Content marketing is a strategic approach to creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and engaging content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and drive profitable customer action. But how do you manage the content creation process from start to finish? Here are some of the most important steps in your content marketing workflow.
Before you start producing any content, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and how you will measure your success. Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. For example, you might want to increase your website traffic by 20% in the next three months, or generate 50 new leads per month from your blog. Having SMART goals will help you align your content strategy with your business objectives and track your progress.
SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) are the foundation of your content strategy. Consider objectives like: Increasing website traffic by 20% in the next three months. Generating 50 new leads per month from your blog. Having clear goals ensures alignment with your business objectives and allows you to track progress.
Before beginning any content development project, it is critical to explicitly establish your goals. What do you intend to achieve through your content? Is the goal to raise brand awareness, drive website traffic, generate prospects, or position yourself as an industry thought leader? Well-defined goals provide a clear direction for your content strategy, allowing you to track the performance of your efforts and make adjustments as needed.
The next step is to understand who you are creating content for and what their needs, challenges, and interests are. You can use various methods to research your audience, such as surveys, interviews, analytics, social media, and buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers, based on real data and insights. They help you create content that resonates with your audience and addresses their pain points, questions, and goals.
Understand your target audience deeply: Needs: What problems are they trying to solve? Challenges: What obstacles do they face? Interests: What topics resonate with them? Research methods include surveys, interviews, analytics, social media insights, and creating buyer personas—detailed profiles of your ideal customers based on real data. Buyer personas guide content creation by addressing pain points, answering questions, and aligning with audience goals. Remember, a well-defined workflow ensures that your content resonates with your audience, meets your objectives, and contributes to your overall marketing success. ??????
Research. Understanding. Being genuinely curious about your topic. The more you can think like your audience, the better and more human your content becomes.
To create effective content, it's important to understand your audience. This means having a clear understanding of their persona, pain points, challenges, and more. By using customer insights to inform your content, you can create engaging and relevant materials that drive loyalty and business growth. Ultimately, customer-focused content is key to developing a successful content and product strategy.
Additionally, it's crucial to think about your INTERNAL audiences too. What types of content do multiple teams need across the company? How can your content plan benefit more than just one team? -- this gives you more allies who support what you do, which is a great way to increase budgets & team headcount long-term. Factor this into your audience too.
Once you have your goals and audience in mind, you can plan what type of content you will create, when you will publish it, and where you will distribute it. You can use a content calendar to organize your content ideas and schedule them according to your editorial plan. A content calendar can also help you coordinate your content marketing team and assign roles and responsibilities for each content piece. You should also consider how you will optimize your content for search engines and social media platforms, using keywords, meta tags, headlines, images, and hashtags.
Content planning isn't only about the practical steps of scheduling and publishing (although this is important) - it's also about planning the right balance of content for your audience. Yes, we all want to share vaulable content but make sure you do have some promotional content planned as well so that people know what you offer and how that could help them.
Planning your content will ensure it is consistent and cohesive with your content marketing efforts. By developing your content calendar and schedule, you can maintain a consistent flow of content that stays within your brand voice, tone, style, and messaging guidelines.
This is the stage where you turn your ideas into reality and produce high-quality, engaging, and relevant content for your audience. Depending on the format and style of your content, you might need different tools and skills, such as writing, editing, design, video, audio, or coding. You should also follow your brand voice and tone guidelines to ensure consistency and credibility across your content. You can use various software and applications to help you create your content, such as WordPress, Canva, Lumen5, or Audacity.
Before you publish your content, you need to review and approve it to make sure it meets your quality standards and expectations. You should check your content for accuracy, clarity, grammar, spelling, formatting, and alignment with your goals and audience. You can use tools like Grammarly, Hemingway, or Yoast to help you with this process. You should also have a clear workflow for content approval, such as who is responsible for reviewing, approving, and publishing the content, and how they communicate and collaborate.
The final step is to publish your content on the appropriate channels and platforms, such as your website, blog, social media, email, or podcast. You should also promote your content to reach a wider audience and drive more traffic, leads, and conversions. You can use various tactics to promote your content, such as paid ads, influencer marketing, guest posting, or email marketing. You should also encourage your audience to share, comment, and engage with your content, and respond to their feedback and questions.
Once you have followed through the process of ideation, creation, review, publish, and report. Don't solely depend on the analysis you gain from the metrics shown in each platform. Analyze the post and the kind of comments shared and DMs had with your audience to get an depth analysis of how your marketing efforts are being perceived by the audience.