used, the author, the keyword cluster, the format, etc. If you use Google Sheets, Airtable, Monday, or Notion to track your content, simply add the relevant columns. This will give you much deeper insights into performance than titles and topics alone.
  

3. Uneven acceleration

It’s a running gag within the marketing community that content marketers are expected to know, well, just about everything. 

The reality is that there are only so many hours in the day and so many things one person can focus on. 

Despite this, it’s not unusual for a company to massively scale the rate of first drafts while failing to make proportionate investments in the rest of the supply chain. Most commonly, this looks like hiring a bunch of writers to create content (a must when scaling) without bringing in the necessary support — e.g., additional editors, better technology, or more efficient workflows.

Marketer burnout is a common symptom of uneven acceleration.

As content exceeds a team’s capacity to oversee its production, publication, and distribution, marketers get pulled away from other revenue-generating activities, and the demands on their time quickly multiply. 

By the time things come to a boiling point, content quality, output, morale, and returns on investment are all down.

 It’s no wonder, then, that a study by the Chartered Institute of Marketing found that 56% of marketers worry about burnout in their role.

Companies competing in today’s highly saturated, noisy markets may need more content to be seen, but failure to invest in more than just sheer output won’t help them achieve their goals — and may put their hardest workers at risk of burnout. 

When different parts of the content engine aren’t scaled relative to each other, things start to fall through the cracks: quality control breaks down, briefs and first drafts worsen, mistakes get published, and strategy gets forgotten in the shuffle. 

The bottom line is, for content to work at scale, you need the right people using the right tools with access to the right resources. Ultimately, that means investing in more than just output. 

Strategies and Resources

• Strategy: Use a collaborative whiteboard studio like Miro or Figjam to map out your entire content production pipeline, including all the steps and individuals involved.
  
  Think carefully about how much content each step in the pipeline can handle, and add weekly estimates based on current resources. 
  
  Any bottlenecks you identify are evidence of uneven acceleration and warrant additional investment.
  
  For example, say your writers can produce 15 pieces of content per week, but your lone, part-time editor can realistically only edit 10. You’ll soon run into trouble, either in the form of a backlog or sloppy editing.
  

• Strategy: Partner with an agency. Agencies bring several valuable things to the table.
  
  First, there’s all the documentation and templates they’ll have ready to jump-start production. Then, there’s the experience of working with dozens of companies and knowing what works best for different industries and markets. Finally, there’s the easy access to industry expertise. Agencies attract top-level talent and put those individuals at your disposal as needed.
  
  The right agency will act like an extension of your in-house team, lending support and overseeing all the most challenging aspects of scaling content. Most companies will find it far easier to scale with an agency’s support than to try to do it alone. 

4. Scaling at the wrong time for the wrong reasons

Scaling production is often seen as the first and best solution to boosting visibility. But that’s not always the case, nor is visibility the only needle worth moving. 

What’s more, pumping out content for content’s sake can actually be incredibly harmful to a company.

Consider the cautionary tale of Hubspot. Hubspot long dominated Search, thanks in part to the staggering size of its library of 150,000+ articles. However, much of this content strayed from Hubspot’s core industry and product: sales, marketing, and customer relationship management (CRM). 

For example, some of Hubspot’s top-ranking pages back in 2024 included: 

• “The Shrug Emoji”
• “Color Theory 101”
• “170+ Fun Icebreaker Games & Activities”
• A series of pages on quotes (“Famous Quotes,” “Work Quotes,” “Hard Work Quotes,” etc.)

Following the August 2024 algorithm update, Hubspot started to lose traffic. Then came the December 2024 spam update, which emphasized content relevance. Google rightly observed that Hubspot had gone way outside its lane, so it deemed specific content low-quality and “punished” the site accordingly: Hubspot lost millions of page views in just a few weeks. 

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Source: Ahrefs.com

The problem is this: When you start publishing content “just because,” you can quickly run through all the most relevant topics in an industry. If you continue in the same fashion without adjusting your strategy, you’ll be forced to write content that’s further and further away from your centre of focus — which can be very damaging to quality and performance.

Another issue comes from the fact that, as you scale, minor issues become big ones. You need to have all your ducks in a row before going down this route, or the content you create won’t do nearly as much good as it could. 

Before scaling, ask yourself:

• Do I have a clear idea of what works for my audience(s) and why?
• Are my pages well optimised for converting, from both a technical and editorial standpoint? 
• Am I tracking all the data I need to (e.g., have I set up key events in Google Analytics 4)?
• Am I using relevant distribution channels to full effect? 
• Is my content organised into meaningful clusters with appropriate internal links?

If your answer to any of these questions is “no,” you’re better off perfecting these elements first. That way, when you do scale, you’ll reap all the potential benefits of an extensive, coherent, fully optimised library. 

In the meantime, there are plenty of ways to move the needle without pumping out new content: 

• Strategy: Refreshing existing content. Rather than adding even more content, invest time and resources in improving what you already have. Refreshes are a great way to boost overall return on investment, and they’re often a lot easier than creating new content. Look for ways to improve UX and readability, optimize content for AI Overviews and Featured Snippets, and focus on improving quality over time.
  
  
• Strategy: Repurpose and redistribute. Clever marketers turn a single blog post into multiple LinkedIn or Twitter posts, content for their newsletter, a script for a video, etc. Find ways to distribute what you have through new channels and present it in new formats.
  
  
• Strategy: Focus on high-impact content. You can still create all kinds of content that can have an enormous impact without scaling. Original research and high-quality eBooks are fantastic lead magnets, while case studies and customer success stories are significant drivers of conversions for most companies. Create repeatable processes for these as you go so that when the time comes, you can publish them at scale.

Scale Smarter With Eleven Writing

Successfully scaling content requires the right mix of strategy, processes, and support. 

If you’re thinking of taking your content production to the next level, we would love to hear from you. Contact us today for a free consultation. We’ll help you assess potential issues and create a plan to scale up and achieve great results.