Today is the second installment in our content marketing series, this time focusing on how to execute on awesome content. This is because we believe content is a currency. It is the marketplace for new ideas and, increasingly so, a core engine in providing value to businesses and to customers. Among the many people who use feedly, content marketers are some people who know this truth best.

Whether you’re at a startup or big company, time is the most coveted resource for many content marketers. In our feedly content marketing survey, 49 percent respondents said lack of budget was the biggest problem, 39 percent of respondents said lack of headcount, and 36 percent said it was the volume of content

Download the full State of Content Marketing Report here.

So we posted the question to two content marketing pros: Gregory Ciotti from Help Scout, and Kevan Lee from Buffer.

Some overall insights from our panelists:

• Being dedicated to content has enabled them to produce at a more efficient rate than when they were divided among marketing activities.
• If you have the resources, it helps to have someone dedicated to content strategy and separate people for content production.

In their own words:

Gregory Ciotti, Help Scout: 8 to 32 Hours

This is one of the toughest things to answer. You might sit down and write something for 40 minutes, but the process was five years in the making. The average time that it takes me is about an eight-hour work day, but you need to put in the research and the thinking into it, too. There’s probably a 16-hour disparity because I’m counting the time it takes to interview people and learn more. But for the writing part, a really solid post probably takes at least eight hours.

Kevan Lee, Buffer: 4 to 15 Hours

The time changes based on how much experience and how many blog posts you’ve written in that style.

My time got shorter and shorter the more I did it. I ended up getting it down between four and six hours per post. But that was after writing four to five posts a week. Within a few months, you’ve written over a hundred posts, so writing at that volume helps you cut down the time as well.

As we’ve grown the team, we’ve switched to encouraging the writers to be able to do two posts a week. So that would be like 30 hours of the week—so 15 hours per blogpost. It’s a way to ramp it up and get into the pace that you can get to once you’ve written at a high volume. It definitely depends, especially as you get the opportunity to practice.

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