Here are useful resources to help you find people with the right talent and skills for outsourcing your content needs.
Outsourcing Resources
Here are useful resources to help you find people with the right talent and skills for outsourcing your content needs.
In this section, you will find a list of useful resources to help you when outsourcing your content needs.
These resources can help you find people with the right talent and skills to complement your business.
We’ll briefly discuss some of the benefits and challenges of outsourcing and then provide a list of content-related areas you can outsource and sites where you can search for freelancers and outsourced service providers.
Outsourcing basically means hiring someone outside of your business to do work that your business needs done.
Outsourcing provides a number of benefits such as allowing you to focus on your core business areas, reduce operational costs, and save you time hiring and training people with the right skills to meet various needs in your business.
You can outsource almost every aspect of content creation and content promotion…even content strategy, planning, and management!
Outsourcing effectively, however, requires managing the outsourcing process itself. With content creation, for example, this includes finding, interviewing, and recruiting freelancers with the right skills, providing your outsourced talent with clear briefs and instructions regarding the work and tasks to be completed, and having documentation they can follow like processes, workflows, and checklists to ensure delivery of the work in a timely manner.
Outsourcing is also not without its challenges. For example, a common problem that many businesses face when outsourcing is how to consistently maintain a high level of quality.
Create SEO strategy, perform topic and keyword research, content silos, etc.
Implement SEO methods, create internal linking, monitor analytics and improve campaigns, perform outreach campaigns to improve backlinks, etc.
Email Marketing
Develop email campaigns
Write emails, newsletters, roundups, etc.
Email campaign scheduling, posting, tracking, analysis, and reporting
Manage email lists, etc.
Blog Management
Write/update blog content
Upload content to the blog
Improve content as per style & formatting guidelines, SEO guidelines, etc.
Manage post comment replies, comment spam, etc.
Social Media Management
Create social media content
Manage social media campaigns
Graphic Design
Create illustrations, artwork, graphics
Create presentations, infographics, multimedia
Create ads, banners, mockups, etc.
Video/Audio Production
All areas of video/audio planning, scripting, recording, production, publishing, conversion, etc.
Translations – translate website pages and content for audiences in other countries/languages
Transcriptions – transcribe audio recordings, videos, and webinars, create captions and subtitles, etc.
Outsourcing Checklists
Use the checklists below if you plan to outsource any area of content production, content promotion, content planning, etc.:
Before Outsourcing
Define your needs, projects, and scope of work.
Research the specific tasks and areas you plan to outsource (who is best to approach, i.e. contractors, freelancers, specialists, etc., where to find them, what are the standard rates, what tools they will need, average timeframes for delivery of work, etc.).
Develop a hiring system (e.g. job post descriptions and brief, interview questions and tasks, contracts, trial assignments, etc.)
Have examples of existing content you can provide to freelance or outsourced writers to illustrate what you are looking for.
Create filtering criteria to screen applicants (e.g. check their social profiles, request social proof of positive previous client experiences and satisfaction, review their ratings, look for red flags such as negative comments or feedback from previous clients, etc.
Freelance Outsourcing Sites
Here are some useful sites for finding people with the right talent and skills to help you with your content-related projects.
Blogging Pro
Blogging Pro
Blogging Pro offers more than just content writing jobs. You can also find editors, copywriters, journalists, magazine writers, social media content writers, and writers specializing in different niches.
If you’re looking for higher-quality content, Contena provides access to expert part-time or full-time freelance writers, editors, and content creators.
Craigslist has a section that lists writing and editing services.
Craigslist provides a section where freelance writers can list their writing and editing services. Every city has its own database, so depending on where you are located or which city’s board you are looking at, you may or may not find suitable listings.
Note: Craigslist has a reputation for scams, so it’s a case of buyer beware.
Fiverr is an online marketplace where you can outsource content-related work to freelancers such as content writing, copywriting, video editing, proofreading, etc.
Most service providers on Fiverr charge low prices, so expect a general level of content quality and expertise to match what you are paying for.
Having said this, however, many beginner freelancers use Fiverr to gain experience and testimonials before moving on to higher-paying work, so you can find talented freelancers who are trying to become established.
Freelance Writing is an established US-focused freelance writing website with advanced search and navigation options that make finding talent in your niche easy.
iWriter is a freelancing site where you enter specific project details like the type of content you want (e.g. articles, article rewrites, blog posts, product descriptions, ebooks, etc.), add your target keywords, article word count, niches or topics, select writer skill level (you will pay more for premium-level writers than standard writers), content brief, and whether you want writers that you have built a relationship with to take on your project.
Writers will then create your content based on the specs you have provided. You then review and either approve or reject the content. If you approve the content, the selected writer will get paid for their work, and you can download the content and add it to your website.
The video below shows you how to order articles on iWriter.com:
MediaBistro is a creative job site for media and content professionals like graphic designers, copywriters, social media managers, marketers, editors, proofreaders, video creators, and more.
Check out this site if you are looking to outsource work in areas like writing, publishing, social media, SEO, marketing, communications, or any other type of creative area.
Scripted is an end-to-end content solution for SMBs, media publishers, agencies, and enterprise businesses.
Scripted offers various plans to suit different business needs with services like providing free content ideas and recommendations, publishing integrations, performance analysis, quarterly content strategy, content calendar creation, end-to-end content production, content publishing, writer prioritization, dedicated account manager, and more.
The Content Panel is a content-writing service that provides experienced content writers for articles, product descriptions, SEO content, website content, copywriting, blog management, freelance writing, and ghostwriting services.
You can use their calculator to estimate the cost of your content writing depending on the type of project, word count, and level of writer quality.
Estimate the cost of your project using The Content Panel’s online calculator.
Upwork is a popular site for sourcing freelance content writers.
You can post jobs and hire professionals using Upwork’s Talent Marketplace, browse and buy projects from their Project Catalog, or let Upwork find you the right outsourcing talent for your team.
WriterAccess is an AI-powered platform that lets you find and hire screened, proven writers, editors, and designers at affordable rates, optimize content and streamline your workflow.
Freelancers are star-rated by customer reviews combined with performance algorithms.
Writers Work is a freelancing jobs board where you can find freelance writers in areas like general website content writing, blogging, copywriting, social media posts, ghostwriting, journalism, and more.
Unlike other platforms, you won’t find freelancers for areas like editing, transcriptions, or similar-type work.
Posted jobs go live within 24 hours and stay live for 30 days. You can also choose to feature your listings.
Here are frequently asked questions about content outsourcing:
What is content outsourcing?
Content outsourcing is the practice of hiring external professionals or agencies to create, manage, or distribute content on behalf of a business.
What are the benefits of outsourcing content?
Outsourcing content can save time, provide access to specialized expertise, maintain consistency, and often reduce costs compared to hiring in-house staff.
What tasks can be outsourced in content management?
Tasks such as content creation, editing, proofreading, content strategy development, SEO optimization, social media management, and content distribution can be outsourced.
How do I choose the right outsourcing partner for content?
Evaluate their portfolio, expertise in your industry, communication skills, turnaround time, pricing structure, and reviews or testimonials from previous clients.
What are the potential challenges of outsourcing content?
Challenges may include miscommunication, cultural differences, quality inconsistencies, intellectual property concerns, and dependency on external parties.
How can I ensure quality when outsourcing content?
Define clear guidelines, provide detailed briefs, offer feedback, establish regular communication, and consider starting with a small project to gauge quality.
What are common questions to ask when outsourcing content writing services?
Questions may include inquiries about the writer’s experience, expertise in your niche, turnaround time, pricing structure, revision policy, and rights to the content.
How do I manage content outsourcing effectively?
Set clear expectations, establish deadlines, provide necessary resources, use project management tools, maintain open communication, and review deliverables regularly.
Video Courses For Beginners – Outsourcing
The video courses below cover basic areas of outsourcing digital services like content creation and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):
Learn how to create, launch, and sell high-quality digital products like downloadable reports, e-books, videos, and audio content quickly and cost-effectively.
Password Managers provide an easy and secure way to keep track of all your passwords. This video course shows you how to use powerful and FREE password management tools.
Learn how to use news releases effectively to boost your search engine rankings, drive more traffic to your website, and generate new leads for your business.
Careerminds provides a useful guide on the pros and cons of outsourcing with research questions to ask candidates, outsourcing evaluation forms, an outsourcing transition framework, and an outsourcing due diligence checklist.
These membership sites are free to join and contain valuable resources and information on internet marketing and digital entrepreneurship.
Free Marketing Membership Sites
These free membership sites contain valuable resources and information that will help improve your traffic, sales, marketing, copywriting, and business skills.
We have secured a number of freemium membership sites giving you free access to valuable information that can help to improve your skills in areas like internet marketing and digital entrepreneurship.
Feel free to register for one or all of the free membership sites listed below:
Power Copy Club shows you how to write captivating, cash-pulling headlines.
Inside this free membership site, you will learn about:
The three components of a good headline and how to combine these factors for maximum cash-pulling effect.
The two best ways to keep your prospect’s eyes glued to your sales page.
Secrets to crafting compelling sales letters and sales video script openers.
How to create irresistible benefit statements. Learn the right way to brainstorm, develop and showcase product benefits for maximum conversion.
Get an inside look at the perfect video sales letter. Discover the essential ingredients to creating high-converting video sales letters that outperform text-only sales pages every time.
Why the digital product business is the best business in the world.
How to start building your own digital empire with a variety of easy-to-create products.
How to recognize a hungry market and what steps you need to take to give your business a profitable start.
How to create “Blow Their Socks Off” ebooks and reports with content that will impress your visitors, turn them into buyers, and turn buyers into repeat customers.
The five secrets of creating edutaining content that gets visitors and buyers coming back for more.
How to create professional video products and hot-selling software and apps without high-end directing and coding skills, and the equipment you need.
Traffic Generation Club shows you how to start getting better traffic results by understanding the key differences between traffic quantity and traffic quality.
In this free membership site, you will learn:
How to get a horde of eager affiliates promoting your products all over the web.
How top vendors create affiliate programs that everyone wants to be a part of and how to get super affiliates to drive traffic to your sites.
A clever way to siphon traffic from Facebook using an overlooked strategy that can attract thousands of eager customers to your business.
Three ways to optimize your existing traffic and turn it into even more traffic and more sales.
Web Profits Club shows you many different ways to make money online.
Inside this free membership site, you will learn about:
The truth about affiliate marketing and five easy and doable steps that successful affiliates use to pull large-figure incomes.
Selling digital info products and the one step you cannot skip to create a thriving business.
How to become a successful author on Amazon Kindle with a five-step overview of how the most successful Kindle authors keep landing on the bestseller lists.
How to turn content into cash using a blog. Includes a 4-step overview of how to set up and run your blog and five ways to make money with it.
Power Marketers Club shows you how to develop a marketing mindset that will help you overcome the fears, negative thoughts, and limiting beliefs that may be holding you back.
Inside this free membership site, you will learn about:
The 21 questions that will help you achieve your goals, and
The art and science of negotiating how to get more of what you want out of every single deal you make with vendors, suppliers, freelancers, etc.
Success Upgrade covers the art of taking calculated risks when starting a business and improving your money management skills.
Inside this free membership site, you will learn strategies for getting more money, keeping more money, and growing your business faster, plus ways to get the funding you need to start or run your business.
Manage your content more effectively on your social media platforms with these social media tools and resources.
Social Media Tools And Resources
Manage your content more effectively on your social media platforms using these social media tools and resources.
Social media has become an integral part of the content marketing strategy of most businesses.
Creating and posting social media content, however, requires defining social media metrics, having content tracking systems in place, and using tools to manage your social media campaigns in order to see a return on investment from your efforts.
This section provides a comprehensive list of social media management tools that can help you improve your social media marketing efforts and results.
The social media tools and resources below will help you manage your content more effectively on your social media platforms.
Social Media Sharing Tools & Counters
There are two main ways to get your content shared on social media platforms:
Post content directly on one or more social media platforms, or
Publish content on your website and encourage people to share it on their social networks using social media sharing tools.
You need to provide your site visitors with social media sharing tools if you want them to share content published on your website.
If your website is powered by WordPress, for example, you can install a free plugin like Hustle that lets you easily add social sharing tools and counters to your posts and pages.
Hustle lets you add social sharing tools and counters to WordPress sites quickly, easily, and for free!
Hustle lets you display a social media sharing bar that visitors can use to share your content on social networks.
You can select which social networks you would like to display on your social sharing toolbar, and customize options like toolbar layout (e.g. centered horizontally at the top or the bottom of your content or vertically on the left or right-hand side of your web page), visibility conditions (e.g. only show on specific posts or under certain conditions), colors, icons, etc.
Plugins like Hustle let you choose the social media platforms to display on your social sharing toolbars.
If your site is not powered by WordPress, you can use the social sharing buttons provided either by the social platforms themselves, or the tools listed below.
Social Media Management Tools (SMB)
The tools listed below are ideal for helping small-to-medium businesses measure and track their social media content performance.
Buffer is a social media management platform that lets you set up a queue of posts to share on various social media channels.
It offers a suite of intuitive tools and products that integrate publishing, engagement, analytics, simple landing pages, and team collaboration, allowing you to work efficiently to drive meaningful social media engagement and results.
Buffer also allows your business to automate your social media scheduling processes by scheduling social media posts in advance across multiple social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more.
The benefits of using Buffer include:
Save time and effort: Buffer eliminates the need for manually posting social media content every day, enabling businesses to schedule posts in advance and automate the posting process.
Streamline social media management: With Buffer, businesses can manage all their social media accounts in one place, making it easy to monitor engagement, track performance, and streamline social media management.
Enable data-driven decision-making: Buffer provides analytics and insights that allow businesses to track engagement, reach, and other key performance metrics, providing the data necessary to make data-driven decisions.
Improve consistency and accuracy: Buffer helps ensure consistent posting schedules and eliminates the possibility of human error by automating the scheduling process.
Support team collaboration: Buffer allows teams to collaborate on social media management, with features that enable team members to work together on content creation, scheduling, and analysis.
BuzzSumo allows you to analyze your content engagement based on relevant industry keywords and see how your content marketing campaigns are performing against your competition.
While not strictly a social media tool, it lets you see how often your blog posts are shared on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc., and which types of posts receive the most engagement.
CoSchedule is a software that integrates content marketing, a marketing calendar, and marketing management tools to help keep all of your marketing organized in one place.
Hootsuite is a social media management platform with an integrated user interface that lets you manage your social interactions on various social networks and prepare social media updates in advance.
Crowdfire lets you schedule content, manage your Twitter account, connect your blogs and your YouTube channel, create social media posts, and provide suggestions about articles for sharing on your sites.
eClincher lets you analyze your social media performance, schedule and publish posts, reply to social messages, and auto-post with smart queues and RSS feeds. It also provides an image media library, and search function for social media influencers.
Followerwonk is a Twitter analytics tool that lets you analyze your followers (e.g. where they are located and when they tweet) to help you gain insights on Twitter users and trends.
Additionally, this tool helps you find and connect with the top influencers in your industry, expand your reach and widen your follower base, and develop your social graph by digging into your Twitter analytics data.
Friends+Meis a social media post scheduling and content management solution that helps you increase your brand visibility online, stay organized and stay focused on creating great content to share with your followers on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Hookle is an app that lets you manage all of your social media marketing in one place and lets you see how your brand is doing online across all of your platforms from your mobile device.
Later is a social media management tool that lets you connect your Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter profiles but focuses mostly on Instagram.
It provides a visual drag-and-drop content calendar and a free linking tool that you can use on your Instagram profile to link to a shoppable Instagram feed or various blog posts and websites.
MavSocial is a visual social media management tool that provides scheduling, monitoring, and reporting features for your social content.
MavSocial allows you to repeat social media posts for a specified duration and includes access to a search engine where you can browse through a digital catalog of millions of stock photos and manage and edit media content for your social media posts.
Post Planner helps you find and curate high-quality content proven to drive user engagement, as well as plan and schedule a content-type-based social media publishing calendar, and then post your content regularly and consistently.
Post Planner also lets you create a targeted sharing plan where you select the content type for each time slot and the tool will then fill each slot with your chosen content, as well as allowing you to schedule posts outside of your social content sharing plan.
Social Pilot is a social media management tool with a simple dashboard that curates and suggests content from different niches and industries and provides scheduling, analytics, and white-label reporting suited for digital agencies.
SocialBee is a social media management tool that lets you add, organize, and share content across several social channels, integrates with Buffer (see above), and uses post variations to keep your content evergreen.
Tailwindis a social media management tool for Instagram and Pinterest that helps you schedule posts, monitor conversations, measure results, and provides recommendations for improving your Pinterest and Instagram performance.
The tools below are ideal for helping enterprise-level companies measure and track their social media content performance.
HubSpot
HubSpot Social Media Management Software
HubSpot‘s social media management software lets you publish content to your social networks, run all of your social media campaigns from one central location, set up keyword monitoring to be alerted whenever your brand is mentioned, and link your interactions back to your CRM to track contextual conversations and access insightful social media ROI reports.
Sprout Social – All-in-one social media management platform
Sprout Social is a social media management tool that combines social media scheduling, monitoring, reporting, and customer relationship management (CRM) into one platform.
Sprout Social Reporting Dashboard
Sprout Social’s “listening” features let you uncover trends and actionable insights from social data to improve and drive your brand and business strategy.
SproutSocial can also help your business streamline its social media presence by automating scheduling and publishing of posts across various social media channels. With SproutSocial, you can easily manage your social media accounts from a single dashboard, which makes it easy to collaborate with your team members and track your social media performance.
The benefits of using SproutSocial for social media scheduling include:
Save time and effort by automating the process of scheduling posts, allowing you to plan and publish content in advance.
Analytics tools that allow you to track and analyze your social media performance, enabling you to make data-driven decisions about your social media strategy and identify which posts are working well and which ones need improvement.
An intuitive and user-friendly interface, making it easy to schedule posts, monitor your social media presence, and collaborate with your team members.
Brandwatch is a tool that allows you to quantify brand awareness. You can use it to identify brand sentiments and see if your video campaigns are working and helping you build positive brand awareness for your business.
Brandwatch gives you access to weekly and monthly social media monitoring reports and video campaign tracking and customer conversations about your brand in real-time.
This is not only invaluable for market research, but it also helps you see what people think of your video campaigns and how these impact your brand perception.
Keyhole is a social media monitoring tool that provides real-time tracking and reporting of social media and influencer campaigns and key metrics via a social media analytics dashboard.
The software lets you monitor the performance of keywords, URLs, topics, hashtags, and @mentions, gain information about brand sentiment, relevant conversations, topics, and influencers’ engagement rates and reach, track campaign performance on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube, and compare your social media accounts and campaigns against major competitors.
Oktopost is a social media management platform aimed at helping B2B marketers generate leads using social media and quantify their social media results.
Reputation provides social media engagement tools, real-time data visualization, and customized views and reports to help companies gain insights, respond quickly, and immprove their social media strategy.
Sprinklr provides a suite of products and tools to help enterprise-level teams collaborate, connect and engage with their customers on 25+ social media channels.
Use these tools to search for influencers based on niche, audience size, and engagement rates, and automate your outreach campaigns.
Aspire
Aspire – influencer marketing software platform.
Aspire is an influencer marketing software that helps your business discover and engage with creators on autopilot.
The Creator Marketplace allows you to receive hundreds of inbound creator applications each week, while the search engine lets them search, compare, and contact millions of creators across various platforms.
Social listening tools enable you to engage with brand fans who mention them online, and e-commerce integrations help them find influential customers to partner with.
Aspire also enables you to create, license, and promote more content than ever before by allowing you to build a campaign around anyone with influence, brief and review content before it goes live, license content for allowlisting and boosting, and measure which content is most effective with content analytics.
Use Aspire to drive business growth through effective influencer marketing strategies.
You can run performance-based influencer campaigns by identifying who drives the most ROI and sales through the analytics dashboard, putting ad spend behind content that performs through allowlisting and boosting, and driving and tracking sales through affiliate links and promo codes.
Upfluence – All-in-one affiliate and influencer marketing platform.
Upfluence is a social influencer marketing software that helps your business find the best creators for your brand by analyzing engagement and performance metrics.
With Upfluence, you can manage and hire creators at scale, simplify influencer gifting campaigns, easily pay influencers, and track marketing ROI.
The platform goes beyond just influencer marketing by also offering affiliate programs, creator management, user-generated content, and brand ambassador tools to help your business build valuable partnerships and turn creators into revenue.
GRIN – a creator management platform for influencer marketing.
GRIN is a creator management platform that helps brands establish authentic relationships with content creators and turn them into brand ambassadors.
The software offers tools for discovering and recruiting creators, nurturing relationships, reporting and analyzing metrics, content management, product seeding, and payment management.
With multiple ways to identify and invite the perfect ambassadors for your brand, GRIN provides an all-in-one solution to simplify the influencer marketing campaign process.
The software also integrates with other marketing stack tools, including social platforms, e-commerce solutions, and communication tools.
Use GRIN to build more valuable relationships with content creators and grow your brand through the power of creator partnerships.
Learn how to drive more traffic to your site and more customers to your business by getting your videos to rank higher on YouTube and on Google’s search results.
Social Media Content Calendar Templates – Social media content calendar templates and information on the best times to post content on different social platforms.
Influencer Campaign tracking Template – A free downloadable template from Keyhole. Use it to track accurate KPIs of your influencer marketing campaigns, measure the engagement rate of influencers’ posts, and understand which influencers are delivering customers.
Learn how to edit web page content and website templates with these learn basic HTML resources!
Learn Basic HTML
Learn how to edit web page content and website templates with these learn basic HTML resources!
As we explain in our Content Management Skills lesson, you don’t need to become a web developer or learn how to code to manage content effectively, but knowing some basic HTML can be useful if you need to:
Make quick edits to the content of your web pages.
Fix up the issue with the layout of a web page.
Fix up the formatting of content (e.g adding bold text, italics, links, etc.).
Change the color of page and content elements (e.g. background colors on elements or text highlights).
Add tables to pages.
Etc.
Here are some resources that will teach you basic HTML so you can perform quick fixes to content and communicate confidently with web developers:
This comprehensive tutorial will show you how to use basic HTML tags to format content on your web pages and blog posts.
Learn HTML – YouTube Videos
The videos below are aimed at teaching complete beginners basic HTML:
HTML In 10 Minutes
HTML Crash Course For Absolute Beginners
HTML For Beginners – Full course
Learn HTML In 1 Hour
Additional HTML Courses
The courses below provide comprehensive tutorials and lessons on using HTML.
W3Schools
W3Schools HTML Tutorials
W3Schools provides a comprehensive free HTML course with hundreds of HTML exercises, examples, and an online “Try it Yourself” editor where you can edit and test each example yourself.
HTML.com provides practical step-by-step HTML tutorials and follow-up guides aimed at teaching beginners the basics of HTML needed to add text and images, headings and text formatting, and tables to your content.
Develop the skills you need to manage content effectively with these digital business video courses.
Digital Business Video Courses
Develop the skills you need to manage content effectively with these digital business video courses.
Managing content effectively requires a practical understanding of all aspects of running a digital business, including knowledge of different methods and tools used to generate results.
The video courses listed in this section will help you gain the knowledge and skills to improve results in all areas of content management.
Learn how to drive more traffic to your site and more customers to your business by getting your videos to rank higher on YouTube and on Google’s search results.
Learn about the benefits of using webinars in your business, how to create high-quality and engaging webinars, and how to sell your products and services using webinars.
Learn how to use news releases effectively to boost your search engine rankings, drive more traffic to your website, and generate new leads for your business.
This video course covers essential areas of list-building, from planning, building, and automating your list-building strategy, to methods for turning online users into loyal subscribers.
Learn ways to increase your conversions by improving your processes and how to set up sales funnels that will help you sift through serious buyers, filter out non-serious buyers, and create a long-term, high-converting customer list.
Password Managers provide an easy and secure way to keep track of all your passwords. This video course shows you how to use powerful and FREE password management tools.
Learn how to create, launch, and sell high-quality digital products like downloadable reports, e-books, videos, and audios quickly and cost-effectively.
Learn how to access and use free image creation and editing tools, basic and advanced image editing techniques using tools like Photoshop and free alternatives, creating images for web content, presentations, infographics, social media, and so much more.
In this practical step-by-step video course, you will learn how to use text-to-speech and the latest AI voice technologies to create professional and realistic-sounding voice narrations from text files for a wide range of commercial uses and business applications.
Learn how to use Aweber to set up autoresponders, newsletters, and subscriber opt-in forms that can be integrated with WordPress for lead generation, user engagement, training customers, and more.
Learn how to set up and use Amazon S3 to upload, store, manage, and protect your site’s images, large media files, downloadable files, stream videos, and more.
Learn how to unlock the power of the WordPress content management system (CMS) using the many powerful features inside your WordPress administration area.
Need a new website or blog in a hurry? This video course shows you how to quickly install and configure a WordPress website or blog on your own domain name.
Learn how to optimize your WordPress site and how to craft website pages and blog posts that will help you get better search engine rankings and improve your traffic results.
This video course takes you step-by-step through the WordPress Maintenance Process and shows you how to keep your WordPress site updated, protected, and error-free!
Learn how to safely and automatically back up your WordPress files and database and how to easily restore your WordPress site if something unexpected or disastrous were to happen.
Learn how WordPress plugins work, how to find, install, and update plugins on your site, and how to expand your WordPress site’s functionality in almost unlimited ways.
Learn how to plan, build, grow, and maintain a viable membership site using WordPress that can be easily scaled and automated to become a sustainable, cost-effective, and profitable asset for many years to come.
If you are an intermediate or advanced user, the video courses below will help take your skills to the next level:
Skillshop For Google
Skillshop is a Google training platform that you can use to grow your skills and knowledge of using Google’s tools and solutions.
Skillshop courses include:
Google Analytics Academy Courses – courses covering Google Analytics 4 (the latest generation of Google Analytics), content measurement strategy, etc.
Google Ads – Courses to grow your skills using Google Ads to advertise your business online, get Google Ads certified, etc.
YouTube – Courses covering content copyright when publishing content online, available tools for creators and content owners to handle copyright protection on YouTube, etc.
Google Marketing Platform – Courses designed to help you achieve your marketing objectives, improve mobile user experience, get certified in Google Marketing Platforms, etc.
Skillshare
Access thousands of self-paced video courses on Skillshare.
Skillshare is an online learning community that provides thousands of classes on all kinds of topics taught by creators, entrepreneurs, and professionals, including many courses on content marketing and digital business areas.
Skillshare members have access to all online classes and can watch these on their own time.
Udemy provides many useful video courses to improve your skills in all areas.
Udemy is a leading global online learning provider with thousands of courses available covering every topic to help you further develop your knowledge and skills.
Simplilearn is one of the world’s leading certification training providers, helping working professionals achieve their career goals by partnering with universities, companies, and individuals.
Simplilearn offers hundreds of self-paced accredited online courses in digital content management and content marketing.
If you are looking for something more comprehensive in the field of digital marketing, they also offer a Digital Marketing Associate course which is geared toward beginners, and an advanced Post-Graduate Program in Digital Marketing, provided in partnership with Purdue University and co-developed with Facebook.
The site also provides many free online courses to help you build your digital marketing skills.
Simplilearn offers many free online courses that can improve your digital marketing skills via their SkillUp program.
The Complete Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual provides detailed and comprehensive WordPress training tutorials for non-technical users.
The Complete Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual
Learn how to use WordPress to manage your web content effectively with the most detailed and comprehensive step-by-step WordPress user manual for non-technical website users available!
Does your business or organization’s website run on WordPress?
Then it’s important that everyone in your team should be a competent and skilled WordPress user to manage all web content in your CMS effectively.
Every feature and function you need to know to use a WordPress website or blog is explained in step-by-step detail in The Complete Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual.
The tutorials are written for non-technical users and contain thousands of instructive screenshots, so you can easily follow and apply every step.
The Complete Step-By-Step WordPress User Manual is the most comprehensive, detailed, and up-to-date WordPress training resource available anywhere.
A paid membership to the site includes full access to the complete WordPress training site and additional resources like access to 2,100+ video tutorials, email courses, downloadable guides, templates, and checklists.
Learn how to take control of your business online to drive more traffic, leads, subscribers & sales to your website!
The Small Business Digital Manager
Learn how to take control of your business online to drive more traffic, leads, subscribers & sales to your website!
The Small Business Digital Manager
If you plan to take your business online or need someone to look after your website, read this book before doing anything else.
The Small Business Digital Manager will help you avoid the costly mistakes that businesses make when building an online presence.
This book shows you how to take control of your digital processes and build an effective digital presence that can deliver your business consistently better results like more traffic, leads, subscribers, and sales.
You will learn how to help your business gain a unique competitive advantage online despite lacking time, resources, and technical skills, using an easy-to-understand and clearly explained comprehensive digital business blueprint.
The video below provides an overview of why most small businesses struggle to get better results online and how to address these problems using the strategies and methods described in The Small Business Digital Manager.
The author has spent over two decades helping businesses of all sizes use effective strategies to grow in the digital global economy.
Download “The Small Business Digital Manager” and learn how to build an effective digital presence for your business that will deliver you consistently better results at minimal cost.
The Small Business Digital Manager – Where To Get It
In this module, we provide a practical overview of content strategy as it relates to the role of a content manager. We recommend going through the links, resources, and references in this section for a more in-depth understanding of the key concepts presented here.
This module covers the topics outlined in the table of contents below:
Additionally, we recommend subscribing to our free content management course email lessons if you haven’t already, as these provide a practical step-by-step way to implement the lessons in this course.
As a subscriber, you will also get notified when new posts containing practical information and valuable content management tips are added to our blog.
What Is A Content Strategy?
A content strategy helps you define your target audience, understand their needs and interests, and create content that addresses those needs and speaks to their interests.
It also helps you determine the most effective channels for distributing that content, such as your website, social media, email marketing, or even offline channels like events or print materials.
A simple way to think about content strategy is to ask the question “how do we achieve our business goals using content?”
This is important because a content strategy is a component of the business marketing strategy and specifies who, what, where, when, and how it plans to connect with its audience.
Businesses need a business strategy and a marketing strategy before creating a content strategy.
A content strategy can be defined as…
“Getting the right content to the right user at the right time through strategic planning of content creation, delivery, and governance.”
Now that we have a basic understanding of what a content strategy is, let’s take a look at why businesses need one.
Why Do You Need A Content Strategy?
Businesses need a content strategy to:
Set And Reach Goals – A documented content strategy helps define marketing goals, set priorities plan the work, and ensure that all marketing efforts translate into tangible results.
Track Progress – A strong content strategy outlines the metrics to track, analyze, and determine if the content marketing efforts are producing results.
Identify New Opportunities – A good content strategy outlines all the avenues that can be used to follow news and trends and find story ideas and prevent the effort put into discovering new opportunities from being uncoordinated and reflecting poorly on a brand’s publications and tone.
Cut Costs – Content strategies help define how much money to spend per project, how to spend it, and how to find ways to cut costs if required to avoid excessive spending on individual projects.
Optimize Its Marketing Team – A documented content strategy sets out performance metrics for team members, and defines a work schedule for content creation, guidelines on the management of social media accounts, maintenance of marketing automation system, and other content-related processes. Without this, the marketing team won’t know how much content to produce, where to post it, how to repurpose it, and how to work as productively and effectively as possible.
Produce Content That Converts – Content that consistently converts comes from a content strategy that understands who its target audience is, what type, style, and format of content its audience wants to consume, its ideal content tone, and how to leverage different distribution and promotional channels.
In simpler terms, a content strategy can help your business realize its vision.
A content strategy gives a measurable and quantifiable way to help your business realize its vision using content.
If your business has a clear vision with clearly defined objectives and a sound business and marketing strategy, a content strategy provides a measurable and quantifiable way to determine how using content can help you achieve those objectives.
Your content strategy drives your content plan, defines the focus of your content production efforts and content promotion activities, and specifies what systems your business needs to put in place to manage all of your content-related processes effectively, including the content itself.
Content Strategy Goals And Objectives
Common content strategy goals and objectives include:
Audience understanding: The goal is to understand the target audience and create content that meets their needs, interests, and preferences. This can be achieved by conducting market research, creating buyer personas, and analyzing website traffic data.
Brand alignment: The goal is to align content with the company’s brand messaging and values, and to create a consistent brand voice and visual identity across all content. This can be achieved by creating a brand style guide, conducting a brand audit, and training content creators on your brand’s messaging and tone.
Content creation and distribution: The goal is to plan, create, and distribute high-quality, relevant, and engaging content to reach and engage the target audience. This can be achieved by creating an editorial calendar, creating and publishing blog posts, creating and publishing videos, and creating and publishing infographics.
Content optimization: The goal is to improve the visibility and performance of existing content through search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. This can be achieved by researching and including relevant keywords, optimizing meta tags, and creating internal and external links.
Content measurement and analytics: The goal is to track and measure the performance of content in terms of engagement, conversion, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This can be achieved by using Google Analytics to track website traffic, using social media analytics to track engagement, and using A/B testing to optimize conversion rates.
Content governance: The goal is to ensure that all content is accurate, up-to-date, and compliant with legal, ethical, and brand guidelines. This can be achieved by creating and enforcing a content style guide, regularly reviewing and updating content, and ensuring that all content is accessible and inclusive.
Continuous improvement: The goal is to continuously improve your content strategy by analyzing performance data, gathering feedback, and making adjustments as needed. This can be achieved by conducting regular content audits, gathering feedback from stakeholders, and testing and implementing new content formats and distribution channels.
Benefits Of Having A Content Strategy
There are many benefits to having a clear content strategy, including:
Consistency: With a content strategy in place, you can ensure that your content is consistent in terms of quality, tone, and style. This helps to build trust with your audience and establish your brand as a reliable source of information.
Improved audience targeting: A content strategy helps to identify the target audience for your content and ensures that the content is tailored to their interests and needs.
Increased brand awareness: Consistently publishing high-quality content can help to increase awareness of your brand and establish it as a thought leader in your industry.
Greater customer engagement: By providing valuable and relevant content, you can engage and build relationships with your customers, leading to increased loyalty and customer retention.
Higher search engine rankings: A content strategy can help to optimize your website’s content for search engines, leading to higher search rankings and increased organic traffic.
Enhanced reputation management: A content strategy can help to proactively manage your brand’s reputation by ensuring that all content aligns with your brand values and message.
Increased sales and conversions: By providing valuable and relevant content, you can drive traffic to your website and convert visitors into customers.
Improved internal communication: A content strategy can help to align the goals and messaging of different teams within your organization, improving internal communication and collaboration.
Streamlined content creation: A content strategy helps to define the types of content that will be created, who will create it, and how it will be distributed, streamlining the content creation process.
Reduced costs: By having a content strategy in place, you can avoid wasting time and resources creating ineffective or redundant content and focus on creating high-quality content that resonates with your target audience.
Content Strategy Vs Marketing Strategy Vs Content Marketing
It’s also important to distinguish between Content Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Content Marketing and the differences between a Content Strategy vs a Content Marketing Strategy.
Content Strategy vs Marketing Strategy
A marketing strategy outlines the marketing steps you’ll take towards your ultimate goals, like growth and increasing revenue, a content strategy focuses on defining which content is created to support this marketing strategy, as well as how you’ll promote it.
Content strategy is the roadmap that guides your content marketing. Content marketing is the process of organizing, scheduling, creating, publishing, and promoting content pieces. Content marketing is the tactics that follow from the content strategy.
36% are focused on generating leads through content marketing
27% of respondents want increased sales and revenue
23% strive for improved customer loyalty and engagement with their brand
Here are a few examples of strategic business goals and objectives using content and content marketing:
To create a content marketing strategy that increases website traffic by 50% within the next six months.
To develop a content calendar that consistently delivers high-quality, relevant content to our target audience.
To increase brand awareness and engagement through social media by creating and sharing engaging content on a regular basis.
To establish our company as a thought leader in our industry through the creation and distribution of educational and informative content.
To improve search engine rankings through the optimization of our website content and the creation of high-quality backlinks.
To develop a content marketing campaign that generates at least 100 qualified leads within the next quarter.
To create a content marketing strategy that increases customer retention and loyalty through the creation of personalized and valuable content.
To establish ourselves as the go-to source for industry news and trends by creating and sharing timely and relevant content.
To improve customer acquisition and conversion rates through the creation of targeted and persuasive content.
To create a content marketing strategy that supports the overall goals and objectives of our business.
2. Types Of Content
After defining goals and objectives, the next step is to decide what type of content the business will use to achieve these.
This can include using blog posts & articles, social media posts, how-to guides, videos, email newsletters, ebooks, whitepapers, and reports, podcasts, infographics, webinars, case studies, etc.
Content formats. Source: Semrush.com. Click on the image to view an enlarged version.
After specifying the type of content the business needs to create to achieve its goals, the next step is to define how it will create and distribute this content.
Content distribution channels. Source: Semrush.com. Click on the image to view an enlarged version.
According to Kurve, the three pillars of a successful content strategy are brand focus, user experience, and content distribution.
Brand Focus ensures that the content is consistent with the brand strategy of the business and that it remains on-topic and relevant to both the business and its customers.
User Experience involves developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) so that you can create highly targeted content.
Content Distribution defines where and how you will publish content to make the most out of the media types you will publish and deliver your content in. We cover this in more depth in the Content Promotion module.
Who Is Responsible For Creating A Content Strategy?
In the Content Manager Mindset lesson, we discuss the three decision-making levels of a business and how these are responsible for creating, implementing, and managing different areas of the organization.
This includes the overall business strategy and its digital strategy.
Different decision-making levels are responsible for creating, managing, and implementing different aspects of a Digital Strategy.
If we apply the three decision-making levels to the digital strategy of a business, for example:
The executive level creates its digital content strategy.
The management level implements and manages its digital content plan.
The technical/tactical level performs the work required to create the content specified in the content plan (e.g. writing articles, recording videos, etc.)
Ideally, executive-level roles of the business would create a content strategy for the organization as part of developing its overall business strategy and digital strategy.
The Content Manager would then take the content strategy and use it to create and implement a content plan.
This content plan would then be used to drive the content production process.
As we have seen in the Digital Business Setups lesson, however, many small and startup businesses do not have the resources to either create a digital business strategy or hire a content strategist to create one for the organization.
In this case, the content manager will need to be directly involved in the process of creating a content strategy before creating and implementing a content plan.
We mentioned earlier that there are key differences between a content strategy and a content marketing strategy. Many businesses confuse these two.
Keeping this in mind, it’s good to know and keep up with the latest content marketing statistics, as these can be helpful when creating or reviewing your content strategy.
Infographic: What makes a content strategy successful? Source: Semrush.com. Click on the image to view an enlarged version.
Content Strategy – FAQs
Here are some of the most frequently asked questions about content strategy:
What is content strategy?
Content strategy is a plan that outlines how content will be created, managed, and distributed to achieve specific business goals, such as increasing brand awareness or driving conversions.
It also ensures that there is usable and useful content, which is well structured and easily found, appropriate to the needs of the user, and that it enhances or improves the user experience of a website or brand interaction.
Why is it important to have a content strategy?
Having a content strategy provides direction, consistency, and efficiency in content creation and distribution efforts. It helps businesses effectively reach and engage their target audience, build brand authority, and drive desired actions, leading to better ROI on marketing investments.
How does content strategy align with business objectives?
A content strategy should directly support business objectives, such as increasing brand awareness, boosting sales, or improving customer engagement. Each piece of content should be crafted with these objectives in mind to ensure it contributes to achieving the overall goals of the organization.
What are the key elements of a content strategy?
Key elements include clearly defined goals, a deep understanding of the target audience, content auditing and mapping, developing a content calendar, content creation guidelines for creating high-quality content optimized for SEO, and metrics for performance evaluation through analytics. It should also encompass content management and updating processes. Each component should also ensures alignment with business objectives and audience needs.
How do you develop a content strategy?
Developing a content strategy involves researching audience preferences, defining clear objectives, conducting competitive analysis, selecting appropriate channels, creating a content calendar, assigning responsibilities, and continuously refining based on performance data. It’s essential to have a documented strategy to guide content creation and distribution efforts.
Content performance effectiveness can be measured through key performance indicators (KPIs) such as website traffic, engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments), conversion rates, lead generation, sales attributed to content, user feedback, SEO rankings, etc. Analyzing data from web analytics tools like Google Analytics and social media analytics platforms provides insights into what content resonates with the audience and what needs improvement.
How does content strategy differ from content marketing?
Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, and management of content to achieve business objectives, while content marketing specifically aims to attract and engage an audience through valuable, relevant content to drive profitable customer action. They are closely related but serve different purposes within a marketing strategy.
Content strategy is also a broad discipline that includes defining how and why content will be collected, managed, and archived, whereas content marketing focuses specifically on using content to attract and engage audiences, leading them towards a specific business goal.
How often should I update my content strategy?
You should review and update your content strategy regularly, at least annually, or more frequently depending on changes in business goals, audience needs, or market dynamics.
Summary
It’s important that businesses have a clear content strategy, as this will guide and drive all the content it creates to achieve their goals.
Without a content strategy, planning, creating, promoting, and managing content can lead to ineffective results and wasting valuable resources.
Action Steps
If you are the person responsible for managing content in your organization, it is vitally important to make sure that there is a content strategy in place. If not, look for ways to help create one.
Useful Resources
In addition to completing the lessons in this module, we recommend the following resources:
This concludes our overview lesson on content strategy.
Please complete all lessons in this module before proceeding to the next module (Content Planning).
Next Lesson
Go here for the next lesson in the Content Strategy training module: How To Create A Content Strategy or click on one of the other lessons in this module in the section below.
Learn how to create a content plan and manage your content planning process effectively to meet your organization’s strategic outcomes.
Content Planning
Learn how to create a content plan and manage your content planning process effectively to meet your organization’s strategic outcomes.
An effective content strategy requires an actionable content plan that allows your business or organization to create and regularly publish content that targets the right audience and meets strategic goals.
In this lesson, we’ll cover:
What is a content plan?
Why do you need a content plan?
Benefits of developing a content plan for your organization
Make sure to review and complete the lessons in the Content Strategy module before you begin.
Additionally, we recommend subscribing to our free content management course email lessons if you haven’t already, as these provide a practical step-by-step way to implement the lessons in this course.
As a subscriber, you will also get notified when new posts (containing practical information and valuable content management tips) are added to our blog.
What Is A Content Plan?
A content plan is a document that specifies:
What content your business will create to target potential customers at all stages of their buyer journey, and
How this content will be created.
A content plan also outlines:
Who is responsible for creating the content
What the purpose of the content is
How the content impacts your content strategy.
Content planning is the structure by which your company determines which content initiatives to execute and when. It’s all about processes and workflows
A content plan is integral to your marketing activity and should be consulted regularly as the business builds its content marketing funnel.
It’s important to note that content strategy and content planning are two different things.
A content strategy is the overarching plan for creating, publishing, and managing content that aligns with the goals and objectives of your organization. It defines the goals for the content, the audience it will target, and the overall tone and style of the content.
A content plan, on the other hand, is the tactical plan for executing your content strategy. It outlines the specific pieces of content that will be created, the channels through which they will be distributed, and the schedule for publishing and promoting the content. It also includes tasks and responsibilities for creating, editing, and publishing the content.
In short, a content strategy is the “why” and “what” of content creation, while a content plan is the “how” and “when”.
Your content strategy directs all of your marketing channels where your content lives. It’s where you outline all the different marketing goals you have and how you plan to achieve these goals.
When your strategy’s ready to go, you’ll turn to content planning to determine how you’ll execute that plan. Your content plan will outline all of the assets and data you need to achieve the goals you set in your strategy.
To understand why having a content plan is essential, consider what can happen to businesses that create and publish content without a content strategy and a content plan.
Let’s suppose that a small business has a blog where it can publish articles to increase its visibility on search engines and attract new customers.
The business owner has ideas for topics to write articles about and begins to write and publish content on the blog. She soon finds that she is too busy attending to other areas of the business, however, and delegates this task to one of her staff members.
The staff member, however, doesn’t have the “full picture” of the business like the owner has, and so is unaware of all the areas that could benefit from using content to educate, inform, train, and attract new customers. He is also busy and after a short time, he too starts running out of ideas for new article topics to write about.
The business owner then decides to outsource its content creation. Lacking the budget to hire a full-service marketing agency that can develop a content strategy for the business and take over and manage their blog, they hire a person with SEO skills to come up with new content for the blog.
The SEO expert, however, also doesn’t have the “full picture” of the business, so he does some content research about the industry, niche, and its competitors, and supplies the business with a list of article topics based on keywords it could potentially rank for.
The SEO expert doesn’t write the actual content, so the business outsources its article writing to freelance writers. After a while, they also begin to accept submissions from guest bloggers.
Although the business is getting content published on its blog, the content doesn’t seem to be effective at driving traffic or attracting new customers. So, the business owner assigns another staff member to perform a content audit.
The content audit reveals that many articles are simply too general to rank competitively in the search engines and are not addressing the specific needs and pain points of their target audience. It also reveals that multiple articles are targeting the same keywords and ‘cannibalizing’ each other. Many of the articles submitted by guest bloggers also link to sites that are not relevant to the business.
Instead of using content strategically to grow the business, the business now has a bunch of content that doesn’t contribute to helping the business achieve its goals and a blog that needs cleaning up.
Just think how much more productive and effective this whole effort would have been had the business first invested in researching and creating a content strategy and incorporated its goals and research into a plan to drive content production before writing even a single piece of content.
A content strategy map. Source: @CarlaGates247. Click on the image to enlarge it.
A content plan, then, is essential for ensuring that your business puts the right systems and workflow processes in place to create the right content, delivered to the right audience at the right time, using the right distribution channels, to achieve its strategic goals.
The goal of your Content Plan is to deliver the goals of your Content Strategy.
Benefits Of Developing A Content Plan
Think about the benefits of having a content plan this way…
One well-planned piece of content (e.g. a blog post, video, etc.) that is perfectly aligned with the strategic goals and objectives of the business, that hits the spot with the right target audience, and that gets picked up by search engines and/or linked to from other websites, can continue driving new traffic, leads, sales, and subscribers long after it’s been published.
Additionally, a content plan:
Addresses each step of the content creation process and how to research, create, publish, and track the content.
Helps to create content that will target the right audience, increase engagement and retention, and drive more traffic and sales to the business.
Makes it easier for teams to create, collaborate on, and share information about the content.
Helps to avoid unnecessary costs or delays in important strategic areas, like preparing a budget or requesting additional resources.
Content Planning Goals And Objectives
Common content planning goals and objectives include:
Audience understanding: The goal is to understand the target audience and create content that meets their needs, interests, and preferences. This can be achieved by conducting market research, creating buyer personas, and analyzing website traffic data.
Content creation: The goal is to create high-quality, engaging, and relevant content that meets your target audience’s needs. This can be achieved by writing blog posts, creating videos, and designing graphics and infographics.
Content optimization: The goal is to improve the quality and performance of content by ensuring it is well-written, visually appealing, and optimized for search engines and social media. This can be achieved by optimizing headlines, meta descriptions, and images, using keywords and hashtags, and making sure the content is mobile-friendly.
Content distribution: The goal is to distribute and promote content through various channels, such as social media, email, and other digital platforms. This can be achieved by publishing content on the website, sharing it on social media, and sending newsletters.
Content measurement and analytics: The goal is to track and measure your content’s performance in terms of engagement, conversion, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This can be achieved by using analytics tools to track website traffic, social media engagement, and conversion rates.
Content repurposing: The goal is to repurpose existing content in new and different formats for different channels and audiences. This can be achieved by republishing a blog post as a video, creating an e-book from a series of blog posts, or turning a podcast episode into a transcript.
Content updating: The goal is to keep your content up-to-date and relevant by updating or removing outdated information. This can be achieved by updating a blog post with new information, removing a broken link, or revising an old video.
Content governance: The goal is to ensure that all content is accurate, up-to-date, and compliant with legal, ethical, and brand guidelines. This can be achieved by creating and enforcing a content style guide, regularly reviewing and updating content, and ensuring that all content is accessible and inclusive.
Budget and resources allocation: The goal is to plan and allocate the budget and resources needed to achieve your content goals. This can be achieved by identifying the cost of creating, distributing, and measuring the content, and allocating resources to create, review, and publish the content.
Content calendar: The goal is to plan and organize your content creation and publishing schedule. This can be achieved by creating an editorial calendar, scheduling the publishing of blog posts, and creating a plan for the distribution of your content.
The Content Planning Process
Your content planning process should flow from your content strategy.
Before creating your content plan, your business should have already defined its content strategy with clear goals, performed an audience analysis and competitive analysis, assessed its resources, determined a content budget, and specified ways to track and analyze results.
Once this is done, you can create a content plan (see next section below) that will help your business align its content with its customer’s buyer journey and identify the topics, needs, and questions to address in the content.
The content planning process also involves doing a content audit to determine if the existing content can be used as-is or if it needs to be updated and to identify any content gaps or new opportunities that can be created or developed.
The content planning process also needs to incorporate elements like:
A content production plan to determine the format of each content piece it will produce and identify who the subject experts, authors, and contributors will be for each item.
A content distribution plan to identify which online and offline channels will be used to get the content in front of your intended target audience.
An effective content planning process.
Different approaches to creating a content plan can also include additional elements like onboarding and training and communication processes.
Your content plan can also incorporate additional elements like onboarding and training team members and communication tools and processes for better collaboration. Source: DivvyHQ.com
Example Of A Content Plan
Below is an example of what a simple content plan for a software company might look like:
Audience: Small business owners looking for an easy-to-use accounting software
Goal: Increase website traffic, generate leads
Competitors: Quickbooks, Xero
Topics:
How to streamline your invoicing process
Tips for managing your business finances
How to get the most out of your accounting software
Plan:
Blog post: once a week
YouTube video: once a month
Infographic: Once a quarter
Distribution:
Social media: LinkedIn, Facebook
Email marketing: Weekly newsletter
Paid Advertising: Google Ads, Facebook ads
Now that we have covered what a content plan is and why businesses need one, let’s look at how to create one.
How To Create A Content Plan
Here are the steps for creating an effective content plan for your business or organization:
1. Ask Content Planning Questions
Once you have a content strategy in place, begin the content planning process by asking questions like:
Who is the content for?
Where will the content be published?
What problem(s)/challenge(s) does the content help to solve?
Your Content Plan will most likely consist of a document that includes all the research, analysis, and marketing collateral laid out in the content strategy, with information such as:
There are different content planning templates you can use and various workflow tools provide content planning templates that can be imported into the tool and then customized to suit your needs.
Use a content planning template to present and communicate your content plan to team members. Source: Monday.com
Some templates, for example, suit Kanban-style content workflows…
Content Planning Template for Kanban-style workflow processes – Source: Teamwork.com
Other templates are suitable for spreadsheet-like content workflows…
Prefer working with spreadsheets? Then use a more spreadsheet-like content plan template. Source: Smartsheet.com
For links to various content planning templates, see the Resources section at the end of this lesson.
3. Create Your Content Plan
As mentioned earlier, there are different approaches you can take to create your content plan.
To keep things simple, we’ll go through the basic steps of creating a content plan that involves the following steps:
Set up a content publishing schedule and create a content calendar
Assign tasks and deadlines to members
Create a content measurement plan
Schedule a periodic review of your content plan
Let’s go briefly through each of these steps:
1. Define Your Goals
Think about why you are developing a content plan and why you want to produce content. Knowing your goals will make determining what’s best for your strategy easier and clearer.
Defining goals for your content plan is easier if you have already defined your target audience (including your buyer persona) and performed a content audit to assess and understand your best- and worst-content types.
If you run a news website, you’ll likely need to publish multiple articles a day to keep up with the latest developments. On the other hand, if you’re running a personal blog or a small business, you might only have the capacity to publish once or twice a week or a few times a month.
Also, when it comes to content, more isn’t always better. It’s important to find a balance between producing enough content to keep your audience engaged, but not so much that it becomes overwhelming or low quality.
Consider your audience, your resources, and your goals when determining the frequency of your content. In general, it’s a good idea to find a frequency that can be sustained over the long term. Consistency is key when it comes to content marketing, so it’s better to publish on a regular schedule rather than trying to push out as much content as possible and then burn out.
3. Choose Your Content Types
There are a number of options you can choose to create content, including:
Blog posts
Videos
Social media
Emails
eBooks
Case studies
Infographics
Podcasts
Templates
etc.
The type of content you create will depend on how your audience prefers to consume information and which stage they are at in your marketing funnel.
For example, social media posts work well for increasing brand awareness and targeting TOFU (top-of-the-funnel) users, while publishing content using blog posts is more effective at targeting MOFU (middle-of-the-funnel) users and increasing organic search traffic, and email marketing is best used for converting a BOFU (bottom-of-the-funnel) audience who may be ready to buy products and services your business.
Make sure to specify in your content plan what type of content you plan to create, and for what purpose. Source: SemRush.com
For more information on the different content types that you can use in your content marketing strategy, see this lesson: Content Marketing
4. Choose Your Content Topics
“What content should you be writing or talking about?”
Again, this will depend on your goals and audience.
If you’re running a business, you’ll want to focus on topics that are relevant to your products or services. For example, if you sell outdoor gear, you might want to write about hiking, camping, and other outdoor activities.
It’s also a good idea to consider what your audience is interested in. You can use social media polls, surveys, and other tools to get a sense of what your followers want to see more of.
It’s important to consider what your audience is interested in and what will be relevant to them. This can involve researching industry trends, keeping an eye on your competitors, and seeking feedback from your audience. You should also consider what topics align with your business or organization’s goals and values.
5. Choose Your Content Distribution Channels
“How should you be getting your content out into the world?
Content distribution channels are the channels through which content is shared and promoted. There are many channels you can choose to publish and share your content on, depending on your audience and resources.
Distribution channels can be divided into three main types: owned, earned, and paid.
Content distribution channels can be owned, paid, or earned. Source: HubSpot
Using one or more of these channels can increase the effectiveness of your published content and help you reach your goals.
It’s important to find the right mix of distribution channels for your business or personal brand. For example, if you’re targeting a younger audience, you might want to focus on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. If you’re targeting a more professional audience, LinkedIn might be a better fit.
For more information on using different content channels to distribute and promote your content, see this lesson: Content Distribution
6. Allocate Your Resources
An effective content plan requires allocating both financial and personnel resources.
A budget should be allocated for creating and distributing your content. This may involve hiring writers, designers, and marketers to produce and promote the content.
Also, personnel resources should be allocated to ensure that all aspects of the content plan are effectively executed.
This may include assigning a dedicated content manager or team to oversee the creation and distribution of the content. Your content team should be composed of individuals with diverse skills such as writing, design, marketing, and analytics, and may even extend to subject experts, experienced authors, and guest contributors.
Your content strategy should provide you with an assessment of business resources and a budget for creating and promoting content using either a dedicated in-house team and/or outsourced resources.
How your business chooses to allocate its resources will have a significant impact on the implementation and execution of your content plan.
For example, if you plan to create articles for your blog, who will write them? Will blog writing be assigned to an employee who is already performing in a different role as an additional responsibility (because your business lacks resources to set up a content team), a dedicated blog writer, an outsourced freelance article writer, or a guest blogger?
What kind of budget does your business have to put a content team together? Click image to enlarge
7. Set Up Your Team Communications
Having a consistent and cohesive content plan is essential for any business or organization looking to effectively communicate with its audience.
However, with multiple teams and stakeholders involved, it can be a challenge to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
Content planning involves extensive communication with stakeholders across different areas of the organization and coordinating and collaborating with your content production team, so it’s important to make sure that you can communicate easily and exchange information promptly and transparently with everyone involved in the process.
First, it’s important to establish clear lines of communication and establish a central point of contact for content-related issues. This could be a content manager or a designated member of the marketing team.
Next, consider setting up regular meetings or check-ins with all relevant teams and stakeholders to discuss the content plan. This can help ensure that everyone is on the same page and can provide an opportunity to address any concerns or issues.
It’s also a good idea to establish clear guidelines and processes for creating and approving content. This can include things like a content calendar, editorial guidelines, and a review and approval process.
Finally, it’s important to choose the right tools to make sure that everyone has access to the latest version of the content plan and can communicate effectively. For example, a document management system.
Most likely your business will have already set up team communication channels (e.g. Slack and email for exchanging information, and Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, or Skype, for live video conference calls and online presentations – especially if your team includes members working remotely), so use these tools and your content production team meetings to keep everyone informed and up-to-date on the progress and any changes or new developments made to your content plan.
8. Choose Your Content Management Tools
If you’re responsible for creating and managing content for your business or organization, it’s important to have the right tools in place to make the process as efficient and effective as possible.
Project management software helps individuals and teams plan, organize, and manage tasks and resources for projects.
These tools typically include features such as task assignments, calendars, timelines, and communication tools to keep team members on track and informed. They also often include tools for tracking time, expenses, and progress, as well as the ability to generate reports and analytics.
A content management system (CMS) is a software application that enables users to create, manage, and publish digital content, typically for websites.
The content could be in form of text, images, audio, and video files. A CMS typically includes a user-friendly interface that allows non-technical users to easily create, edit, and publish content without the need for extensive technical knowledge.
It also provides tools for organizing and categorizing content, and for controlling access and permissions for different users. Some popular examples of CMS include WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.
Some key considerations when choosing the right content management tools include:
Budget: There is a wide range of content management tools available, ranging from free options to more expensive enterprise-level solutions. Determine what you can afford and look for tools that offer the features you need at a price that fits your budget.
Your team and their needs: Does your team need a tool that is user-friendly and easy to learn, or are they more tech-savvy and comfortable with more advanced features? Make sure to choose a tool that meets the needs of your team and will be easy for them to use.
Your content workflow: Which features do you need to support your content workflow? For example, do you need a tool that allows for collaboration, organization, distribution, and version control, or do you just need something simple to store and organize your content? Make a list of your must-have features and look for a tool that meets those needs.
Don’t be afraid to try out different tools and see what works best for you. It may take some trial and error to find the right fit, but it’s worth the effort to find a tool that makes your content management process as efficient and effective as possible.
9. Set Up A Content Publishing Schedule
A content publishing schedule is an important part of any content marketing strategy. It helps you plan and organize your content in advance, so you can consistently publish high-quality content for your audience.
Whether you are publishing blog posts, social media updates, or videos, having a set schedule for when you release new content can help you stay organized and attract and retain an audience.
An editorial calendar or content calendar lets you organize and schedule all the content your business or organization needs to produce and publish.
See our in-depth lesson on creating an editorial or content calendar here: Editorial Calendar
Establishing a content publishing schedule is only effective if you stick to it. Make sure to set a sustainable content frequency and allocate enough time and resources to create and publish your content on a consistent basis.
10. Assign Tasks And Deadlines To Members
Effective task assignment is an important part of managing a team. It helps ensure that work is completed efficiently and on schedule.
As a team leader or manager, it’s important to know how to assign tasks and deadlines to your team members in a way that is clear, organized, and fair.
Here are some steps you can follow to effectively assign tasks and deadlines to your team:
Clearly define the task
Make sure to provide clear and detailed descriptions of the task and ensure that everyone on the team understands the expected outcomes. Include any necessary resources or instructions.
Consider each team member’s skills and workload:
Think about which team member is best suited to complete the task and assign the task to the right person.
Consider their current workload and capacity. It’s important to balance the workload among team members to prevent burnout.
Set a realistic deadline
Deadlines help ensure that tasks are completed in a timely manner. Consider how long tasks will take to complete and set deadlines accordingly.
Take into account the complexity of the task and the availability of the team member. It’s important to be realistic about what can be achieved within a certain time frame, as setting unrealistic deadlines can lead to frustration and missed expectations.
If it takes 5 to 7 days to create, review, and approve a comprehensive, well-researched and authoritative article, don’t expect it to be published in two days. It just puts unnecessary pressure on everyone.
Communicate the task and deadline
Make sure to clearly communicate the task and deadlines to the team members in your content brief.
Use team meetings, email, or an online project management tool to follow up and ensure that they understand the task and have everything they need to complete it.
Monitor progress and provide support
Check-in with your team members periodically to make sure the task is on track to be completed by the deadline.
Keep track of their progress and offer assistance and support as needed. This might involve providing additional resources or answering questions.
By following these steps, you can effectively assign tasks and deadlines to your team, helping everyone work together efficiently to ensure that the work is completed efficiently and on schedule.
Create guidelines for assigning tasks
Create guidelines for assigning tasks to members that include the points mentioned above and add these guidelines to your team’s workflow documentation.
11. Create a Content Measurement And Content ROI Plan
A content strategy requires a way to measure the performance of all content created to help the business achieve its overall objectives. This is necessary to justify both the investment (i.e. budget) and the methods used to create and distribute content.
The content plan is where you formulate a plan to measure your content performance in terms of meeting strategic goals and content marketing ROI.
Measuring content performance typically involves analyzing metrics such as engagement (e.g. likes, shares, comments), traffic (e.g. page views, unique visitors), lead generation (e.g. email signups, demo requests), conversions, bounce rate, etc.
To measure content ROI, you need to track the revenue generated from your content marketing activities and compare it to the costs associated with creating and promoting the content.
For example, if your company spends $5,000 on creating and promoting a blog post and that post generated $10,000 in revenue from leads generated, the content ROI would be 100%.
Another example is A/B testing for website landing pages. You can measure the conversion rate of the different versions of the landing page, and see which one performed better in terms of lead generation or sales.
It is also important to track and measure your content’s performance over time. You can do this using analytics tools such as Google Analytics and social media analytics to track engagement and traffic, and by monitoring lead generation metrics such as email signups, demo requests, and sales.
A plan for measuring the return on investment of your content involves:
1. Calculating how much was spent producing the content.
2: Figuring out the cost to distribute the content.
3: Working out how much the content generated in revenue.
4: Calculating the content marketing ROI.
Content Marketing ROI formula. Source: OptinMonster
12. Schedule A Periodic Review Of Your Content Plan
The last step is to schedule a periodic review of your content plan (e.g. quarterly, half-yearly, annually) to make sure that everything set out in the plan is progressing along, that all strategic goals are being met, and to figure out how to improve things if goals are not being met.
Make sure to include content reviews as part of your periodic content plan review.
Content Planning Challenges
While content planning helps your business to identify the goals, topics, and formats of the content that will be created and is a crucial step in the content creation process, it can also present some challenges.
Here are some of the challenges of content planning:
Setting clear goals: Setting clear and measurable goals for the content can be challenging, as it requires a good understanding of the target audience, the industry, and the business objectives.
Identifying relevant topics: Identifying relevant topics that will engage the target audience and align with the goals of the content can be challenging, as it requires a good understanding of the audience’s interests, pain points, and industry trends.
Content format: Deciding on the format of the content that will be created can be challenging, as it requires understanding the audience’s preferences and the goals of the content.
Scheduling: Scheduling the content creation and publishing process can be challenging, as it requires balancing the need for timely and relevant content with the resources and capabilities of the team.
Collaboration: Collaborating with different teams and stakeholders can be challenging, as it requires effective communication and coordination to ensure that the content aligns with the overall goals and objectives of the organization.
Budgeting: Allocating the necessary budget for the content creation process can be challenging, as it requires balancing the costs with the expected return on investment.
Measuring success: Measuring the success of the content can be challenging, as it requires tracking metrics such as engagement, traffic, and conversion rates, and then using that data to improve future content planning.
As you can see, content planning requires a good understanding of your target audience, your industry, and your business objectives, as well as effective communication and coordination between all members of your content team.
Content Planning Checklist
Define goals and objectives: Clearly define the goals and objectives for the content, such as increasing brand awareness or driving website traffic.
Audience research: Conduct research to understand the demographics, interests, and pain points of your target audience. This will help inform the topics and tone of your content.
Competitive research: Analyze the content of your competitors to understand what topics and formats are resonating with your target audience and how you can differentiate your content.
Topic generation: Generate a list of potential topics for your content, based on your audience research and competitive analysis.
Content calendar: Create a content calendar that outlines the topics, formats, and publishing schedule for your content. This will help you stay organized and ensure a consistent flow of content.
Format and medium: Determine the format and medium that best suits your content and audience, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, or infographics.
Keyword research: Research keywords related to your content topics to optimize for search engines and increase visibility.
Content creation: Create the content using the information gathered in the previous steps.
Review and approval: Review and get approval from relevant stakeholders before publishing
Promote and distribute: Develop a plan to promote and distribute your content through various channels such as social media, email, and paid advertising.
Measure and analyze: Use analytics tools to measure the success of your content and gather insights for future planning.
Content Planning – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content planning:
What is content planning?
Content planning involves the strategic development of content ideas, scheduling of content creation, and distribution across various channels to meet specific business objectives.
How does content planning differ from content strategy?
Content planning focuses on the operational aspects such as ideation, scheduling, and distribution. Content strategy defines the overall goals, audience targeting, and metrics for success.
Why is content planning important?
It ensures that content creation aligns with marketing goals, maximizes resource efficiency, and enhances the ability to engage and convert specific audiences.
What are the benefits of using a content management system in content planning?
A CMS helps manage digital content, allows for easy updates, multiple user access, and provides tools for SEO and analytics tracking.
How do you choose the right content management system (CMS) for content planning?
Assess your needs based on the type of content, user-friendliness, scalability, integration capabilities, and cost.
How can content planning impact audience engagement?
Effective content planning ensures that the content is relevant, timely, and engaging to the audience, which boosts interaction and retention.
What role does content planning play in SEO?
It helps in targeting relevant keywords, organizing content for easy navigation, and updating content regularly to improve search engine rankings.
How often should you revise your content plan?
Regularly review and adjust your content plan based on performance metrics, audience feedback, and evolving business goals, typically quarterly or biannually.
What are some common challenges in content planning?
Challenges include maintaining consistency, measuring effectiveness, keeping content fresh and relevant, and aligning with dynamic market conditions.
Summary
A content plan ensures that every piece of content you create is aligned with your content strategy and flows through the right stages in the right order, to the right people in order to meet strategic objectives.
Using a content plan template and a content calendar allows your business to execute its content plan while getting stakeholder feedback at the right times, and ensuring that everyone on the team can collaborate and see how each piece of content is progressing along.
Content planning also has challenges. Understanding your target audience, your industry, and your business objectives, and maintaining effective communication and coordination between the members of your content team can help your business overcome these challenges.
Action Steps
Follow the steps in this lesson and use the simple checklist below to create a content plan for your business:
Define your audience: Identify the demographics and psychographics of the people you want to target with your content. Understanding your audience will help you create content that resonates with them.
Set your goals: Determine what you want to achieve with your content. Goals can include increasing website traffic, generating leads, boosting brand awareness, or improving engagement on social media.
Research your competitors: Look at what other businesses in your industry are doing with their content. This can give you an idea of what has worked well in the past, and what strategies you might want to avoid.
Identify your topics: Choose the topics you will create content around. This might include product- or service-related information, industry news, or thought leadership pieces.
Plan your content: Decide on the content type (e.g. blog post, video, podcast, infographics) and schedule when you will publish it.
Create a distribution plan: Outline the channels you will use to distribute your content. For example, you might use social media, email marketing, or paid advertising.
Measure and evaluate: Create a content measurement plan. Define key metrics and implement content tracking methods to track the success of your content and regularly evaluate your results. Use this information to optimize your content and distribution strategy over time.
Content Marketing Workbook: A Beginner’s Guide to Applying Content Marketing To Your Business (HubSpot)-Download this guide to learn about the power of storytelling in content marketing, a framework and process for generating content ideas, how to plan a long-term content strategy, how to effectively promote content, how to extend the value of your content through repurposing, and how to create a topic cluster and pillar page.
Persona Template Generator (HubSpot) – Use this tool to learn what a buyer persona is or to create a buyer persona for your company.
Plan Content – A useful content planning guide and checklist for digital professionals working in the government sector (published by the Australian Government).
Learn how to define a content workflow for your organization, from content ideation and creation to scheduling and publishing.
Content Workflow
Learn how to define a content workflow for your organization, from content ideation and creation to scheduling and publishing.
Keeping content projects on track and on time requires organizing and managing processes with specific tasks, done in a specific order, by team members assigned to specific roles.
If you are building a content pipeline and your content team is working on various projects, things can quickly become unwieldy and difficult to manage. People will start to get confused about where things are at, and projects will end up getting stuck and delayed.
This is where having a defined content workflow can help.
“A content workflow is a set of tasks that a team needs to complete for a given client or content type — a web page, a blog post, a white paper, an email, or any other kind of content that the group needs to deliver.”
The article also mentions Kristina Halvorson, author of Content Strategy For The Web, as saying that a content workflow determines “how content is requested, sourced, created, reviewed, approved, and delivered,” and goes on to explain:
Why a business needs to define a content workflow
How to define a content workflow, and
How to:
Identify the roles (who is involved in production)
Identify the tasks (what each role does)
Determine when tasks should get done by to maintain consistent production flow, and
Assign accountability for overseeing and tracking projects through to completion.
As we touched on in the Content Production Overview lesson, creating a content workflow involves defining things like the steps involved, who does what to make each step happen, how/when the process should move from one step to the next, what formats, guidelines, and procedures should be followed to ensure consistent standards, how/when to deliver each step, etc.
Even a simple content workflow can have many moving parts. For example, consider the steps involved in writing an article for a blog.
At first glance, it may look something like this:
Create an outline.
Write a draft.
Review the draft.
Edit the draft.
Get changes approved.
Publish the article.
A simple content workflow.
However, if you map out the sequence of all the steps involved in the actual article writing process, you may find that your article creation workflow ends up looking something more like this:
Your content workflow for creating articles could look like this.
From the above, it should be clear that:
Certain aspects of the process need to be assigned to and performed by different roles.
Some steps cannot proceed until other steps have first been completed.
Certain processes involve steps that “loop” (i.e. repeat) before the workflow can move to the next phase.
Different content requires different content workflows – a workflow used to create content like blog articles won’t necessarily work for other types of content (e.g. videos).
It’s important, then, to define content workflows in the content production process, as it helps the content team to:
Keep everything organized, saving time, reducing costs, and increasing production efficiency,
Break down different processes into manageable tasks,
Identify each stage of development and what needs to happen for the item to move forward and get approved,
Know who should take over responsibility for each step and when,
Identify and deal with bottlenecks in the production process.
Identify different workflows for different types of content.
Content Workflow Goals And Objectives
Common content workflow goals and objectives include:
Efficiency: The goal is to streamline the content creation process and reduce the time and effort required to produce, review, and publish content. This can be achieved by creating a content calendar, using project management tools, and automating repetitive tasks.
Collaboration: The goal is to promote collaboration and communication among team members to ensure that content is created and reviewed in a timely and effective manner. This can be achieved by using shared tools for content creation, review, and publishing, setting up regular meetings and check-ins, and providing clear guidelines and instructions.
Quality control: The goal is to ensure that all content meets the established standards for quality, accuracy, and compliance with legal, ethical, and brand guidelines. This can be achieved by creating and enforcing a content style guide, regularly reviewing and updating content, and ensuring that all content is accessible and inclusive.
Scalability: The goal is to ensure that the content workflow can easily adapt and scale to accommodate changes in content volume, team size, and complexity. This can be achieved by using cloud-based tools, creating a flexible and modular content creation process, and implementing a version control system.
Security: The goal is to protect the confidentiality and integrity of the content and the workflows by implementing security protocols. This can be achieved by using encryption and access controls, creating backups, and monitoring for unauthorized access.
Flexibility: The goal is to ensure that the content workflow can be easily adapted to changing business needs and goals. This can be achieved by incorporating a feedback and testing process, making it easy for stakeholders to provide input and feedback, and implementing agile methodologies.
Automation: The goal is to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks to improve the speed and efficiency of the content workflow. This can be achieved by using a content management system (CMS) to automate the publishing process, using workflow automation tools, and integrating with other tools and software.
Integration: The goal is to integrate the content workflow with other systems and tools to improve efficiency, collaboration, and automation. This can be achieved by integrating with a CRM system, integrating with social media platforms, and integrating with analytics and reporting tools.
Key Elements Of An Effective Content Workflow
As mentioned, you may need to define different content workflows depending on the content strategy of the business and the purpose of the content it intends to create.
For example, consider the following types of content:
Blog articles to boost search engine visibility and drive traffic to the business,
Videos to inform and introduce products to potential customers,
Social media posts to increase brand awareness.
Each type of content listed above requires different processes to create and serves a different purpose. Each of these processes needs to be clearly defined to ensure efficient content production and consistent standards of quality.
While each of these content types requires different workflow processes, they also have certain elements in common.
Let’s look at these.
Content Production Phases
Different phases of content production.
While different content production processes result in the creation of different content types, they all tend to move through similar phases.
Your content workflow has to move content production through the various phases below:
1. Concept Development / Strategic Ideation
In this phase, team members brainstorm content ideas. Ideally, this will flow from the content strategy and include input from all stakeholders (e.g. the content team, designers, writers, editors, channel managers, creative agencies, etc.) to provide a fuller perspective of all the essential aspects of the project.
This phase should also involve a discussion of factors that can affect the project, like concept, style, budget, resources, timeframes, etc.
2. Pre-Production
This is the preparation phase where you source, gather and line up everything you will need before starting the actual process of creating the content. Depending on which project the team is working on, pre-production may include activities like researching, preparing outlines, sourcing graphics, scripting, etc.
For example, if you are shooting a video, pre-production will probably involve doing things like:
On the other hand, if you are planning to write an article for a blog, pre-production will involve different activities, such as:
Create an outline
Research information
Gather quotes, stats, etc.
Source media (images, banners, videos, etc.)
Interview subject experts
etc.
3. Production
This is where the content gets assembled. Production can take place internally (e.g. by the content team) or externally (e.g. an agency or outsourced provider), or split between the two.
4. Post-Production
In this phase, content either gets fine-tuned and polished (e.g. adding video titles and intros/outros to videos) or prepared for different channels and purposes (e.g., adding video transcripts or translations, creating longer and shorter versions of videos, repurposing articles for social media, infographics, slide presentations, videos, etc.).
Post-production activities can also be split between internal and external teams.
5. Feedback Loop
Once the content is ready for initial review (e.g. an article draft or video rough), it will typically bounce around a loop (e.g. Draft 1 > Review 1 > Draft 2 > Review 2 > Draft 3 > Review 3) involving different people (e.g. editors, subject experts, managers) or different departments (e.g. HR, legal) who provide feedback and additional suggestions until the final content is approved.
6. Final Delivery / Publishing
This is where the content is approved for publishing or distribution via the agreed channels (e.g. blog, social media, email newsletters, etc.)
Content Purpose
There are different ways to define your content’s purpose. For example, the overall purpose of the content may be to help the business achieve a strategic goal, such as building brand awareness or generating leads and sales.
While knowing why you are creating a certain piece of content is important and should be incorporated into the workflow’s production notes and the content brief (see further below), asking a writer to write an article or a video producer to create a video designed to “build brand awareness” doesn’t provide sufficient direction to help them with the actual article writing or video scripting process.
So, additional information about the purpose of the content may be required.
For example, SEOptimer describes the three types of content produced for most websites, often to be used in conjunction with one another:
Cornerstone Content – This is longer, authoritative content that will remain mostly unchanged, covering single topics in a definitive way to build awareness of your brand and establish authority rather than to sell products. Cornerstone content is the content you want to rank highest in the search engines, so it needs to be well written, updated often, and targeted to rank for your most competitive keywords.
Gated Content – This is content (usually of very high value) designed to be exchanged for something of equally high value (e.g. opt-in subscriber or lead information), such as email newsletters, downloadable guides or templates, podcasts, etc.
Evolving Content – This is content produced regularly that changes over time and often needs frequent updates, such as blog posts, news, a video series, etc.
While the aim of content marketing is to use content to convince your audience to take an intended action (e.g. buy something), the aim of content production is to connect with individual members of that audience, and this also has to be reflected in the content’s purpose.
EngageContent describes three types of content that connect with individuals:
Entertaining content – Content that connects with people on an emotional level, such as subjective stories centered around people.
Educational content – Content that connects with people on an intellectual level, such as objective content that describes processes or analysis of data.
Informative content – Content that connects with people on an attentional level, e.g. news content that attracts the reader’s attention because it’s current, new, and relevant.
Understanding the above differences and incorporating these into your content workflow will help your team create and deliver content that is on-purpose.
Content Types
Your content workflow may be geared exclusively to the production of one type of content or to multiple content types, such as blog articles, videos, emails, social media posts, downloadable PDF guides, whitepapers, infographics, templates, etc., and/or produced for print and digital formats.
See the Content Types lesson to learn more about different types of content that can be included in your content workflow and content production.
Team Roles
When defining a content workflow, it’s important to understand and identify:
Who will be involved in the content production process,
Which stage of the project they will be required to participate in, and
What the responsibilities of each role will be.
A project may require assigning different roles to people who may also be working on other projects or areas of the business at the same time, so it’s important to define how all the different roles will work together seamlessly and efficiently in the workflow.
Swimlane diagrams, for, example, are a useful way to map roles in content workflows.
We provide an entire section dedicated to helping you understand different team roles in a content production team and a digital organization.
Tasks
After identifying the roles in the workflow, the next step involves the following:
Identifying the tasks required to complete a project (i.e. what needs to be done).
Defining each task in detail (to minimize time-wasting and confusion once the project gets underway).
Assigning tasks to the roles (i.e. who will do what).
Organizing tasks in a logical and sequential order (i.e. their flow).
Without clearly-defined tasks, things can fall through the cracks, especially if there are multiple people working on a project and/or or multiple teams responsible for ensuring the completion of projects. Vaguely-defined tasks can lead to confusion and lack of accountability (e.g. “I didn’t know I was supposed to do that…I thought such and such was looking after that area!”).
For this reason, it’s important that tasks be made clear enough so that anyone occupying the role assigned to the task will know exactly what needs to be done to complete their part and move it along to the next stage of the production process.
Here’s how to ensure this happens:
Break each task down into its smallest possible elements. For example, after a blog article has been approved for publishing and before hitting the “publish” button, there may be additional steps involved to the post itself (i.e. not the content), like adding a post excerpt, meta description, author’s note, related articles, categories, tags, etc.
Work out who is responsible for each element. For example, if you are creating an infographic, make sure to specify who will do the research and who will supply the graphic designer or illustrator with accurate data (and in which format, e.g. a list, table, slide mock up, etc.). Similarly, who will upload the final article to the blog and hit the publish button…the writer, the editor, or the production manager?
Assign each element of the task to a specific team member. This will help you work out whether certain roles have excessive workloads in the production process and whether these can be distributed, reassigned, or consolidated within existing roles and the available resources.
Ask for feedback when assigning tasks. It may be more efficient for someone else to take on a task. For example, when writing a technical article, a product manager may be more suitable for writing out all of the key points and then handing this to a writer for making the content flow in a more readable way to the audience. This can be worked out during the team production meeting.
Work out agreed ways to signal the completion of a task. Using good workflow management tools can help in this area.
As most tasks in workflows tend to be repeatable processes, it’s best to document these tasks and anything else that helps to complete them, like style guidelines, company information (e.g. mission, vision, and value statements, legal compliance policies, etc.), and store this documentation somewhere where your team can easily access it.
Timelines
Ideally, you would start from the deadline or final publication date for the content, then work backward to create a timeline, adding in specific dates or time frames for all the steps in the process. This way, each team member knows when their task is coming up and when it is due and can plan their workload accordingly.
For example, Let’s say that you are in the first week of July and during your production meeting, the team is informed about a new product due for release on August 1st that needs an accompanying article to be written and ready to publish by the end of July.
Let’s also say that from past experience, you know that it takes articles one working week to go through the feedback loop for reviews and approvals, 2-3 days to write the first draft, and 2-3 days to research and create an outline once the writer is given a content brief.
Working backward from the deadline, the initial schedule for making sure that the article will be ready in time for publishing would look something like this…
What your production calendar timeline would look like working backward from a deadline for submitting publish-ready content.
From the above schedule, you would then assign all the tasks required to complete the project to different roles and incorporate your content workflow into your content management tool to track its progress.
While this approach may work for getting content delivered in sync with a specific marketing promotion or event (e.g. a “Black Friday” sale) and is quite useful for content planning purposes, things often don’t work out to plan, so it’s important to include enough time into the content production process for additional edits, revisions, and unexpected events, such as:
A team member gets sick or goes on leave,
Competing priorities create delays, hold-ups, or bottlenecks in the production process,
The project schedule is brought forward (e.g. to match a product release or company announcement).
Tools
Using the right tools allows everyone involved in the project to have a clear idea of what, when, and where their contribution is required in the workflow, and to keep track of where things are at during production.
Once everything has been defined — phases, timelines, roles, tasks, etc., the next step is to choose a workflow approach and arrange all production elements in a way that will work for the business or organization.
As explained in this article, there are three main workflow approaches:
Status-based: The workflow is organized around the status of a content piece.
Task-based: The workflow is organized around the tasks needed to complete the project.
Swim lane: The workflow is organized across different roles over time.
An example of tasks organized using the ‘swim lane’ workflow approach. Source: Smartsheet.com
Project/Content Brief
A content brief (or project brief, or creative brief) is a document that outlines the project’s context, purpose, and deliverables. It provides whoever is assigned to create the content with all the information and direction they need to make sure that their efforts will be on track and on purpose.
A content brief helps to:
Set out project expectations clearly and concisely.
Make the team focus on the most important areas of the project.
Save unnecessary editing and revisions.
Deliver content that fits the purpose and goals of the organization’s content strategy.
Depending on the project type, a content brief may include/address the following areas:
Project background (i.e. why is this content required?)
Target audience/buyer persona (if the organization targets multiple audiences)
Content type(s) and deliverables
Project timeline, deadline, and key milestones
Suggested titles, target keywords
Initial research (e.g. competing articles, reference sources, etc.)
Resources (e.g. supporting statistics, quotes, related articles for internal linking, etc.)
Access to subject matter experts (if required). This can be as simple as pointing out who to contact in the organization to obtain information (e.g. a product manager), or something more elaborate, such as lining up interviews with industry experts.
To help you understand what a content brief looks like, here is an example of a content brief for an article listing the best espresso coffee machines:
*** Start Content Brief ***
Title: “Top 10 Best Espresso Coffee Machines for At-Home Brewing”
Purpose: To provide readers with a list of the best espresso coffee machines for at-home brewing, based on factors such as performance, ease of use, and price.
Target audience: Home coffee enthusiasts who are interested in purchasing an espresso coffee machine for at-home brewing.
Objectives:
To help readers find the best espresso coffee machine for their needs and budget.
To provide detailed information about the features and performance of each espresso coffee machine.
To offer tips and recommendations for selecting the right espresso coffee machine.
Keywords: espresso, coffee machine, at-home brewing, performance, ease of use, price, features
Outline:
Introduction
Explain the purpose of the article and introduce the topic of espresso coffee machines.
Provide a brief overview of the different types of espresso coffee machines available, and explain why they are a popular choice for at-home brewing.
2. Top 10 Best Espresso Coffee Machines
Introduce the list of the top 10 best espresso coffee machines, and explain the criteria used to select them (performance, ease of use, price, etc.).
For each espresso coffee machine on the list, provide a brief overview of its features and performance, and explain why it made the top 10.
3. Tips and Recommendations
Offer tips and recommendations for selecting the right espresso coffee machine, based on factors such as budget, intended use, and personal preferences.
Provide guidance on how to properly use and maintain an espresso coffee machine to ensure optimal performance.
4. Conclusion
Summarize the main points of the article and encourage readers to consider purchasing one of the top 10 best espresso coffee machines for at-home brewing.
**** End Content Brief ***
Content briefs are not only useful for helping your content team nail projects when creating standardized content types internally but they can also be used in projects that involve working with new or inexperienced writers and content creators, outsourced (e.g. freelance) writers and marketing agencies, partners who are writing content about your company, or when creating projects on behalf of clients.
In all of the above instances, writing content or creative briefs before starting on the work will help content creators stay focused on the project’s goals, audiences, topics, keywords, etc., and deliver content that will meet your defined standard, voice, style, and needs.
Useful Tips:
Don’t overload content creators by supplying them with more information than they need to complete the project.
Ideally, the brief would also incorporate some form of initial meeting or discussion with the content team and individuals involved in the project to address any questions or concerns they may have and to make sure that everyone clearly understands the project and what is expected of them.
It’s also useful to develop a content brief template that the team can easily understand and follow.
For additional information on creating content briefs, see the ‘Resources’ and ‘References’ sections at the end of this lesson.
Workflow Sub-Processes
Depending on the size of your business and the complexity of its projects, certain aspects of content production may take place in different areas of the business or outside the organization.
In this case, you may want to consider creating separate workflow sub-processes to ensure that content production remains manageable.
For example, in larger companies, content approval and content publishing often involve more people, different departments, or outsourcing to professionals outside the organization, so the business may want to consider treating these as sub-processes of the content production process and having separate workflows to manage these areas.
The content approval workflow would then focus on the ‘sign-off’ process and deal specifically with content approval or rejection, while the content publishing workflow would focus specifically on the publication process.
Document Storage
An efficient content production process needs a system that allows content to be stored, organized, and retrieved at each stage of production.
This will depend on what works best for your organization.
You can use workflow management software to do this or just simply set up a numbered series of folders on a shared drive or cloud storage location that allows each member of the team to go into the folder on a specified date and see at a glance whether there is work waiting for them to do and what their tasks and responsibilities are for that day.
Ideally, you will use a combination of both methods. For example, you can run content projects from a workflow management tool and allow team members to add and access media elements such as images, videos, and downloadable files from numbered folders saved on a shared drive.
You can organize your content project using content workflow software of numbered folders. Source: EngageContent.com.au
The next step after defining your content workflow is to create a content production schedule.
This is the schedule that your content team will work to in order to meet content production targets and deliver content within specific deadlines.
The content production schedule will depend on how much content the business needs to create and the structure of your content team. This schedule can be refined as you go.
Once your content team gets into its stride, you will have a better idea of how long it takes to create content outlines, edit drafts, wait for people to review articles, coordinate items and events between different calendars (e.g. content production and content promotion calendars), what days are best to publish content, etc.
Define the goals and objectives of your content workflow: Clearly define the goals and objectives of the content workflow, such as streamlining the content creation process and ensuring consistency in the quality of the content.
Identify all stakeholders: Identify all stakeholders involved in the content creation process, including content creators, editors, and approvers.
Define roles and responsibilities: Define the roles and responsibilities for each stakeholder in the content creation process.
Establish a content creation process: Establish a content creation process that outlines the steps for creating, reviewing, editing, and publishing content.
Use a content management system (CMS): Use a content management system (CMS) to manage and organize the content creation process.
Set deadlines and milestones: Set deadlines and milestones for each step of the content creation process.
Implement a content review process: Implement a content review process to ensure the quality and consistency of the content.
Use a version control system: Use a version control system to keep track of the different versions of the content and ensure that the final version is accurate.
Set up an approval process: Set up an approval process for the final version of the content before it is published.
Continuously monitor and improve: Continuously monitor and improve the content workflow based on the results and feedback.
Content Workflow – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content workflow:
What is content workflow?
Content workflow refers to the structured processes and steps involved in creating, managing, and distributing content. It ensures consistent execution and quality across content projects.
Why is content workflow important?
Content workflow is crucial because it helps teams maintain efficiency, consistency, and quality in content creation and distribution. It also facilitates better collaboration and accountability among team members.
What are the typical stages of a content workflow?
The stages usually include planning, creation, review, approval, publication, and analysis. These stages help in managing the content lifecycle effectively.
What tools are commonly used in content workflows?
How do I choose the right content workflow for my team?
Assess your team’s specific needs, the types of content you produce, your publication frequency, and your team’s size. It might also be beneficial to consider customizable templates or software that can adapt to your organization’s changing needs.
What are the benefits of a well-defined content workflow?
A well-defined workflow improves operational efficiency, reduces errors, ensures content quality, and helps meet deadlines. It can also lead to better content alignment with business goals.
Can content workflow impact content quality?
Yes, a well-managed workflow ensures that all content is properly vetted and refined through stages like editing and approval, which significantly enhances the quality of the final output.
Summary
Defining content workflows ensures that the content production process works efficiently by following a logical and repeatable order.
Content workflows also help your content team set clear milestones and recognize any dependencies required to help them meet project deadlines on time.
Action Steps
Identify and document all the different content workflows your organization requires to meet its strategic objectives.
Resources
Free content workflow checklist – this useful article includes a downloadable checklist that will help you identify tasks, timeframes, and assign responsibilities.
Content Brief Templates (MarketMuse) – Use this online tool to create content briefs using AI-enabled technologies that analyze competing content on similar topics.
Provides structure and visibility to content production processes
Increases execution efficiency to help deliver content on time
Helps your team to better understand how dependencies affect processes
Increases clarity into when and how to push work forward
Enables faster content approvals and less rework
Documenting workflows not only helps to define the roles, tasks, processes, and steps involved in the production of content, it also helps to organize content ideas, prioritize projects, track their execution, determine what happens to the content after its published, and record how and where all the information gets stored.
Workflow Management Tools
In the Content Workflow lesson, you were asked to identify what each role in the content production process does for any given workflow, break these down into tasks, assign each task to a role, and order these tasks in a logical and sequential order of completion.
After you have done this, where do you then record all this information so everyone in your team can access it to begin and track content production?
You can do this manually (e.g. using a spreadsheet or drawing it on a whiteboard), use workflow management software, or a combination of both. It all depends on how your business works and what works best.
As long as workflow processes are defined and written down somewhere (and don’t exist only in someone’s head), you have documentation that others can access and refer to. Later in this lesson, we’ll look at how to organize this documentation more efficiently for easy access and retrieval.
For now, let’s look at using various tools to document your workflow processes.
Spreadsheets
If you have been tasked with designing, building, and documenting a content workflow for your organization, spreadsheets are a great way to develop a prototype for your content production workflows.
Using spreadsheets can help you focus on streamlining the production stages and tasks in your workflow, identify dependencies and issues, and track your content production team’s progress.
Case Study
When I began working as a blog writer for a web development services provider, my team consisted of myself, two other blog writers, and our CEO who was also filling in for the role of Editor.
Each week, we would discuss ideas for new articles during our weekly team meeting. Each writer would then go and write the articles, and get them reviewed until these were approved and published, and we would then repeat the process the following week.
After a short while, our small team began to grow. Additional writers and illustrators were brought in, and I soon found myself having to schedule the production of new content for the blog in addition to reviewing and updating existing content.
We had guidelines for getting the work done but no clearly defined workflows for managing and tracking the people and processes involved, so I created a spreadsheet with various color-coded sections and workflow columns to schedule new projects and keep track of our content production.
Our team initially used a spreadsheet-based content production board to schedule and track the production of new articles for our blog.
As we began to rely more on this spreadsheet to plan and manage our team’s workload, I then fine-tuned, inserted, and rearranged some columns within the spreadsheet to improve workflow efficiency.
Starting with a spreadsheet is a useful way to test, improve, and document your content workflow.
When working with spreadsheets, we also recommend adding comments to all the column headings so your content team knows exactly what they are required to do every step of the way.
Adding comments to spreadsheet column headers is a great way to document your workflow processes.
In addition to content writing, our blog articles also require custom artwork such as featured images (hero banners). This is done by our illustrators.
Creating articles for this blog involves using illustrators to create featured images and documenting this in the workflow as a sub-process. Source: WPMU DEV.
Our illustrators and designers, however, create artwork for the entire company, not just the blog team. Also, each writer in the blog team is responsible for sourcing images, creating screenshots, and requesting artwork for their articles, so the blog team mostly uses the company’s illustrators to request featured images for articles.
Given this structure, we decided to incorporate the task of requesting and tracking the delivery of featured images into the workflow as a sub-process, using a separate spreadsheet.
Featured images for blog articles are requested separately using a banner request spreadsheet.
All our illustrators have to do is:
Check the spreadsheet for new banner requests (when a writer requests a new banner we notify our artwork team via our team messaging software)
Assign the creation of the banner to one of their team members (they decide who to assign the work to internally, we just place the request)
Provide a link to download the artwork when the banner is done.
Whichever writer requested the banner then uploads the featured image to their article and marks the task as completed (“done”) in the artwork team’s spreadsheet.
Once images are created and delivered, the task is marked off on the spreadsheet.
The writer then marks this task as done in the blog team’s main content tracking spreadsheet.
Featured images for blog articles are also marked off in the team’s main content spreadsheet.
In addition to featured images, some of our blog articles include cartoons created by one of our team members who is a professional cartoonist.
Requesting cartoons for blog articles is a separate process. Source: WPMU DEV
As our illustrators are not involved in creating cartoons, this is another sub-process of the blog’s content workflow, so the team uses a different spreadsheet to submit cartoon requests and to track the completion and delivery of the artwork.
Requests for cartoon artwork for blog articles are tracked on a separate spreadsheet.
The blog team also makes all published blog articles available to the SEO team to review, analyze, and look for ways to improve their performance.
As we don’t want to overload the SEO team with unnecessary and unrelated “content production” information, we treat this as another sub-process of our content workflow and track it on a separate spreadsheet after articles are published on the blog.
Another spreadsheet is used to keep a log of all published blog articles for review by the company’s SEO team.
In addition to using spreadsheets, our team uses tools like Slack (our team messaging software) to add content writing task reminders for deadlines and schedules during times when team members and other company staff are away on leave, holidays, etc. (you can also use an editorial calendar.)
Use tools like Slack to communicate with team members and add content writing schedules and reminders.
A production and performance summary report is also compiled from the spreadsheets at the end of the year and posted to the team on Slack.
We publish a simple blog team summary production summary report at the end of the year.
As you can see from the above, documenting the content workflow of something as simple as the production of a single content type (e.g. blog articles) can involve various processes.
If your workflow management needs outgrow spreadsheets, then consider using other software tools.
Workflow Management Software
While spreadsheets are a great way to document some workflow processes, you may want to use a workflow management software.
For instance, with the example we’re using in this lesson, spreadsheets are sufficient to document certain sub-processes like requesting images/artwork and for tracking SEO progress. Documenting the entire content production workflow, however, required using a more flexible tool.
Getting approval for blog articles, for example, often involves members from other teams (e.g. software development, hosting, support, and business development teams), and work priorities often change to align with other events taking place in the company, such as releasing new product features and new service launches (or launch delays).
So, we turned to workflow management software when spreadsheets were no longer adequate to help us manage content production.
There are many great workflow management tools available and the right tool for your organization depends on its needs and preferences. In this case, we decided to use Jira to document and manage our workflow processes, as most of our teams were already using it to manage their workflows.
A workflow management software is not just a great content production tool, it is also a powerful workflow documentation tool.
As mentioned earlier, starting with a spreadsheet is useful for developing prototype workflows. After learning the basics of how to use the software, all we had to do was to map out the content workflow processes in the tool.
A tool like Jira automatically documents the workflow as you configure processes on your kanban board.
Once this step was done, managing content workflow became much easier. The tool itself became one of the main components of our workflow documentation process.
The columns display the content production workflow.
Some of the benefits of using a workflow management tool to document processes include the following:
Any team member can contribute to improving workflow documentation by modifying the workflow management tool itself.
Rearrange columns on the kanban board to update workflow processes.
For example, team feedback and discussions contributed to improving the order of processes to improve production flow and efficiency. Adding, removing, or rearranging the columns on the tool’s kanban board automatically updates the workflow documentation.
A workflow management tool like Jira lets you easily assign tasks to different stages of the production process.
Using agreed standards and conventions for creating projects in the tool also benefits the workflow documentation.
Using agreed standards when adding tasks to the workflow tool helps the content team and is also part of the workflow documentation.
Additionally, you can improve the workflow documentation by building “templates” for new jobs into the workflow processes.
These templates can include essential elements of the project brief, such as:
Project description – This section provides notes and background to help whoever is assigned the job understand what is required.
Reference – Here, we add any links to internal conversations and discussions about the project. Writers can then get a better idea of things like context, suggestions made by other team members, things to highlight or avoid in the content, etc.
Keywords – Keyword research information goes here. The writer knows then which keywords to focus on when creating or updating the article.
Internal Links – Here we list the URLs of other blog posts related to the topic so the writer can link to these in the article where and when appropriate.
Competition – Here, we provide a list of competing articles on the topic or keywords that we are targeting. This helps the writer research the topic and gives them a better idea of what the article needs to cover to rank competitively with other existing articles.
Add templates to your workflow management tool to improve workflow documentation.
Templates can improve workflow (and workflow documentation) significantly. When a writer is assigned a new blog article project, for example, they already have all the information they need to get started…
Templates can improve workflow documentation significantly.
This can also help the writer save time with other tasks, such as doing research or linking to existing topic-related articles on the blog…
A workflow management tool not only documents the workflow, it also saves the content used to create your projects.
Collaboration features such as team commenting are also part of the workflow documentation.
A workflow management tool allows team members to add comments to communicate and collaborate with other team members on projects.
A workflow management tool, in fact, documents everything associated with a project’s workflow. This includes brief notes, comments, attachments, production time, etc.
Everything associated with the project’s workflow is recorded, documented, and archived.
Workflow documentation isn’t confined to using a great content production and workflow management tool, however.
Additional Workflow Documentation
In the content workflow lesson, we explain the importance of breaking down and defining each task in as much detail as is necessary to minimize confusion, avoid unnecessary steps, save time, and improve workflow efficiency.
This all requires additional documentation.
For example, let’s say that a new writer has to create an article about one of the company’s main products or services.
Where does the writer go to get information about the company and the products, request or download artwork, obtain access logins for certain tools or services required to complete the article, standards and guidelines for spelling and grammar, accuracy, voice and tone, or compliance with certain policies or legal requirements?
These aren’t documented in the workflow management tool. They require additional workflow documentation.
Below are some of the essential types of documentation your organization should have and be able to provide to its content team. It will help them save time planning, researching, and accessing commonly-used information (and minimize disrupting other team members from doing their work):
Company Information
Vision, Mission, Value statements
HR documents (e.g. compliance, security, codes of conduct, requesting time off, etc.)
Company training manuals
Team member details (names, description of role, contact info)
Logins and passwords to services pertaining to their roles
Pre-publishing checklists can be built into your Content Management System (CMS). Image: Pre-Publish Checklist Plugin.
For a complete list of useful documentation for your content writing team, refer to the Content Documentation lesson.
For tasks that require more details than the workflow tool can provide, we recommend building an online guide for your content team with regularly updated links to internal documentation, style guidelines, useful information, tips, tutorials, login details for online services, code snippets, shortcuts, time-saving hacks, etc.
The purpose of this guide is to point your team to all the information and resources they will need to complete their projects (e.g. where to find company information, audience profiles, word-count goals, style guidelines for voice, tone, and format, etc.).
This is a great way to help your team save time with content production and onboard new team members.
Build an online guide for your content team with links to all the documentation they need to produce content.
You can build this helpful guide starting with just the basic information like useful links to company documentation, get your team to contribute to it (e.g. whenever someone experiences an issue and finds a way to solve it), and appoint someone to manage the guide and be responsible for keeping the content in it up-to-date and accurate.
Make all workflow documentation accessible to your content team from a central location.
You can build this guide online in a subfolder of your main domain (e.g. yourdomain.com/content-guide) and make it private using a content management system like WordPress or build it on a platform like Google Sites.
Storing and Accessing Workflow Documentation
Your Workflow Management software can document some of your workflow processes, but where do you store additional documentation used in your content workflow, such as style guides, content brief templates, etc.?
Define the purpose of your content workflow documentation: This step involves identifying the goals and objectives of creating the documentation, such as improving team collaboration, streamlining the content creation process, and ensuring consistency in the content produced.
Gather information: This step involves collecting information about the current content creation process, including the roles and responsibilities of team members, the tools and software used, and any existing documentation or guidelines.
Identify key stakeholders: This step involves identifying the individuals or teams who will be impacted by the content workflow documentation, such as content creators, editors, and marketers.
Create a template: This step involves creating a template for the content workflow documentation, including sections for an introduction, roles and responsibilities, the content creation process, tools and software, and any relevant guidelines or best practices.
Outline the content creation process: This step involves outlining your step-by-step process for creating content, from idea generation to publication.
Assign roles and responsibilities: This step involves assigning roles and responsibilities to team members, including who is responsible for creating, editing, and publishing content.
Identify tools and software: This step involves identifying the tools and software used in the content creation process, such as content management systems, project management tools, and design software.
Develop guidelines and best practices: This step involves developing guidelines and best practices for the content creation process, such as style and tone guidelines, and accessibility standards.
Document procedures: After defining all of the above steps, it’s important to document your procedures.
Review and test: This step involves reviewing and testing the content workflow documentation, seeking feedback from key stakeholders, and making any necessary revisions.
Finalize and distribute: This step involves finalizing the content workflow documentation and distributing it to the appropriate team members, ensuring that everyone has access to the latest version.
Content Workflow Documentation – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content workflow documentation:
What is content workflow documentation?
Content workflow documentation outlines the step-by-step process of how content is created, reviewed, approved, and published within an organization’s content management system (CMS).
Why is content workflow documentation important?
It ensures consistency, efficiency, and accountability in content creation processes, helping teams understand their roles and responsibilities.
What elements are included in content workflow documentation?
It typically includes workflow diagrams, role descriptions, content templates, approval criteria, and escalation procedures.
How do organizations create content workflow documentation?
Organizations analyze their content creation process, identify key stakeholders, define roles, map out workflow steps, and document these processes using tools like flowcharts or specialized software.
How does content workflow documentation improve collaboration?
It fosters clear communication between team members by outlining who is responsible for each task, reducing misunderstandings and streamlining collaboration.
What are the benefits of documenting content workflows?
Benefits include increased productivity, reduced errors, faster turnaround times, better content quality, and compliance with regulatory requirements.
How often should content workflow documentation be updated?
It should be reviewed regularly to reflect any changes in processes, personnel, or technology to ensure its relevance and effectiveness.
Summary
Documenting workflow processes helps your content production team know what they are doing (or what they are supposed to do) and shows them how to do it in the most efficient and effective way possible.
This frees everyone in your team to focus more of their time and energy on creating better content.
Action Steps
If you haven’t begun to document your content workflow processes yet, then it’s important to make a beginning.
You can start simply by writing down or typing out processes and procedures in bullet point form so they are recorded and stored somewhere, and bookmarking links to frequently accessed pages of your website or other sites, shared drive folders, useful tools, resources, etc.
Documentation is an ongoing process, so get started and continually add to it. Get everyone in your team or company to contribute to growing and improving this documentation and remember to schedule periodic reviews to make sure everything is kept up-to-date.
Resources
Content Production Tools – A list of useful tools for creating and managing your content production.
Learn how to develop an effective content production process that delivers consistently high-quality content on a regular basis.
Content Production
Learn how to develop an effective content production process that delivers consistently high-quality content on a regular basis.
Content…a website’s gotta have it!
Your business needs to produce high-quality content to attract leads and engage with your audience, delivered regularly, and often adapted to multiple channels.
This requires developing and maintaining an effective content production process.
In this lesson, we’ll cover:
What Is Content Production?
The Key Components Of A Content Production Process
Troubleshooting Common Content Production Problems
Additionally, we recommend subscribing to our free content management course email lessons if you haven’t already, as these provide a practical step-by-step way to implement the lessons in this course.
As a subscriber, you will also get notified when new posts containing practical information and valuable content management tips are added to our blog.
What Is Content Production?
Let’s look at some definitions from the web…
“Content production is the process of creating written and visual products for distribution as part of an overall content marketing strategy.”
“Content production is the process of developing and creating visual or written assets, such as videos, eBooks, blog posts, whitepapers, or infographics.”
As the above suggests, content production is a process.
Content production, however, is more than just a process. It’s also a system. And like every system, it requires inputs and outputs.
Your Content System: Content Strategy And Content Production
Having a content strategy is not the same as having a content production system:
“Content strategy = the plan that informs what you publish, how you publish and why you publish (ie business value)”
vs…
“Content production = the series of defined, documented, steps that take each piece of content from idea to publication and analyze its effectiveness in advancing your content strategy.”
Both your content strategy and content production process, however, are essential parts of a “self-looping” feedback system that can create and deliver content of great value to help your organization achieve its objectives.
Having a content strategy and a content production process is essential to creating content that delivers results to your business.
In fact, a content strategy (and the content plan derived from its strategic objectives) are the inputs the content production process needs to output the various types of content your business needs to meet its strategic goals and objectives.
A content production system should deliver content that helps your business meet the goals outlined in your content strategy.
A good content production system, then, allows your business to:
Produce quality content for one or more content types that serve a definite purpose for your organization.
Maintain a steady flow of newly published content of a consistent standard.
Communicate roles and responsibilities clearly within the content production team and across other teams.
Identify, prevent, reduce, solve, and/or eliminate problems that arise in the content production process.
Adjust the types of content it produces if there are any changes made to the content strategy or content plan.
Scale its efforts.
It can’t be emphasized enough that content needs to be created (and distributed, and managed) as part of a well-thought-out system.
Your business may create an occasional brilliant piece of content ad-hoc, but without a strategy, planning, and systems, it will have no way to understand what makes the content resonate with your audience, what your true cost of production is, and how to duplicate this success across other topics or different content types.
The Key Components Of A Content Production Process
Now that we have established the importance of thinking of content production as being part of a system, let’s look at the main components of the content production process.
Key components of the content production process.
Content Ideas
Coming up with ideas for your content can be a challenging part of the content creation process.
With the right sources and methods, however, you can generate a steady stream of ideas to keep your content fresh and engaging.
Some sources and methods you can use to generate ideas for your content include:
Your audience: Your audience is a great source of ideas for content. Consider what questions, problems, or interests your audience has, and create content that addresses those topics.
Industry experts and thought leaders: Follow industry experts and thought leaders in your field and look for ideas for content that align with their work and insights.
Trends and news: Stay up-to-date on current trends and news in your industry, and use them as inspiration for your content.
Social media: Social media is a great source of inspiration for content ideas. Look for conversations, hashtags, and trends on platforms like Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
Brainstorming: Get your team together and have a brainstorming session to generate ideas for content. This can be a fun and creative way to come up with new and innovative ideas.
Competitor analysis: Take a look at what your competitors are doing and see if there are any gaps in their content. This can help you identify opportunities for your own content.
By using these sources and methods, you can generate a wide range of ideas for your content and keep your audience engaged with fresh and relevant material.
We’ve created a comprehensive email course on how to keep coming up with endless new content ideas for website articles, blog posts, and newsletters…100% free!
If your business intends to create and publish content repeatedly, then it needs an effective content production process to keep moving concepts from ideas to published content.
For example, writing an article for your company’s blog may involve the following steps:
How and when should a process move to the next step.
What formats, guidelines, and procedures need to be followed to ensure that consistent standards are maintained.
How and when to deliver each step.
etc.
It also involves documenting:
How each step should be documented (and who will do this).
How and where the documentation should be stored.
Who can access and modify the documentation, processes, etc. (and how this should be done.)
While a workflow may define the process for creating one type of content (e.g. blog articles), it may not suit the production of other content types, such as videos, podcasts, slide presentations, ebooks, etc.
Some workflows may be simple, while others can be quite complex. Some projects may also require several different workflows to be assigned to different teams.
It’s important, therefore, to define workflows for all the different content processes that your business will engage in and all the different types of content it will create.
See the lessons below for details on how to create and document a content workflow for your business:
The above process may be fine if you are the only person creating and publishing the content. In many businesses and organizations, however, a digital team comprised of multiple roles is often required to oversee and perform various content production tasks.
A key component of the content production process, then, is being able to identify the specific roles required to perform and complete any given workflow, work out all the tasks involved, and assign each task to the respective role in its correct sequence.
Workflow Documentation
Documenting workflows not only helps to define the roles, tasks, processes, and steps involved in the production of content, but it also helps to organize content ideas, prioritize projects, track their execution, determine what happens to the content after its published, and record how and where all the information gets stored.
Content Production Review, Evaluation, And Measurement
To determine if your content production process is efficient and find ways to improve it, you must be able to measure, review, and evaluate it.
There are several ways to do this. For example, you can measure its qualitative and quantitative outputs:
Qualitative Outputs – Has the content met its brief? Were content guidelines for structure, style, formatting, etc. followed correctly?
Quantitative Outputs – Are content production targets being met? How much new content is being added and coming through the pipeline?
Having measurable outputs can help you evaluate content production efficiency.
You can also measure content production efficiency using time/cost-based metrics, such as:
1. Time to publish – how long it takes to move a piece from ideation to publication.
2. Time to distribute – how long it takes to get published content in the hands of the intended audience(s).
3. Withdrawal time – how quickly can published content with errors be withdrawn from public access or outdated content be reviewed.
4. Production cost – how much a piece costs to create.
5. Distribution cost – how much publishing a piece to each targeted channel costs.
Once you have a way to measure your content production efficiency, you can review and evaluate it by surveying key project stakeholders and getting their feedback regarding the processes involved.
Your Content Production Plan
Now that you understand the content production process better, it’s time to create your content production plan.
Your content production plan is a document that outlines the strategy and schedule for creating, publishing, and promoting content for your business.
It typically includes the goals and objectives for your content, your target audience, the types of content you will produce, the distribution channels you will use, and the key performance indicators (KPIs) you will use to measure the success of your content production efforts.
Your business needs a content production plan because it helps you to align your content efforts with your overall marketing and business goals and to ensure that you are creating content that is relevant, valuable, and engaging for your target audience.
It also allows your business to allocate its resources and budget more efficiently toward content creation and track your content’s performance over time.
Additionally, a content production plan can help your business to identify and fill gaps in your content offerings, and stay consistent and on-brand with your messaging.
In short, a content production plan is a detailed plan that outlines the specific actions and resources that your business will use to create and publish its content.
It is a more detailed version of your content plan and will help your business stay organized and on schedule when creating content.
Content Production Plan Goals And Objectives
Common content production plan goals and objectives include:
Content planning: The goal is to plan and strategize the creation, distribution, and promotion of content. This can be achieved by creating an editorial calendar, identifying a target audience, and defining KPIs.
Content creation: The goal is to create high-quality, engaging, and relevant content that meets the needs of your target audience. This can be achieved by writing blog posts, creating videos, and designing graphics and infographics
Content optimization: The goal is to improve the quality and performance of your content by ensuring it is well-written, visually appealing, and optimized for search engines and social media. This can be achieved by optimizing headlines, meta descriptions, and images, using keywords and hashtags, and making sure the content is mobile-friendly.
Content distribution: The goal is to distribute and promote content through various channels, such as social media, email, and other digital platforms. This can be achieved by publishing content on your website, sharing it on social media, and sending newsletters.
Content measurement and analytics: The goal is to track and measure your content’s performance in terms of engagement, conversion, and other key performance indicators (KPIs). This can be achieved by using analytics tools to track website traffic, social media engagement, and conversion rates
Content repurposing: The goal is to repurpose your existing content in new and different formats for different channels and audiences. This can be achieved by republishing a blog post as a video, creating an e-book from a series of blog posts, and turning a podcast episode into a transcript
Content updating: The goal is to keep your content up-to-date and relevant by updating or removing outdated information. This can be achieved by updating a blog post with new information, removing a broken link, or revising an old video.
How To Create A Content Production Plan
Here are the steps you can follow to create a content production plan for your business:
Assign roles and responsibilities: Determine who will be responsible for each aspect of the content creation process. This might include research, writing, editing, design, and distribution.
Create a content calendar: Use a calendar or scheduling tool to plan out when each piece of content will be created, reviewed, and published. This will help you stay on track and ensure that you have a steady stream of content to share with your audience.
Define your workflow: Create a detailed workflow outlining the specific steps that will be taken for each piece of content. This should include research, writing, editing, design, and distribution.
Outline your process for creating each type of content: Identify the tools, resources, and steps required to create different types of content, such as blogs, videos, podcasts, infographics, etc.
Review and optimize: Regularly review your content production plan and make adjustments as needed. Use metrics to measure the success of your content and make changes that will help improve results over time.
Example Of A Content Production Plan
Here is an example of what a simple content production plan for a fashion e-commerce store might look like:
With a content production plan in place, the e-commerce store will be able to create and distribute a steady stream of high-quality content that resonates with its target audience, aligning with the overall business goals.
Content Creation – Best Practices
Creating high-quality and engaging content is crucial for your content marketing strategy.
Not only will it help you attract and retain an audience, but it will also help build trust and credibility for your brand.
Here are some best practices to follow when creating high-quality and engaging content:
Plan your content: Creating a content calendar or editorial plan can help you stay organized and ensure that you have a steady stream of ideas for your content.
Use relevant and reliable sources: Make sure to use credible sources when researching and creating your content. This will help you produce content that is accurate and trustworthy.
Start with a strong headline: Your headline is the first thing your audience will see, so make sure it’s attention-grabbing and clearly conveys the main message of your content.
Use formatting and design elements to enhance readability: Use formatting techniques like headings, bullet points, and bold text to make your content easier to read and scan.
Use visuals: Adding visual elements to your content like images, videos, and infographics can help break up text and make your content more engaging and easier for your audience to understand. Just make sure to use high-quality images and optimize your videos for mobile.
Know your audience: Understanding who your target audience is and what they are interested in will help you create content that resonates with them.
Write for your audience: Your content should be tailored to your target audience. Consider their interests, problems, and needs, and create content that addresses those topics.
Keep it simple: Use clear, concise language and avoid unnecessary jargon or complex concepts. This will help your content be more accessible and easier for your audience to read and understand.
Optimize for SEO: Use keywords and other SEO best practices to ensure that your content is discoverable by search engines and your target audience.
Use data and research to support your points: Including data and research in your content adds credibility and can help you make a stronger case for your points.
Edit and proofread: Make sure to edit and proofread your content to ensure it’s error-free and easy to understand.
By following these best practices, you can create high-quality and engaging content that resonates with your audience and helps you achieve your content goals.
Content Production Challenges
While content production is a crucial and necessary part of your content strategy, it can also present some challenges, especially as you try to create unique and original content for your business and website.
Here are some of the main challenges you may experience with content production:
Defining your target audience: One of the main hurdles of creating content for a website is defining your target audience and understanding their needs, interests, and pain points. This is crucial for creating relevant and valuable content that will engage them.
Content strategy: Another hurdle is to develop a content strategy that defines the type of content you will create, the topics you will cover, and the goals you will achieve.
Research and information gathering: One of the main challenges of creating unique and original content is researching and gathering the necessary information. This can take a significant amount of time and effort, and it can be difficult to find reliable and accurate sources of information.
Originality: Another challenge is to come up with original ideas and perspectives, as it’s easy to fall into the trap of creating content that is similar to what’s already out there.
Writing quality and style: Maintaining a consistent writing style and quality throughout the content is crucial for engaging the audience and building trust, but it can be challenging to achieve without the necessary skills and tools. It requires a good understanding of grammar, punctuation, and the target audience.
Formatting and design: Creating unique and original content requires the use of effective formatting and design, which can be challenging to achieve without the necessary skills and tools.
SEO and keyword research: Creating unique and original content that is optimized for search engines can be challenging, as it requires a good understanding of SEOand keyword research.
Time management: Creating unique and original content can be time-consuming, and it’s important to manage time effectively to ensure that the content is delivered on schedule.
Keeping up with trends: Another challenge is to keep up with trends and changes in the industry, which requires staying up to date with the latest developments and news.
Meeting the needs of the audience: Creating unique and original content that meets the needs of the target audience can be challenging, as it requires a good understanding of their preferences, interests, and pain points.
Measuring success: Measuring the success of your content can be a hurdle, as it requires tracking metrics such as engagement, traffic, and conversion rates.
Content Production Checklist
Define the purpose and target audience for the content: Before starting to create any content, it’s essential to understand why it’s being created and who it’s being created for. This will help guide the overall tone and style of the content.
Research and gather information: Gather all the information and resources you need to create the content, this includes researching industry trends, competitor content, and audience behavior.
Create an outline: Organize the information you’ve gathered into a logical structure, this will be your guide when creating the final piece of content.
Write the content: Using the outline as a guide, begin writing the content. Be sure to keep the tone and style consistent with the purpose and target audience defined in step one.
Edit and proofread: Once the content is written, read it over several times to catch any errors or inconsistencies. Make sure the content is clear, concise, and easy to understand.
Add media: Add any relevant images, videos, or other media to enhance the content and make it more engaging for the audience.
Optimize for SEO: Optimize the content for search engines by including relevant keywords, meta descriptions, and alt tags.
Publish and distribute: Once the content is final, publish it on your website or other platforms and promote it through social media and other channels to reach your target audience.
Track and analyze performance: Use analytics tools to track the performance of the content and gather insights on how to improve future content.
Troubleshooting Common Content Production Problems
Sometimes, problems affecting content creation may not surface until you reach the content production phase.
For example, once your team actually starts to create the content, they may discover an issue with their website that may prevent or limit the content from fulfilling its intended purpose. This can happen if an organization needs to implement a particular content model to achieve its goals and objectives that they did not incorporate during the web design process, leaving the business to try and force “round pegs into square holes”.
Knowing how to quickly identify and troubleshoot any problems or issues in content production ensures the best return on investment for businesses using content as a strategy for growth.
Content production problems may be related to inefficiencies that lead to content marketing waste or to the process itself.
Use the chart below to identify and troubleshoot any problems or issues that need fixing in your content production process.
Troubleshooting Content Production
No Content Pipeline
Creating a content pipeline for content production can be challenging, but there are several strategies that can help you overcome this difficulty, including:
Define clear content goals: Having clear goals for the content that is being produced can help to ensure that your content is aligned with the overall objectives of your business. Develop a content strategy that outlines your business’s goals, target audience, and the type of content that will be created. Use this strategy as a guide for all your content creation efforts.
Create an editorial calendar: An editorial calendar can help to ensure that content is being produced on a consistent basis and that it aligns with the overall content strategy of your business. Create an editorial calendar that outlines the topics and types of content that will be created, and assign specific individuals or teams to create and publish content on a regular basis.
Establish a content creation process: Having a clear process in place for creating and approving content can help to streamline your content creation process. Establish a content creation process that includes stages such as researching, creating, editing, and publishing. Assign specific roles and responsibilities to team members at each stage of the process.
Automate tasks: Automating repetitive tasks can help to free up time and resources for more important tasks, such as creating new content. Use tools such as marketing automation software, scheduling tools, and social media management tools to automate tasks such as scheduling posts, creating content, and publishing content.
Repurpose and recycle content: Repurposing and recycling existing content can help to reduce the time and resources needed to create new content. Identify existing content that can be repurposed or recycled, such as blog posts or videos, and use them in different formats, such as an infographic or a podcast.
Outsource content creation: Outsourcing content creation can help to fill any gaps in the content pipeline and ensure that there is a consistent flow of high-quality content. Hire freelance writers, designers, or other content creators to help with content production. Make sure to set clear guidelines and instructions for the content being outsourced.
By implementing these strategies, your business can create a content pipeline that is efficient, effective, and aligned with your overall content strategy. This also helps to ensure that your business is able to produce high-quality content on a consistent basis and meet your content marketing goals.
Content Output Is Low
Suppose your content plan requires publishing 8 new articles on the company blog each month, but your content team is only delivering 3 or 4.
Check if this low output in content production is caused by one of the following reasons:
Resources
Low content output can be caused by having insufficient resources.
Does your business:
Have a content team (in-house, outsourced, or a combination of both) with the skills and capabilities to create and deliver the content?
If your business has sufficient resources but content production output is low, the cause of the problem may be unrealistic workload expectations on individual team members.
For example, let’s say that your business expects a content writer to create well-researched long articles or tutorials (e.g. 1,500 – 2,000+ words) with links to authoritative references, detailed screenshots, charts/tables, and an accompanying video.
While the writer may have the tools and skills to perform all the tasks, the requirements may simply be too complex for one role to take everything on and complete it all within the expected time frame.
Additionally, the writer may be expected to perform other writing tasks for the company or be a shared resource for different departments, so their time and focus are being split into other areas.
In this case, a review of individual workloads may be necessary where an adjustment is either made to the expectations of the role or additional resources are brought in.
If your content production metrics show that the content output is on target but the content is frequently being delivered late, then look for issues in areas like delivery rates and workflow bottlenecks.
For example:
Has someone been made accountable for meeting project deadlines? If so, start by asking them what they see as causing the issue.
If the issue is caused by multiple stakeholders having a say in the content approval phase and not being able to agree on the final version, assign the final call to one person.
Are there too many dependencies or too many reviewers in the content workflow? If so, these can significantly extend production times and create delays and holdups in your content pipeline. Look for ways to improve process efficiency and eliminate non-essential decision-makers from your workflow.
Content Is Below Standard
If the content output is fine and the content is being delivered on time but the quality of the finished content is substandard, then look for issues in the following areas:
Content Brief & Guidelines
Review your content brief to make sure that it has clearly and concisely set out your expectations and the areas of importance that should have been covered in the content (if you need help creating a brief, read this article).
Does your organization have clear and documented guidelines for content creation? If you need help in this area, see the lesson on Workflow Documentation.
Meet With The Content Creator
If the brief and/or content guidelines are not the issue, then schedule a meeting with the content creator to find out why the content was below standard.
Check if:
They have read and understood the brief.
They have read and are familiar with the content creation guidelines.
There were any personal issues involved that affected their work.
Content Production – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content production:
What is content production?
Content production refers to the process of researching, creating, editing, and publishing information in various formats, including text, images, and videos, intended for a specific audience.
Why is content production important for businesses?
Content production helps businesses engage with their audience, improve their brand presence, and drive sales through informed and appealing information dissemination.
What are the key stages of the content production process?
How can one improve the effectiveness of content production?
To enhance effectiveness, focus on understanding the target audience, utilizing SEO best practices, maintaining a consistent voice and style, and regularly evaluating analytics to refine strategies.
How do content production strategies differ across media types?
Strategies vary significantly; for example, social media content requires brevity and visual appeal, while blog posts might focus more on detailed information and keyword integration.
What trends are currently shaping content production?
What is the role of analytics in content production?
Analytics help producers understand what content performs best, who the audience is, and how they interact with the content, thereby guiding future content strategies.
Summary
Creating consistently high-quality content requires an effective content production system with defined and documented workflows and periodic reviews of the content strategy and content plan.
Creating unique and original content also requires a good understanding of your target audience, your topics, and your industry. It also requires having the necessary skills and tools to format and design the content effectively, maintaining a consistent effort to stay up-to-date with the latest developments and trends, and measuring and analyzing the performance of your content.
This section looks at structuring your team’s content production schedule to meet content production targets.
Content Production Schedule
This section looks at how to structure your content team’s production schedule to meet content production targets.
In order to deliver content that consistently meets high-quality standards and production targets, your content team needs to run like a well-oiled machine.
A well-oiled machine, however, consists of different moving parts that must work together frictionlessly and seamlessly.
In this lesson, we’ll briefly review what parts your content team needs to run like a well-oiled machine, and look at ways to structure your content team’s production schedule to ensure that it is able to consistently meet the content quality standards and content production targets set by the business.
We’ll also look at different options for structuring your content team’s production schedule depending on whether you have a larger or smaller team.
Turning Your Content Production Team Into A Well-Oiled Machine
The phrase “to run like a well-oiled machine” is typically used to describe teams and organizations where all the parts are coordinated effectively so that everything works smoothly, operates efficiently, and results are delivered consistently on time, and to high standards.
To make sure that your content production team can run like a well-oiled machine, however, you need to have parts like the ones listed below working frictionlessly and seamlessly together:
Documentation
Resources
Time Management
Expertise
Skills
Tools
Training
Communication
Your content production team’s ability to run like a well-oiled machine depends on how well these parts work together.
Let’s go briefly through each of these:
Documentation
To operate efficiently and effectively, your content team needs access to good documentation.
Organizing, storing, and archiving media and other content production files, etc.
The better the documentation you can provide to your content production team, the less time and problems they will experience creating and delivering content that meets the quality standards and production targets set by the organization.
To learn more about the types of documentation your business should create, go here: Content Documentation
Without sufficient or adequate resources, your entire content strategy could boil down to being able to write only an occasional blog article or post a social media update.
Having said this, most businesses operate with limited resources, so they need to become “resourceful” and use ingenuity, creativity, and willingness to operate efficiently.
Later in this lesson, we will look at examples of how to schedule content production whether you are a team operating on limited resources or have no resources at all.
Time Management
All members of your content team need to develop and implement efficient time management practices to produce and deliver high-quality content on time, especially as they will probably be required to wear different hats and assume other responsibilities.
As we will see later in this lesson, the best way to implement effective time management systems is to build these into your production schedule.
Expertise
Your content strategy should tell you what kind of expertise your content team will require.
For example, if your content strategy is to utilize content marketing methods like blogging, video marketing, and email marketing, then your team will need people who have expertise in article writing, video making, and copyrighting.
For more information on different types of digital-based roles and the expertise required to fulfill those roles in an organization, go here: Team Roles
Skills
Your team members may have the expertise required to fill the role, but do they have the skills to create the types of content your organization intends to produce?
Ideally, the answer should be “yes.” However, with all the new, emerging, and different technologies and platforms available, having the knowledge and expertise of knowing “what to do” doesn’t always equate with knowing “how to do it.”
For example, if your organization lacks the resources, in addition to having writing skills, your humble blog article writer may need to develop skills in different areas like:
SEO
Data Analytics
Video Production
Media Editing
Graphic Design
Lead Generation
Conversion Tracking
Content Management Systems
etc.
Tools
All professionals need “tools of the trade” to deliver results.
In addition to having the necessary expertise and skills to perform their responsibilities successfully, your content team may also need to develop proficiency using various tools, such as:
Developing competency and proficiency using tools requires not only documentation and resources but also…
Training
Your business has probably already invested a significant amount of money into specific platforms, solutions, and tools, and developing and implementing processes and procedures to fit your workflow around these.
Creating an effective onboarding process to train new and existing team members to use these platforms, solutions, and tools, and follow your processes and procedures requires additional documentation, resources, time management, expertise, skills, tools, etc.
Many software platforms and tools include their own training and documentation, so make sure to add this into your own internal training documentation (e.g. create a “Quick-Start” manual or guide on how to access and use these tools).
Additionally, you may need to invest in external training courses (e.g. online video courses) to help skill up your content team.
Communication
In addition to everything we’ve listed so far, turning your content production team into a well-oiled machine requires a seamless communication process.
This is especially important if your company employs remote-based team members, as many companies do nowadays.
An effective team-based communication system typically involves using various workflow and digital processes, documentation, work collaboration tools, project management software, and basic communication tools like email, phone apps, and face-to-face meetings.
Content Production Team Schedule
Now that we have looked at what components are required to create a “well-oiled machine,” let’s look at how to put together an effective content production team schedule to ensure that all content will be produced and delivered on time, to high-quality standards, and can meet your content production targets.
We recommend starting your content team’s production schedule with a basic framework that the team can refine as they work together.
Once production gets into its stride, your team will have a better idea of how long it takes to create an article outline, edit a draft, wait for relevant parties to review content and provide feedback, what days work best to publish content, etc.
You can then apply this useful information as a group to coordinate content production, schedule content promotion, and manage your editorial calendar.
To help make this a practical lesson, let’s focus on two different but realistic scenarios:
A small-to-medium business with limited content creation resources.
A solo business with little to no resources to hire/outsource a content team.
Scenario #1 – SME Business With Limited Resources
For this example, we’ll use my regular job as a blog editor and content writer for a privately-owned SME technology company.
The company sells digital B2B products and services worldwide and employs a distributed workforce with around 150+ team members located all around the world.
My role is to help ensure that the company’s blog produces and publishes regular content to a large readership base (over 2 million unique visitors annually).
I’m part of a content production team for a tech blog that gets over 2 million visitors annually.
Additionally, the blog’s audience is tech-savvy and well-versed in the technology platform the company specializes in, so the content always needs to be expertly written, of very high quality, informative, educational, engaging, and authoritative.
To deliver the above, here’s what our content team consists of and what our content production schedule looks like:
The Content Team
Our blog’s content production team currently consists of:
3 x blog writers (including myself with additional editing duties), responsible for researching and writing articles, creating screenshots, proofing copy, checking content SEO and formatting guidelines, replying to comments left on blog posts, etc.
The blog team also has access to the following internal resources:
1 x marketer (who mostly works on landing pages, email marketing, promotional ads, copyrighting, and social media, but provides editing assistance to the blog team).
3 x illustrators (for blog post banners and additional artwork).
1 x documentation person (for content feedback).
1 x SEO adviser (for assistance with content strategy).
Technical development and product support team (150+ people) – these provide mostly technical feedback and technical checks during the content’s final review stage.
The company’s CEO (who fills the role of senior content editor).
As you can see, it’s not a very large content publishing team, given the size of the company’s customer base and target audience. Most of the organization, in fact, is comprised of people filling technical software development roles.
Content Production Targets
The blog team described above has a target of publishing at least 2-3 new high-quality articles on the company blog every week (while continually reviewing and updating existing content).
Also, new content has to be published by no later than the close of business each Thursday.
Here is the reason why:
The marketing team needs to include links to the new articles in its weekly email round-up to subscribers, and promote these on the company’s social media channels each week. Emails are scheduled to go out every Thursday night.
I work for a distributed company that prioritizes customer responsiveness and employee work-life balance, so while it aims to deal immediately with all customer issues, our team members are located all around the world and have weekends off. If the content is published after Thursday and there is an issue with it, we won’t know about it until the start of the new business week on Monday. Hence, we have an internal policy that nothing new gets published or released on Fridays. This helps to avoid any situations that could create negative customer experiences (e.g. having unanswered comments left on blog posts).
Team Meetings
To make sure that our content production workflow is on track, the content writing team meets virtually twice every week (audio call meetings only).
We meet early on Tuesday mornings (Monday evening for some of our team members) for an hour to focus on the specific assignments each team member is working on and to discuss any issues or roadblocks that may prevent the article from getting published by its deadline.
We also meet mid-morning on Thursdays (Wednesday evening for some of our team members) with the CEO to discuss content production issues at a higher (i.e. strategic) level and to clarify any unresolved issues regarding specific assignments or projects.
Throughout the week, the team stays in constant communication with each other and with other teams via the Slack messaging software.
Note: given the fact that our team members live in different countries and across different time zones, sometimes we don’t get a reply until the following day.
Content Production Team Meeting Agenda
Here’s a simple template you can use to create your content production team meeting’s agenda:
Review of the previous week’s content production progress
Approval of upcoming content calendar
Discussion of any production challenges or delays
Review of analytics for recent content
Brainstorming for new content ideas
Assigning tasks for next week’s production
Review of any new tools or resources that can improve the production process
Any other relevant items or concerns (e.g. ask team members if there are any upcoming leaves or time-off planned that may affect production schedules).
Content Workflow
Once the topic of a new article is agreed on and assigned to one of the writing team members, it goes through the following workflow sequence:
Outline – This includes a headline, intro, section headings, and a rough description of the content for each section.
Outline Review – This is to make sure that the article presented in the outline is on track and aligned with the agreed content strategy and content plan, and to make any additional suggestions or corrections to the content structure.
Initial Draft – Initial draft gets written with screenshots, internal links, etc. content
Initial Review – The editor and team members review this draft and make additional comments, suggestions, corrections, etc.
Draft 1 – The writer incorporates initial review notes into the article, polishes up the article, and transfers content to the blog (CMS).
Review 1 – The editor and team members review the amended draft and make additional comments, suggestions, corrections, etc.
Draft 2 – The writer incorporates review notes into the article.
Technical Review – If the article contains technical or product-specific information, it needs to be reviewed by someone with expert technical or product knowledge to make sure the information is 100% accurate.
Final Draft – The writer incorporates feedback, comments, suggestions, recommendations, etc. from the technical review
Final Review – The team and CEO (Senior Editor) give the article one final check and read over. If everything is ok, it’s approved for publishing.
Publish – Pre-publish checks are made (e.g. website URL slug, post excerpt, categories, feature image added, SEO elements, etc. and the article is then published.
All of the above has to factor in the fact that team members and anyone involved in reviewing and approving the content happen to live in different parts of the world and work in different time zones, so a draft article can sometimes take a day or more to be reviewed.
After the article is published, it gets logged on a spreadsheet (for future content reviews)…
We log every newly published blog post on a spreadsheet. Source: WPMU DEV
The team is then notified via the company’s communication app…
The team gets notified on Slack after each new blog post is published. Source: WPMU DEV
And the content is then promoted through various channels (e.g. email, social media, etc.)
New blog posts get promoted to email subscribers and social media followers. Source: WPMU DEV
Content Production Tools
In the example shown above, there are lots of moving parts, so a number of different tools are used in content production.
For example, the blog team’s content production schedule is tracked using Jira…
Content production is documented on the team’s Blog Board on Jira.
Post drafts are created using GDocs (where editors and other team members can leave comments, feedback, and suggestions)…
The blog team uses Google Docs to create article outlines and draft articles.
Once articles have been reviewed and edited, they are then moved into WordPress…
This blog post has been added to WordPress and is ready for final review and publishing.
And all communication related to content projects being worked on is done via team channels on Slack…
All communications with team members are done on Slack.
ContentManagementCourse.com (i.e. the site you are looking at) is a great example of a solo business with a lot of content to manage.
Since there is only one person looking after all of the content on this site (i.e. me 👋), a spreadsheet is enough to track the site’s content production and workflow.
After formulating a content strategy and content plan for this course, a list of all the content that would need to be created for the course lessons was added to a spreadsheet. Additional columns were added for workflow processes and checks.
This spreadsheet contains a list of all the course’s planned lessons.
As each lesson is worked on, its corresponding entry on the spreadsheet is highlighted in yellow…
As each lesson is worked on, it is highlighted in yellow.
After each lesson is completed and all the workflow columns are checked off, the highlight color is then changed to green…
Completed lessons are highlighted in green.
Once all of the content scheduled on this production spreadsheet was completed and all workflow processes done and checked off, this site was finally ready to launch and go live.
After months of work, this is what the content production spreadsheet for this course looks like.
Of course, content production never ends.
As new content is scheduled for production, it is entered into the content production spreadsheet and the process then repeats all over again.
This course has ongoing content planned and being worked on. Everything is tracked on a spreadsheet.
Note: Additional subtasks are added to worksheets (e.g. link redirects, content fixes, updates, rewrites, etc.) for future content reviews.
Here are frequently asked questions about content production scheduling:
What is content production scheduling?
Content production scheduling is the process of planning, organizing, and managing the creation and publication of content across various platforms and channels.
Why is content production scheduling important?
Content production scheduling helps maintain consistency, meet deadlines, allocate resources effectively, and ensure content aligns with strategic goals.
What are the key components of content production scheduling?
Key components include defining goals, identifying target audience, creating a content calendar, allocating resources, setting deadlines, and monitoring performance.
How do I create a content production schedule?
Start by identifying your goals, audience, and available resources. Then, create a content calendar outlining topics, deadlines, and responsible team members.
What tools can help with content production scheduling?
Tools like project management software, content calendars, and collaboration platforms can streamline content production scheduling processes.
How can I optimize my content production schedule for efficiency?
Optimize by batching similar tasks together, automating repetitive processes, delegating responsibilities effectively, and regularly reviewing and adjusting your schedule.
What are common challenges in content production scheduling?
Common challenges include managing tight deadlines, dealing with unexpected delays, balancing quality and quantity, and coordinating cross-functional teams.
How can I adapt my content production schedule to changes in priorities or resources?
Stay flexible by building buffer time into your schedule, communicating openly with stakeholders, and regularly reassessing and adjusting your plans as needed.
Summary
For your content production team to run like a well-oiled machine, various parts must work frictionlessly and seamlessly together, and follow a clear team production schedule with document workflow processes and regular meetings to communicate about new and existing projects.
This lesson shows you how to put this together, whether you are a business operating with limited resources or a team of one.
Action Steps
Assess each of the areas that can affect your content production team to ensure that it will run like a well-oiled machine (i.e. documentation, resources, time management, expertise, skills, tools, training, and communication)
Work with the team to create a content production team schedule with the aim of consistently meeting the content quality standards and content production targets set by the business.
Learn how to maximize your content production efforts and resources with content repurposing strategies.
Content Repurposing
Learn how to maximize your content production efforts and resources with content repurposing strategies.
Creating high-quality content on a regular basis involves a significant investment of time and resources.
With a little planning, you can get more value from the time and effort you have invested and recycle and breathe new life into your existing content by repurposing it into other content types.
In this lesson, we’ll look at the benefits of repurposing content and provide different examples of content repurposing.
Content repurposing is re-using your existing content and presenting it in a new or different format to expand its reach and maximize its lifespan.
Essentially, content repurposing is the process of taking existing content and adapting it for use on different platforms or in different formats.
This can include things like turning a blog post into a video, republishing an article on a different website, or creating an infographic from a research report.
The goal of repurposing content is to get the most out of the content you have already created and to reach new audiences.
Benefits Of Repurposing Content
Repurposing content has several benefits, including:
Increased reach: By republishing content on different platforms, you can reach new audiences and expand your reach. For example, republishing a blog post on LinkedIn can help you reach a professional audience.
Cost-effective: Repurposing content allows you to get the most out of the content you have already created, which can save you time and resources.
Reinforcing brand awareness: By republishing content on different platforms, you can reinforce your brand and make it more familiar to your target audience.
Increased engagement: Repurposing content in different formats can lead to increased engagement. For example, a video version of a blog post can increase audience engagement.
SEO improvement: By republishing content on different platforms and linking them to your website can help to improve your website’s SEO.
Audience targeting: Repurposing content in different format and platforms allows you to target specific audience. For example, republishing a podcast episode on YouTube can help reach a younger audience who may not listen to podcasts.
Long-term value: Repurposing content can provide long-term value, as the content can continue to be useful and relevant to your audience even after it’s first published.
Content Repurposing Examples
Once you have created a great piece of content, all the hard work involved in researching, planning, and creating it is already done. You have an asset you can use to help promote and grow your business.
Sometimes, content created for a very specific purpose can have a limited lifespan. For example, let’s say you put a great deal of effort into researching and writing a great blog article, which then gets promoted to your newsletter subscribers and posted on your social media channels.
For a week or two, your blog article gets a lot of attention and attracts a good number of visitors, thanks to your team’s promotional efforts.
Then, new content gets published on your blog, pushing the article down the list, and traffic to your post drops. If that post isn’t ranking high on the search engines, traffic can dwindle significantly.
Now, you have a great piece of content with lots of useful information sitting on your site doing very little for your business.
What if you took that great content and reused it in different formats?
For example, let’s say you create a really great series of blog articles with well-researched statistical data, detailed screenshots, memorable quotes, etc.
With a little planning, you could easily repurpose these blog articles into new content types, such as:
Long-Form Content: Compile your blog posts into a guide, eBook, online course, or report.
Emails: Turn your blog content into full email newsletter articles or email snippets pointing to your articles, or compile these into an email course (e.g. a “7-day course”)
Videos: Turn your information into sales videos or video tutorials (tip: turn your blog posts into a slide presentation and use screen capture software to turn your slide presentation into narrated videos).
Audios: Use Text-To-Speech software to create audio narrations for accessibility purposes, turn your articles into podcasts, etc.
Content repurposing lets you turn your existing content into different content types.
You can do the same thing if you create a more comprehensive piece of content like a guide or eBook (i.e. turn the content into a series of blog articles and all of the above content types).
More Content Repurposing Examples
Repurposing a blog post into a video for social media.
Repurposing a webinar into a podcast episode.
Repurposing a whitepaper into an infographic.
Repurposing a podcast episode into a written article for a blog.
Repurposing a research paper into a slide deck for a presentation.
Repurposing a video tutorial into a written guide.
Repurposing a live event into a recorded video.
Repurposing a social media post into a graphic for a website.
Repurposing a keynote presentation into an ebook.
Repurposing a product demo video into a gif for social media.
Republishing a blog post as a LinkedIn article.
Creating a YouTube video from a podcast episode.
Turning a webinar into a white paper or ebook.
Repackaging a series of tweets into an Instagram post.
Transcribing a video into a blog post.
Creating an infographic from a research report.
Using quotes from a podcast episode in a social media campaign.
Repurposing a presentation into a series of slides on SlideShare.
Turning a case study into a testimonial video.
Creating a podcast episode from a Facebook Live Q&A session.
As you can see, you can get a lot of mileage from content repurposing.
In fact, the more time and effort you invest into researching and creating high-quality content with useful in-depth information, the more valuable content repurposing becomes as a content marketing strategy.
Here are frequently asked questions about content repurposing:
What is content repurposing?
Content repurposing involves adapting your existing content into different formats or for different platforms to expand its reach and lifespan.
How does content repurposing differ from cross-posting or reposting?
Content repurposing is about transforming content to suit different formats or contexts, while cross-posting involves sharing the same content across various platforms without modification. Reposting generally means re-sharing the exact same content on the same platform.
What are the benefits of content repurposing?
It can extend the life of the original content, reach a broader audience, enhance SEO, save resources, and provide more value from the content already created.
Which types of content are best suited for repurposing?
High-performing content such as popular blog posts, videos with high engagement, and content with timeless relevance are ideal candidates for repurposing.
What are some effective strategies for content repurposing?
You can turn blog posts into podcasts or videos, create infographics from data-rich content, use webinar content to produce guides or e-books, or convert a series of related posts into an email course.
How does repurposing content impact SEO?
Repurposing helps target various keywords, increases content visibility across platforms, and can generate more backlinks to your original content.
What challenges might I face while repurposing content?
Finding the right balance between reuse and freshness, maintaining the quality and relevance of the content, and ensuring it fits the new format or platform can be challenging.
How can I measure the success of repurposed content?
Track metrics such as engagement rates, traffic sources, conversion rates, and overall reach compared to the original piece of content.
Summary
Content repurposing is a great way to maximize the value of your content and your organization’s resources and reach new audiences.
Content repurposing can also be used to increase your reach and visibility online using different content channels, help improve your SEO, nurture lead generation streams, improve engagement and retention, and garner new insights to help you continually refine and improve your content strategy.
With the right strategy and approach, repurposing content can be a powerful tool for growing your online presence and driving results.
Action Steps
Take a great piece of content that your team has invested time and effort into creating, list all the ways you can repurpose it, and turn it into new content types.
Rinse and repeat this process with other additional existing content, and begin to incorporate content repurposing into your content planning.
Resources
Free Content Ideas Course– Learn how to never run out of great content ideas for your blog, website, or email newsletters.
Video Courses – Links to video courses on content creation for different content types (e.g. blogging, videos, emails, podcasting, etc.)
Tools & Resources – Useful tools and resources for planning, producing, and promoting different content types.
Different users learn and consume content differently. While some users may prefer reading text on a screen, others may want something more visual like videos or infographics. Another group of users may find that they engage better with information via audio content formats, such as podcasts and narrated articles.
Content preferences also vary depending on the type of business you are and the audience you are targeting (e.g. B2B, B2C, etc.), the phase of the customer or buyer journey they are at, their search intent, and trends over time.
For example, according to a B2B content survey carried out by sales and marketing research company Demand Gen Report, B2B customers report relying increasingly more on well-researched content backed by data filled with insights to research and make their purchasing decisions, such as webinars and research-based content (e.g. survey and third-party analyst reports), ebooks, blogs, white papers, case studies, and community-based sources, such as industry newsletters.
The main forms of content B2B companies are consuming. Source: Demand Gen Report
Additionally, the research showed that users preferred different content at different stages of their buying journey.
For example, the most popular content formats for early-stage research were informational content like infographics, blogs, and podcasts, while assessments, webinars, and case studies were the preferred content types they researched during the mid-stage. For late-stage research, buyers cited the most useful content types being those that present concrete evidence such as user reviews, third-party analyst reports, and ROI calculators.
Types of content that B2B companies consume at different stages of their buying journey. Source: Demand Gen Report
While B2B companies seem to choose content types backed by data and research, B2C companies make different choices.
For example, research from the Content Marketing Institute shows that B2C companies focused on creating content like short articles, videos, and infographics to reach their audiences.
As mentioned earlier, it’s also important to be aware of changes in content preferences over time.
For example, if you look at content marketing trends before and after the global pandemic, you can see that there’s been a change in the content types favored by B2C companies, especially in areas like social media content and in-person events.
Which phase of the buyer journey are you addressing?
What type(s) of content are companies similar to yours currently creating to reach your target audience?
Content Types vs Content Deliverables
According to Draft.dev, content types set the overall tone of an article, help the writer understand what perspective they should write from, and sets client expectations, while content deliverables define the actual contents of the article.
So while a content type helps to define the difference between creating an article as a “tutorial” or as a “guide,” the elements that will be included in the article, like screenshots, stock images, diagrams, code samples, etc. are the content deliverables.
Understanding this difference is important, because…
“Defining content types and deliverables helps to assign articles to the writers best suited for them, resulting in great content.”
For resources on sourcing content deliverables like stock images and screenshot/image editing software, see our Tools & Resources section.
Now that we have looked at why businesses may need to consider creating different types of content and the difference between content types and content deliverables, let’s look at different content formats and different content types.
Content Formats
There are many different types of content formats, including:
Text: This is the most basic and common type of content and includes anything from articles and blog posts to emails and social media updates.
Images: This type of content includes photographs, illustrations, and infographics. They can be used to supplement text or to convey information on their own.
Video: This type of content includes anything from short clips and animations to full-length films and documentaries. Video can be used to tell stories, provide instructions, or demonstrate products.
Audio: This type of content includes podcasts, music, and sound recordings. Audio can be used to tell stories, provide information, or entertain.
Interactive: This type of content includes quizzes, polls, and interactive infographics. It allows the audience to engage with the content and can be used to gather information from the audience.
Virtual reality (VR) and Augmented reality (AR): This type of content provides immersive experiences, allowing the user to explore and interact with a digital environment. It can be used in gaming, education, and other industries.
Live streaming: This type of content is a real-time broadcast of an event or activity. It can be used for events, news, and entertainment.
Content Types
Content can be delivered in digital or printed (i.e. physical) formats. The type of content and format your organization chooses to create will determine the content production process and content workflow to follow.
Articles are a form of content suitable for publishing on the blog section of a website or as a page of the website itself (e.g. a landing page, company page, or product/services page).
Different types of articles can be written to suit different purposes. For example:
Tutorials
Tutorials are “how-to” articles that provide information showing readers how to complete certain tasks and how to achieve specific results. Tutorials can include detailed (or bullet point) step-by-step instructions videos, screenshots, examples (e.g. before and after images), etc.
You can write “how-to” tutorials on just about anything and everything. Simply open your web browser and type in “how to” into Google and you will see all kinds of suggestions popping up for “how to” searches that users are looking for.
A listicle, or “list post,” is an article written in list format. Listicles (also sometimes referred to as “Roundups”) provide a list of comparable products, tools, or items where each item is typically only a few sentences or paragraphs long and aimed at educating or entertaining readers.
Listicles can be fun or informational and typically have titles like “The 100 Best Rock Album Covers Of All Time” (fun), or “9 Essential Ingredients Every Cook’s Kitchen Should Have” (informational). Great listicles often get shared widely online.
Comparison articles are educational pieces that compare different products and services to help potential buyers assess their options and make a decision.
Comparison articles are similar to listicles but are much more in-depth, typically focusing on comparing two or three options only across different categories or competing brands, and presenting the “pros and cons” of using the products or services.
These articles typically focus on reviewing products, services, events, etc.
Writing product review articles (or creating product review videos) is a strategy that is often used in affiliate marketing.
Ideally, the review writer will have used the product, experienced the service, or attended the event they are reviewing. Review articles typically define their target audience (e.g. people interested in home cooking, moviegoers, etc.), list the upsides and downsides or good and bad aspects of the product, provide visual proof (e.g. photos, videos, etc.), try to take a balanced and honest approach, and offer some form of helpful conclusion.
Persuasive Writing
According to Grammarly, persuasive writing “is any written work that tries to convince the reader of the writer’s opinion and point of view. Persuasive writing tries to appeal to emotion alongside factual evidence and data to support its claims.”
Business-related content like sales copywriting uses persuasive writing to influence readers to choose the company’s products or services over their competitors.
Other types of articles you can create include press/news releases, essays, opinion pieces (op-eds), question and answer articles (e.g. interviews), skyscraper articles, personality profiles, and short posts (e.g. news, company announcements, tips, etc.).
Best Practices For Creating Blog Posts And Other Types Of Articles
Use a clear and attention-grabbing headline: The headline is the first thing that readers will see, so it’s important to make sure that it is engaging and makes them want to read more.
Organize content into short paragraphs and use subheadings: Breaking up the text into smaller chunks and using subheadings makes it easier for readers to scan and understand the content.
Use images, videos, and infographics to break up text and make the post more visually appealing: Adding multimedia elements can help to make the post more engaging and make it easier for readers to understand the content.
Optimize for SEO by including keywords in the post and meta description: This will help search engines understand the content of the post and make it easier for people to find it.
End the post with a call-to-action, such as asking readers to leave a comment or share the post on social media: This will encourage engagement and make it more likely that the post will be shared.
Challenges Of Creating Blog Posts And Other Types Of Articles
Coming up with new and interesting topics to write about: Finding new and engaging topics to write about can be challenging, particularly if you are writing on the same subject over a long period of time.
Creating engaging and well-written content: Writing content that is interesting, engaging, and well-written can be challenging, particularly if you are not a natural writer.
Optimizing for SEO: Incorporating keywords and optimizing for search engines can be a time-consuming and complex process.
Staying consistent: Creating regular blog posts can be challenging, particularly if you are busy or have a limited budget.
Keeping up with industry trends: Staying up-to-date with the latest industry trends and changes in search algorithms can be difficult and time-consuming.
eBooks And Guides
eBooks and Guides provide readers with a more comprehensive understanding of a specific topic or a particular area of interest and can be used as a high-value asset in lead generation (e.g. offer the eBook or guide to potential clients in exchange for giving you their email address and subscribing to your newsletter).
In terms of content planning, an effective way to write an eBook/guide is to start by creating an outline of all the chapters you plan to include arranged in a logical sequence and then write each chapter as an in-depth and self-contained article.
This approach lets you repurpose the chapters of your guide later on as separate articles or as an article series on your blog or website, or even expand the content into an eBook.
Alternatively, you can start by creating an in-depth article series with some foreplanning, and then publish these collectively later as a downloadable guide or eBook.
Use a clear and attention-grabbing title and description: The title and description should be engaging and make people want to read more.
Use a consistent format and design throughout the eBook: A consistent format and design will make the e-book easier to understand and more visually appealing.
Use well-researched and engaging content: Make sure that the content is well-researched, accurate, and engaging, to keep readers interested.
Use images, videos, and infographics to break up text and make the eBook more visually appealing: Adding multimedia elements can help to make the e-book more engaging and make it easier for readers to understand the content.
Include a call-to-action at the end of the eBook, such as directing readers to a landing page or asking them to subscribe to a newsletter: This will encourage engagement and make it more likely that the eBook will be shared.
Challenges of Creating eBooks
Creating a clear and attention-grabbing title and description: Creating a title and description that is engaging and makes people want to read more can be challenging.
Writing well-researched and engaging content: Writing content that is interesting, engaging, and well-researched can be challenging, particularly if you are not a natural writer.
Finding the right images and graphics: Finding the right images and graphics to supplement the text can be time-consuming.
Staying consistent: Creating regular eBooks can be challenging, particularly if you are busy or have a limited budget.
Keeping up with industry trends: Staying up-to-date with the latest industry trends and changes in technology can be difficult and time-consuming.
Online Courses
Online courses are a type of digital learning experience that can be delivered over the internet.
Online courses can also be used to generate leads, and also to nurture leads through the funnel, by providing more in-depth and comprehensive information.
Online courses can include a wide range of content such as videos, audio, text, images, and interactive elements such as quizzes, assessments, and forums. They can be self-paced or instructor-led and can range from a few minutes to several hours in length.
Examples of using online courses as part of content marketing include:
Product or service training: Create online courses that provide training on how to use your products or services. For example, a software company could create a course that teaches customers how to use their software effectively and how to optimize their performance. Or, a company in the finance industry could create an online course that provides training on financial planning, investment strategies, and other related topics.
Industry-specific education: Create online courses that provide education on a specific industry or topic. For example, a marketing agency could create a course that teaches the principles of digital marketing.
Self-Improvement And Personal development: Create online courses that provide information and guidance on personal development topics such as leadership, time management, and stress management. For example, a company in the health and wellness industry could create an online course that provides information and guidance on topics like nutrition, exercise, and stress management.
Thought leadership: Create online courses that provide insights and advice on industry-specific topics, which will position your company as a thought leader in the industry and increase your visibility and credibility. For example, a company could create an online course that provides insights and advice on industry-specific topics, which will position the company as a thought leader in the industry and increase its visibility and credibility.
Certification: Create online courses that provide training and certifications on a specific skill or technology. For example, a company in the technology industry could create an online course that provides training and certifications on a specific technology or programming language.
Best Practices For Creating Online Courses
Define your target audience: Understand your target audience and their needs, interests, and pain points. This will help you create content that is relevant and valuable to them.
Create a clear learning outcome: Define a clear learning outcome for the course, and make sure that all the content and activities support that outcome.
Keep it interactive and engaging: Use interactive elements such as quizzes, polls, and discussion boards to keep the course engaging and interactive.
Use multimedia: Use a variety of multimedia elements such as videos, images, and audio to make the course more engaging and to appeal to different learning styles.
Use storytelling: Use storytelling to make the course more engaging and to help learners relate to the content.
Provide assessments and quizzes: Provide assessments and quizzes to help learners check their understanding and to provide feedback on their progress.
Use feedback and testing: Use feedback and testing to assess learners’ understanding and to identify areas for improvement.
Provide support and assistance: Provide support and assistance to learners, such as answering questions, providing feedback on assignments and offering additional resources.
Be mobile-friendly: Ensure that the course is mobile-friendly and accessible on different devices and platforms.
Monitor and analyze: Monitor and analyze the course engagement and completion rates to understand the effectiveness of the course and to identify areas for improvement.
Keep it updated: Keep the course updated to ensure that the content is accurate and relevant.
Challenges Of Creating Online Courses
Creating online courses can be a powerful way to provide valuable information and education to customers, but it can also present some challenges.
Here are a few examples of the challenges of creating online courses:
Developing high-quality content: Creating engaging and informative content that is relevant to the audience can be time-consuming and challenging. It requires a good understanding of the topic, the target audience, and the format of the course.
Maintaining consistency and quality: Online courses often include multiple modules or lessons, and it can be challenging to maintain consistency and quality throughout the course.
Designing and developing interactive elements: Online courses should be interactive and engaging, which requires the development of interactive elements such as quizzes, polls, and interactive videos.
Marketing and promoting the course: Once the course is created, it needs to be promoted and marketed effectively to reach the target audience.
Tracking and measuring success: Measuring the success of the course can be challenging, as it requires tracking engagement, completion rates, and other metrics.
Keeping up with technology: Online courses should be designed to be mobile-friendly and accessible across different devices and platforms, this also requires keeping up with the latest technology trends.
Providing support and assistance: Online courses often require support and assistance, such as answering questions and providing feedback on assignments.
Staying current and up-to-date: The topic of the course may change rapidly, and it’s important to keep the course updated to ensure that it stays relevant and valuable to the audience.
Creating online courses can be a significant investment of time and resources, but it can also be a powerful and effective way to educate and engage customers and position your company as a thought leader and authority in your industry.
Internet marketers often state that “the money is in the list.”
Emails are a great way to keep readers informed and updated about new products and services, useful tips, training, and more.
Running a regular email newsletter and email campaigns is one of the most effective ways to build a subscriber list and nurture leads. Email marketingconsistently delivers great ROI and is a proven method used by B2B and B2C organizations to generate sales and grow their business cost-effectively.
Writing a series of short, concise emails with compelling headlines and calls to action with links to more detailed website pages (e.g. landing pages, sales pages, e-commerce or product information pages, tutorials, etc.) can be very effective when used as lead nurturing follow-ups or short email-based subscriber/customer training courses (e.g. a 7-day course on using your products).
Emails can also be triggered by user behavior and used to rescue sales and reduce eCommerce shopping cart abandonment.
Most reputable email service companies provide email personalization, campaign segmentation features, and statistical data reporting tools that allow you to analyze the results of your email campaigns and improve the content of your emails and your sales process.
Best Practices For Creating Emails
Segmenting your email list: Segmenting your email list allows you to send targeted, personalized messages to specific groups of people. This can increase the relevance and effectiveness of your emails.
Keeping the subject line short and clear: The subject line is the first thing that people see when they receive an email, so it’s important to make sure it’s clear and to the point.
Creating a clear and compelling call to action: Make sure your emails have a clear and compelling call to action, such as a link to a landing page or a button to make a purchase.
Optimizing for mobile devices: More and more people are checking their email on mobile devices, so it’s important to make sure your emails are optimized for mobile devices.
Testing and analyzing: Test your emails and analyze the results to see what works and what doesn’t. This will help you improve your emails over time.
Challenges Of Creating Emails
Standing out in a crowded inbox: With so many emails being sent every day, it can be difficult to make your emails stand out.
Avoiding spam filters: Spam filters are designed to block unwanted emails, so it’s important to make sure your emails are not flagged as spam.
Maintaining high open and click-through rates: High open and click-through rates are key indicators of email success, but they can be difficult to achieve.
Creating content that resonates with the audience: Creating content that resonates with your audience can be challenging, as you need to understand their needs, interests, and pain points.
Keeping up with regulations: There are a number of laws and regulations that govern email marketing, such as the CAN-SPAM Act and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), so it’s important to make sure you are compliant with these regulations.
Videos
Video is everywhere and video marketing is one of the most effective forms of content marketing available. Millions of online consumers worldwide are reached using videos and the demand for video content is increasing each year (see the “Infographics” section below).
There are many forms of video content you can create, including:
Explainer videos (short videos explaining products or services)
Simple Sales Videos (e.g. video narrations of PowerPoint slides)
Vlogs (video blogs)
Video interviews
Video presentations and recorded webinars
Video tutorials
Product reviews
Product demos and walkthroughs
Live stream recordings
Video testimonials
Video ads
As the chart below shows, video content serves a wide range of purposes.
Video production for your products and services doesn’t have to be expensive. Businesses can produce videos cost-effectively in-house (i.e. shot on smartphones or recorded and edited using screen capture software), and even outsourced inexpensively on freelancer sites (e.g. explainer videos).
For tools and resources to help you create or source video content, see Media Creation Tools.
For the latest video marketing statistics, see these articles:
Keep the video short and to the point, ideally less than 2-3 minutes: The attention span of viewers is limited, so it’s important to make sure that the video is concise and gets to the point quickly.
Use a strong and clear script: A script will help to keep the video on-topic and make it easier for viewers to understand the message.
Use high-quality visuals and audio: Good lighting, sound, and editing are essential for creating a high-quality video that is visually appealing and easy to understand.
Optimize for search by including a title, description, and keywords: This will help search engines understand the content of the video and make it easier for people to find it.
Include a call-to-action at the end of the video, such as directing viewers to a landing page or asking them to subscribe to a channel: This will encourage engagement and make it more likely that the video will be shared.
Challenges Of Creating Videos
Ensuring that the final product is high-quality and visually appealing: Creating high-quality videos can be time-consuming and require specialized equipment and skills.
Script-writing and storyboarding: Writing an engaging and compelling script and storyboard for the video can be challenging for non-creative people.
Producing videos can be time-consuming and expensive: The process of creating a video, from pre-production, filming, post-production, and editing, can be time-consuming and costly.
Staying on top of industry trends: Keeping up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in video production can be difficult and time-consuming.
Measuring the performance of videos: Measuring the performance of videos can be difficult, as it’s hard to track how many people have watched the video, how long they watched it for, and how engaged they were with it.
Webinars
Webinars gained a significant increase in popularity as a preferred content type for many audiences after the global pandemic.
As the charts at the top of this lesson show, 67% of B2B and 48% of B2C consumers prefer watching webinars. The research also shows that while most buyers typically spend between five to 30 minutes reviewing nearly all
content formats, many are willing to invest 30 to 60+ minutes watching
a webinar.
Here are some additional stats you may want to know about using webinars as content…
Lead Generation: Webinar participants typically register with their contact information before attending. You can capture their information, then follow up with content on topics that you know they’re already interested in (e.g. using a sequence of pre-written, personalized emails).
Community Building: Webinars can be very engaging and a great way to build relationships with customers. They allow you to position your brand while users interact with experts and thought leaders in your organization. Most webinar tools allow participants to chat and ask questions, providing instant engagement and a way to address concerns and objections directly in real-time.
Cost-effective Marketing: Webinars may not be as powerful or effective as live events, but when you consider that webinars require far less time, money, and resources to coordinate and put together than a live event, even if you get a smaller return on investment, running a successful webinar should more than offset and justify the risks vs trying to run a live event. Additionally, consider the downsides. There is less risk of experiencing a significant financial loss if you cancel a webinar due to low registrations than canceling a live event. Also, should you decide to run a webinar with fewer attendees than expected, this will give you more time to answer their questions and address their concerns, resulting in better engagement and interactivity with your target audience than live events.
Repurposing Content: You can repurpose webinar content for use in other distribution channels. For example, you can turn webinar topics into a series of blog articles, a video course, or sharable tweets (using memorable quotes or stats), and turn questions from attendees into new content like FAQs, tutorials, etc. Additionally, you can turn your webinars into slides for sharing on sites like SlideShare.
Evergreen Content: Record your webinars and add them to a “Resources” or client training page, or use them as high-value content for your lead generation campaigns. Webinars can continue delivering results long after making an initial investment of effort to create them.
Use a clear and attention-grabbing title and description: The title and description should be engaging and make people want to attend the webinar.
Use a consistent format and design throughout the webinar: A consistent format and design will make the webinar easier to understand and more visually appealing.
Use a clear and engaging presentation: Make sure that the presentation is clear, engaging, and easy to understand for the audience.
Use images, videos, and infographics to break up text and make the webinar more visually appealing: Adding multimedia elements can help to make the webinar more engaging and make it easier for attendees to understand the content.
Include a call-to-action at the end of the webinar, such as directing attendees to a landing page or asking them to subscribe to a newsletter: This will encourage engagement and make it more likely that the webinar will be shared.
Challenges Of Creating Webinars
Creating a clear and attention-grabbing title and description: Creating a title and description that is engaging and makes people want to attend the webinar can be challenging.
Preparing a clear and engaging presentation: Preparing a clear and engaging presentation can be challenging, particularly if you are not a natural speaker or presenter.
Finding the right images and graphics: Finding the right images and graphics to supplement the text can be time-consuming.
Staying consistent: Creating regular webinars can be challenging, particularly if you are busy or have a limited budget.
Keeping up with industry trends: Staying up-to-date with the latest industry trends and changes in technology can be difficult and time-consuming.
Audios
Audio-based web content creates new opportunities for content creators and content publishers to expand their range of products and services.
Audio content can help government, corporate, and business websites by:
Increasing online user engagement
Strengthening social responsibility
Expanding content reach and consumption by making information available in different formats for different types of users, and
Helping to create a more inclusive internet for everyone.
Podcasts
Podcasts are a highly engaging form of content and podcasting is becoming increasingly popular as a source of entertainment, education, and news.
Currently, there are over 2 million podcasts available and hundreds of millions of podcast listeners worldwide.
As the chart below shows, listeners prefer some podcast genres over others, so depending on the industry and niche of your business, creating and distributing podcasts could be an effective way to reach new audiences.
Most popular podcasting genres. Source: BuzzSprout
An effective way to market your business with podcasts is to interview experts or leaders in your field to get advice and helpful information, discuss hot industry trends, provide useful tips and ‘how-tos’, etc. This lets you build your reputation as a reliable source of information your audience can trust.
New AI developments in voice technology allow text-to-speech to convert your text files and documents into lifelike audio narrations, deliver realistic-sounding voice narrations to your web content, and provide audio content to help make the web more inclusive by giving users with special learning needs, visual impairments or disabilities access to information in a format that they can more easily consume and digest.
The latest AI text-to-speech voice technology also allows you to translate your text files and documents into dozens of languages and turn these into high-quality voice narrations using hundreds of different male and female AI voices.
You can use text-to-speech voice recordings to create audio-based content like:
Educational videos, sales videos, training videos, explainer videos, product review videos, webinars, etc.
Narrated audio presentations and documentation.
e-Learning courses
Audiobooks and audio-based digital products.
Podcasts.
Spoken web pages.
Online/video/social media/radio advertising.
Translating your training or HR documentation into different languages
Creating audio content for visually-impaired users
Recording document drafts that can be listened to and reviewed on the way to and from work
Recorded greetings and announcements.
Other content and media formats
In summary, some of the benefits of using text-to-speech for content creation include:
Save time and money creating and publishing content. Getting text-to-speech voice narrators to enunciate your courses or narrate your podcasts or audiobooks is an economical and time-saving solution compared to hiring voice talent.
Create e-courses and audio products faster with less time and less cost.
If you plan to use human voice talent for your finished product, text-to-speech allows you to create drafts and audio scripts for professional narrators.
Create better content. If you plan to create an audiobook, podcast, e-learning product, or training course, listening to an audio draft helps to improve content structure and layout, fix spelling or grammatical errors, and generate new ideas.
Write more effective content. Hearing your sales pitch or content read aloud helps you to focus on your message, improve your copywriting and writing skills, and write more effective sales or training video scripts and presentations, web content, radio ads, and many other forms of content.
Create and deliver content to a global audience by making it easier to create multilingual audio content and audio products from language translations.
If you need help creating audio-based content using text-to-speech, see this excellent Text-to-Speech Course (narrated entirely using AI voices) or see the Content Production Tools section for text-to-speech software.
Best Practices For Creating Podcasts
Use a clear and attention-grabbing title and description: The title and description should be engaging and make people want to listen to the podcast.
Use a consistent format and theme throughout the podcast: A consistent format and theme will make the podcast easier to understand and more engaging for listeners.
Use high-quality audio equipment: Good sound quality is essential for creating a professional-sounding podcast that is easy to listen to.
Use engaging and well-researched content: Make sure that the content is engaging, well-researched, and relevant to the audience.
Include a call-to-action at the end of the podcast, such as directing listeners to a landing page or asking them to subscribe to the podcast: This will encourage engagement and make it more likely that the podcast will be shared.
Challenges Of Creating Podcasts
Creating a clear and attention-grabbing title and description: Creating a title and description that is engaging and makes people want to listen to the podcast can be challenging.
Preparing engaging and well-researched content: Preparing engaging and well-researched content can be challenging, particularly if you are not a natural writer or researcher.
Finding the right equipment: Finding the right equipment to produce a high-quality podcast can be expensive and time-consuming.
Staying consistent: Creating regular podcasts can be challenging, particularly if you are busy or have a limited budget.
Keeping up with industry trends: Staying up-to-date with the latest industry trends and changes in technology can be difficult and time-consuming.
Promoting products and services using specially crafted content for social media platforms can be a powerful way to increase brand awareness, build a community, create engagement with your target audience, and drive traffic to your business.
Additionally, some of the most popular social media platforms in the world are not primarily targeting English speakers, so creating content for users on these platforms may require an entirely different approach altogether.
Not all of the most popular social media platforms target English speakers. Source: Shopify.
Use a clear and attention-grabbing headline: The headline is the first thing that readers will see, so it’s important to make sure that it is engaging and makes them want to read more.
Use a consistent brand voice and tone: Use the same brand voice and tone throughout the post to ensure that it aligns with the overall brand image.
Use images, videos, and infographics to break up text and make the post more visually appealing: Adding multimedia elements can help to make the post more engaging and make it easier for readers to understand the content.
Use relevant hashtags and keywords: Use relevant hashtags and keywords to increase the visibility of the post and make it more discoverable.
Engage with your followers by responding to comments and messages: Engaging with your followers will help to build a sense of community and encourage engagement.
Challenges Of Creating Social Media Posts
Staying consistent: Creating regular social media posts can be challenging, particularly if you are busy or have a limited budget.
Finding the right images and graphics: Finding the right images and graphics to supplement the text can be time-consuming.
Keeping up with industry trends: Staying up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in social media can be difficult and time-consuming.
Measuring the performance of social media posts: Measuring the performance of social media posts can be difficult, as it’s hard to track how many people have seen the post, how engaged they were with it, and how it influenced their decision to buy.
Managing multiple social media accounts and platforms: Managing multiple social media accounts and platforms can be difficult and time-consuming, especially for small businesses or those with limited resources.
Images can be used as content in many ways, including:
Infographics
An infographic (or information graphic) uses engaging images, data visualizations (e.g. pie charts and bar graphs), and minimal text to communicate information or data quickly and clearly in an easy-to-understand overview format.
An infographic about the importance of video marketing. Source: Impact+
Study any successful infographic carefully, and you will see that it typically combines 5 essential elements:
Infographics can be used in any business to explain anything that would be too hard or take too long using words only.
You can create infographics to provide a quick overview of just about any topic, make complex information easier to understand, summarize long articles or reports, display research findings or survey data, compare different options, raise awareness of an issue or cause, etc.
To view some great examples of infographics, go here.
For tools that will help you create infographic content, see Media Creation Tools.
Best Practices For Creating Infographics
Use a clear and attention-grabbing headline and description: The headline and description should be engaging and make people want to read more.
Use a consistent format and design throughout the infographic: A consistent format and design will make the infographic easier to understand and more visually appealing.
Use high-quality visuals and colors: Good visuals and colors are essential for creating an infographic that is visually appealing and easy to understand.
Use a clear and logical structure: Organize the information in a logical and clear manner, using headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up the text.
Use a consistent brand voice and tone: Use the same brand voice and tone throughout the infographic to ensure that it aligns with the overall brand image.
Challenges Of Creating Infographics
Finding the right data and statistics: Finding the right data and statistics to include in the infographic can be time-consuming and difficult.
Making sure that the final product is visually appealing and easy to understand: Creating an infographic that is visually appealing and easy to understand can be challenging.
Staying on top of industry trends: Keeping up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in infographic design can be difficult and time-consuming.
Limited scalability: Some infographics may not be scalable to different languages or formats.
Measuring the performance of infographics: Measuring the performance of infographics can be difficult, as it’s hard to track how many people have viewed the infographic, how long they spent looking at it, and how engaged they were with it.
Memes
My gardening philosophy!
Memes can be great for getting your business noticed, especially if the subject of the meme relates to your brand.
Here’s a practical and useful definition for businesses looking to promote their products or services using whitepapers…
“A whitepaper is a persuasive, authoritative, in-depth report on a specific topic that presents a problem and provides a solution. Marketers create whitepapers to educate their audience about a particular issue, or explain and promote a particular methodology. They’re advanced problem-solving guides. “
Whitepapers are great for capturing leads. However, they are not meant to be used as “product pitches.” Their aim is to promote an in-depth level of expertise and industry knowledge and inform and persuade readers based on well-researched facts and evidence.
Whitepapers tend to be more serious in tone and better researched than other long-form content like cornerstone (i.e. authoritative) articles, ebooks, and reports. Whitepapers also tend to be around 3,000 to 5,000 words long and are generally made available as downloadable PDFs (preferably delivered after capturing the reader’s email details).
For an excellent resource on this topic, check out this guide: What Is A Whitepaper?
Best Practices For Creating Whitepapers
Use a clear and attention-grabbing title and abstract: The title and abstract should be engaging and make people want to read more.
Use a consistent format and design throughout the whitepaper: A consistent format and design will make the whitepaper easier to understand and more visually appealing.
Use well-researched and engaging content: Make sure that the content is well-researched, accurate, and engaging to keep readers interested.
Use images, charts, and tables to supplement the text and make the whitepaper more visually appealing: Adding visual elements can help to make the whitepaper more engaging and make it easier for readers to understand the content.
Include a call-to-action at the end of the whitepaper, such as directing readers to a landing page or asking them to subscribe to a newsletter: This will encourage engagement and make it more likely that the whitepaper will be shared.
Challenges Of Creating Whitepapers
Creating a clear and attention-grabbing title and abstract: Creating a title and abstract that is engaging and makes people want to read more can be challenging.
Writing well-researched and engaging content: Writing content that is interesting, engaging, and well-researched can be challenging, particularly if you are not a natural writer.
Finding the right data and statistics: Finding the right data and statistics to include in the whitepaper can be time-consuming and difficult.
Staying consistent: Creating regular whitepapers can be challenging, particularly if you are busy or have a limited budget.
Keeping up with industry trends: Staying up-to-date with the latest industry trends and changes in technology can be difficult and time-consuming.
Case Studies
Case studies and client profiles use “success stories” to showcase your business and your services and provide readers with concrete data as proof of your company’s value, authority, and expertise in helping clients get results.
Although case studies usually require a great deal of time and energy to create (and reaching out to past customers/clients to get their consent for using them in your case study), they can be influential in helping B2B buyers make more informed purchasing decisions.
As shown in the graph at the top of this lesson, almost half of all B2B consumers prefer case studies over other types of content when researching information about products or services they are looking to purchase.
As content, case studies work well when used as lead magnets, landing pages, repurposed blog posts, and video testimonials.
Use a clear and attention-grabbing title and description: The title and description should be engaging and make people want to read more.
Use a consistent format and design throughout the case study: A consistent format and design will make the case study easier to understand and more visually appealing.
Use real-world examples: Use real-world examples to illustrate the benefits of a product or service, this will make the case study more relatable and convincing.
Use a problem-solution-result structure: Organize the case study into a clear and concise format, such as a problem-solution-result structure, to make it easy for readers to understand the main points.
Use testimonials from customers or clients: Use quotes from customers or clients to provide credibility and social proof for the case study.
Challenges Of Creating Case Studies
Finding the right real-world examples: Finding the right real-world examples to illustrate the benefits of a product or service can be challenging.
Gaining permission from clients or customers to use their information in the case study: Obtaining the necessary legal permissions to use client or customer information can be a challenge.
Writing a clear and concise format: Creating a clear and concise format, such as a problem-solution-result structure, can be challenging.
Staying on top of industry trends: Keeping up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in case study creation can be difficult and time-consuming.
Measuring the performance of case studies: Measuring the performance of case studies can be difficult, as it’s hard to track how many people have read the case study, how engaged they were with it, and how it influenced their decision to buy.
Content Templates
Content templates are pre-designed layouts or structures that can be used as a starting point for creating new content helping to save valuable time creating content from scratch.
Templates can include text, images, and other elements, and can be customized to suit the specific needs of the content being created.
Examples of content templates include:
Blog post templates: Blog post templates provide a structure for creating new blog posts, including sections for the introduction, body text, and conclusion.
Email templates: Email templates provide a structure for creating emails, including sections for the subject line, header, body text, and call to action.
Social media post templates: Social media post templates provide a structure for creating social media posts, including sections for the text, images, and hashtags.
Landing page templates: Landing page templates provide a structure for creating landing pages, including sections for the headline, body text, and call to action.
You can use different kinds of templates to create content for website pages, blog posts, infographics, ebooks, videos, slide presentations, etc.
Depending on the type of business you are in, you can also create and distribute your own templates (or checklists) as content and use these to help your clients, generate new leads, or even sell them as information products.
For example, Nusii provides a selection of free, professional, online proposal templates that let you add your company branding and bid on various projects.
Keep it simple: Create templates that are easy to use and understand. Avoid using complex layouts or design elements that can make the template difficult to use.
Be consistent: Use a consistent format, design, and style throughout your templates to ensure a cohesive look and feel for all of your content.
Make it customizable: Allow for enough flexibility in the template to allow for customization, such as adding brand colors, imagery and fonts.
Optimize for usability: Ensure that the template is user-friendly, with easy-to-find elements and intuitive navigation.
Test and iterate: Test the templates with a small group of users and make necessary adjustments based on their feedback.
Challenges Of Creating Content Templates
Balancing consistency and creativity: Finding the right balance between consistency and creativity can be difficult when creating templates.
Limited flexibility: Creating templates that are too rigid can limit the ability to customize and adapt to different types of content.
Limited scalability: Some templates may not be scalable to different types of content, such as different languages or formats.
Time-consuming: Creating templates can be time-consuming, particularly if you need to create multiple templates for different types of content.
Requires technical skills: Creating templates often requires knowledge of graphic design and layout, which can be a challenge for those without the necessary technical skills.
Keeping them up-to-date: Templates, especially those that are code-based, need to be updated frequently to avoid errors or incompatibility issues with the software being used.
Interactive Content
Interactive content refers to digital media that allows users to actively engage and participate in the content, rather than simply consuming it passively.
Examples of interactive content include quizzes, polls, surveys, assessments, interactive infographics, and games.
Interactive content can be used in many different ways to increase engagement, boost brand awareness, and generate leads.
For example:
Quizzes And Assessments
Examples:
A company in the health and wellness industry might create a quiz that helps users determine their “health age” based on their lifestyle habits, this not only provides valuable information to users but also collects information about their health and wellness interests that can be used for targeted marketing efforts.
A skincare company could create a quiz that helps users determine their skin type, and then provide personalized recommendations for products.
A company in the finance industry may create interactive financial calculators. This would allow visitors to make calculations on their own and see the results while providing valuable information on the company’s products and services.
Interactive Polls And Surveys
Polls and surveys are a great way to gather feedback from customers and gain insights into their preferences and opinions, provide valuable feedback for companies, and allow customers to share their thoughts with other potential customers.
Examples:
A company could create a survey asking customers about their experience using their products or services.
A company in the service industry might create an interactive survey that allows customers to rate their satisfaction with the service they received.
Interactive Infographics
Interactive infographics can be used to present data or information in an engaging and interactive way.
Examples:
A company in the real estate industry could create an interactive infographic that shows the most popular neighborhoods in a city and allows users to filter the data by different criteria.
An e-commerce company might create an interactive infographic that shows the different features and benefits of its products. This allows users to explore the products in more depth and learn more about what sets them apart from the competition.
Interactive Videos And Webinars
Companies can create interactive videos and webinars that allow users to engage with the content through polls, quizzes, Q&A, and other interactive elements.
Example:
A software company might create an interactive video that provides a step-by-step tutorial on how to use its product. This allows users to learn how to use the product at their own pace and provides a more engaging experience.
Interactive Games
Companies can create games that are related to their products or services.
Examples:
A company that sells outdoor equipment could create a game that challenges users to complete different outdoor activities, such as hiking or camping, using their products.
A company in the entertainment industry might create a game that allows users to interact with the brand and learn more about the company’s products or services in a fun and engaging way.
Interactive eBooks
An educational company might create an interactive e-book that allows users to interact with the content in various ways, such as by highlighting text, taking notes, and answering questions. This allows users to learn in a more engaging and interactive way.
Virtual Reality And Augmented Reality Experiences
Companies can create virtual or augmented reality experiences to showcase their products or services in an interactive way.
Examples:
A company in the automotive industry could create a virtual reality test drive experience for its customers.
Best Practices For Creating Interactive Content
Use a clear and attention-grabbing headline and description: The headline and description should be engaging and make people want to engage with the content.
Use a consistent format and design throughout the interactive content: A consistent format and design will make the interactive content easier to understand and more visually appealing.
Use interactive elements such as quizzes, polls, and games to engage the audience: Interactive elements such as quizzes, polls, and games can make the content more engaging and increase user participation.
Use a clear and logical structure: Organize the information in a logical and clear manner, using headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up the text.
Use a consistent brand voice and tone: Use the same brand voice and tone throughout the interactive content to ensure that it aligns with the overall brand image.
Challenges Of Creating Interactive Content
Finding the right interactive elements: Finding the right interactive elements, such as quizzes, polls, and games, to include in the content can be time-consuming and difficult.
Making sure that the final product is visually appealing and easy to use: Creating interactive content that is visually appealing and easy to use can be challenging.
Staying on top of industry trends: Keeping up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices in interactive content can be difficult and time-consuming.
Measuring the performance of interactive content: Measuring the performance of interactive content can be difficult, as it’s hard to track how many people have engaged with the content and how engaged they were with it.
Limited scalability: Some interactive content may not be scalable to different languages or formats.
User-Generated Content
User-generated content (UGC) refers to any content that has been created by users of a product or service, rather than by brands, publishers, or the company itself.
User-generated content can include text, images, videos, and other forms of media. Examples of UGC include social media posts, product reviews, blog comments, testimonials, forum discussions, and ratings.
User-generated content can be an effective way to build brand trust and credibility with potential customers, as well as to provide valuable customer insights.
Examples:
A company might encourage customers to share their experiences with a product or service on social media, and then repost those reviews or testimonials on their website. This can help to build trust with potential customers who are considering purchasing the product or service.
A company creates a hashtag for their customers to share their photos and experiences with the product. This would allow the company to use the customer’s photos and experiences in their marketing campaigns.
A clothing retailer might showcase customer photos of people wearing their clothing on their website or social media pages. This not only provides social proof that their products are popular, but it also allows customers to see how the clothing looks on people with a similar body type.
A company that runs a blog allows customers to submit their own articles. This would not only provide a different perspective but also increase customer engagement and loyalty.
Best Practices For Creating User-Generated Content
Encourage users to share their content: Make it easy for users to share their content on your platform by providing clear instructions and guidelines.
Use a consistent format and design throughout the user-generated content: A consistent format and design will make the content easier to understand and more visually appealing.
Use a clear and logical structure: Organize the information in a logical and clear manner, using headings, subheadings, and bullet points to break up the text.
Use a consistent brand voice and tone: Use the same brand voice and tone throughout the user-generated content to ensure that it aligns with the overall brand image.
Use a clear and attention-grabbing headline and description: The headline and description should be engaging and make people want to engage with the content.
Challenges Of Creating User-Generated Content
Encouraging users to share their content: Encouraging users to share their content can be challenging, particularly if they are not familiar with the platform or are hesitant to share their personal information.
Managing and moderating the content: Managing and moderating the content can be time-consuming, particularly if you have a large volume of user-generated content.
Ensuring that the content is accurate and reliable: Ensuring that the content is accurate and reliable can be challenging, particularly if it is not reviewed or moderated by an expert.
Measuring the performance of user-generated content: Measuring the performance of user-generated content can be difficult, as it’s hard to track how many people have engaged with the content and how engaged they were with it.
Limited scalability: Some user-generated content may not be scalable to different languages or formats.
Content Types – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content types:
What are content types in digital marketing?
Content types in digital marketing refer to the various forms of content used to engage audiences, such as blogs, videos, infographics, podcasts, and social media posts. Each type serves different purposes and is used in different contexts to maximize impact and reach.
How do I choose the right content type for my marketing strategy?
Choosing the right content type depends on your audience’s preferences, the goals of your campaign, the message you want to communicate, and the platforms you are using. Analyzing audience data and previous engagement metrics can guide your decisions.
What are the benefits of diversifying content types in a marketing campaign?
Diversifying content types helps to reach a broader audience, cater to different learning styles and preferences, and enhance engagement by keeping the content fresh and interesting. It can also boost SEO performance by providing multiple ways to feature keywords and backlinks.
Can the same content be repurposed into different content types?
Yes, repurposing content into different formats is a cost-effective strategy to maximize reach and reinforce messages. For example, a series of articles can be turned into an eBook, or a blog post can be turned into a video, a podcast episode, or an infographic, each appealing to different segments of your audience.
What tools can help manage multiple content types effectively?
Content Management Systems (CMS) like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla can help manage and schedule different types of content efficiently. These tools often come with features that allow for easy editing, organization, and publication of diverse content types without extensive technical knowledge.
Summary
There are many different types of content you can create to help promote and grow your business. The content type you create depends on factors like the audience group you are targeting, which phase of the buying journey your customers are at, and different content trends and preferences.
Your content strategy should help you decide which content types your production team should focus on creating.
Action Steps
When choosing a specific content type to create, it’s helpful to study examples of how other organizations in your industry or niche have used that type of content to promote their business successfully.
Build a ‘swipe file’ of ideas for different content types and make sure to check out the ‘Resources’ and ‘References’ sections below.
See the tutorials below to learn how to use the above content types in your content marketing strategy:
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In this section, you will find a list of useful resources to help you when outsourcing your content needs.
Outsourcing Digital Services
As we explain in our 
Managing content effectively requires a practical understanding of all aspects of running a digital business, including knowledge of different methods and tools used to generate results.
Does your business or organization’s website run on WordPress?
In the previous module, we looked at 
An effective 
Keeping content projects on track and on time requires organizing and managing processes with specific tasks, done in a specific order, by team members assigned to specific roles.
Documenting your 
In order to deliver content that consistently meets high-quality standards and production targets, your content team needs to run like a well-oiled machine.
Creating high-quality content on a regular basis involves a significant investment of time and resources.
The type of content your business or organization decides to create will depend on its 
