Today, most customers conduct extensive research before contacting a brand. Therefore providing the right content puts you in control of your site visitors’ first experience with your brand. In addition, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional methods and guarantees three times the number of leads.
You should see your business content as an extension of your development team. It speaks on behalf of your company; thus, ensure that the message reflects your firm’s expertise in solving your target customers’ problems. This way, you will boost engagement, attract leads and encourage purchases. To create such content, you need mindful planning, collaborative thoughts, and time commitment; this is where content strategy workflow comes in. Read on to learn more.
What Is A Content Strategy Workflow?
A content workflow outlines each team member’s roles in an organization needs to play to publish a specific content type. It also defines all the steps involved in content creation. With a clear content strategy workflow, you can set deadlines to ensure the process runs smoothly. In addition, you will quickly identify any bottlenecks that can affect the process to ensure that content delivery is on track.
There is no single content strategy that suits all business models. It differs based on your unique organization’s team structure, tools, and platforms for project management and the internal approval processes. Here are the vital steps to create a manageable content strategy workflow for your marketing campaign.
Define Your Content Goals And KPIs
Your content strategy won’t work if you misalign it with your company’s goals. Therefore, ensure that each piece of content you want to produce has clear objectives so that you can measure performance later on for future improvements.
Brainstorm what you want to achieve with your content. Draw objective ideas from your business’s primary goals, position in the marketplace, and competition level. Also, research your competitor’s content. You will spot an information gap in your industry so you can produce more helpful information to boost your competitive landscape.
Again, look into your brand’s core elements, like vision, mission, visual identity, and messaging, to help create content that reflects your brand. Make your goals very specific and develop a straightforward way to attain them. The most common goals include;
- To drive brand awareness.
- To increase conversions
- To educate customers on products or services.
- To improve brand loyalty.
Run A Content Audit
After setting your goals, you must determine how to achieve them, so start with a content audit. Look into your existing content-creating strategy to assess the type of information you avail. Find out what content you might be leaving out, what is working, and what is not. Review five to ten pieces of your previous content, and group them into the top and low-performing segments. It will give you a clear picture of how well or poorly you communicate with your customers.
Determine what persona your content addresses, whether it comes in various formats, or you may want to include infographics, videos, or other content types. Again, check whether the content has a clear call to action and note anything that stands out, whether good or bad. It will help you understand areas in your content that you can repurpose to meet your goals. Finally, routinely review even your best-performing content and compare it with your competitors to determine how well you are faring.
Research And Ideate
To create a successful content strategy workflow, you must gather as much information about your campaign as possible. Determine your buyer personas, the person you are trying to connect with. Please learn more about what they care about, what interests them, the problems they need to solve, and what they need to improve their lives. You also need to understand your ideal customer’s demographics and budget.
You can create helpful content that addresses your target audience’s unique needs with such information. Now that you know your target audience, research topics that resonate with them. You can get ideas from what your customers continuously search for on the internet or tell your sales team.
Additionally, you can use your website analytics to know what content your site visitors often interact with. Further, do keyword research and look into your competitor’s content to gather views on what issues you can expand on.
Again, you can creatively approach your old topics in a new way. Please find customers’ most frequent questions about your company, their main challenges, and priorities, and provide information covering such issues. Stay current with current issues to provide content related to what’s going on globally.
Outline and Organize Content Topics Into Campaigns
You must now create a visual representation of how your content should appear. It will help guide your content workflow to ensure your ideas come out as intended. Next, outline your target keywords as a point of reference when making your final draft.
Next, lay out your content headlines to help you organize your information. Ensure that each header corresponds to a particular key phrase and arrange your content’s body to your satisfaction. For example, you can write the introduction first, then outline the other body parts in bullet form.
Another great approach is creating an editorial calendar that outlines what you need to publish within a specific time frame to ensure that you meet deadlines. Remember that consistency is paramount if you wish for a successful content strategy, so keep your team on track. Finally, outline all the different types of content you want to produce, be it blogs, eBooks, webinars, interactive elements, or infographics, to help you deduce the best fit.
Create and Optimize Content for Users and Search Engines
With clear goals and topics, it’s time to create your content. Place the researched information under the headers you outlined earlier on. Ensure the content flows naturally from point to point and provides viable solutions to your target customer’s problems. You must also optimize your content to rank better on search engine result pages. Include your main keyword in the first paragraph within your first 100 words. Also, publish long enough content that covers multiple topics to attract backlinks.
Remember that you are writing to your readers, not search engines, so make the content as relevant as possible. Put yourself in your reader’s shoes and consider what responses they would love for their search queries. It will guide you in creating an exciting piece that satisfies the searcher’s intent and entices them to share.
Clearly outline your content’s benefit in the title and Meta descriptions to convince your audience to continue reading. Provide unique content and cite recent information sources to emphasize your main points. In each piece of content, stick to a single idea and thoroughly explains it to avoid confusing your readers. Use simple, straightforward language so your audience can easily understand your information. Finally, include a call to action to allow your audience to respond to your business by sharing your blogs and purchasing your products or services.
Publish and Promote Content
Once you complete the writing phase, you need to place it somewhere people can view it. Your distribution channel will vary based on your company culture, industry nature, or goals. The most obvious way to promote your content is through social media. Since you want to get as many eyes as possible on your publication, post it across various social media platforms to increase your reach across social networks.
You can also use email marketing to distribute your content to your subscribers. Further, regularly upload the information on your website to give your customers something to always look forward to.
Measure Results Based on KPIs
Now it’s time to assess your content strategy workflow performance. Compare what you have spent on the content creation process with its returns. Refer to the key performance indicators or the quantifiable outcomes you planned to achieve on the first step.
You can use Google Analytics to determine whether you have hit your targets. You can track some metrics, including the conversion rate, social shares, engagement level, and leads. You can also measure the number of backlinks acquired, time spent on the pages, organic traffic, page views, and bounce-off rate.
Refine the Process and Begin Again
Content development is continuous; a project’s end marks another’s beginning. With a robust content strategy workflow, you can learn from one project’s results to develop better content. First, review your content marketing efforts monthly. Then, through trial and error, you will understand what works for your company and what doesn’t.
Note down any results from your previous content. If you notice that a particular format converts better than others, you may need to use it across other publications. You might get different results each time, so constantly monitor, test, and repeat. This way, you can create high-quality content to increase your brand’s traffic. The more often you track your results and gather insights from the data, the better you can refine your strategy.
Conclusion
Whether you have a new business trying to venture into digital marketing or an established enterprise looking forward to outdoing your competitors, a good content marketing strategy will help you achieve your goals. It would be best to have the correct content workflow that continually refines itself to help you find gaps and polish lagging areas to keep producing better content. With the above process, you can create content that delivers the best results for your organization.