This lesson covers what you need to know and do before you can create an effective content strategy for your business.
You will also learn about the challenges of managing content effectively and what you need to put in place first.
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Watch the video lesson below or refer to the video transcript:
Video Transcript
Welcome back to our video course on how to create an effective content strategy for your business.
This is module 2.
In module 1, we introduced you to the course and looked at what a content strategy is, why your business needs one, and the benefits and importance of having a clear content strategy.
In this lesson, we are going to look at what you need to know and do before you can create a content strategy for your business.
Now, there are obvious and not-so-obvious challenges to managing content effectively.
So, let’s look at some of the obvious challenges first.
These include things like:
Having too much content. The more content you have, the more content you have to manage. Without good content management systems, it’s hard to keep your content organized and easy to find, and important information can end up getting lost or overlooked.
It’s also harder to coordinate your content when you have multiple people or teams contributing to it.
Also, having outdated, inaccurate, or obsolete information can be confusing for users and harm your credibility.
Another challenge is adapting to new technologies and platforms. Your business needs to keep up with new technologies, systems, and tools to stay current and manage its content effectively.
Keeping sensitive or confidential content secure and protected from unauthorized access or leaks is another challenge.
And so is tracking and measuring content performance, which is essential for making informed decisions.
Keeping content integrated and aligned with other systems and processes within your organization is also challenging, but important to optimize efficiency and avoid confusion or duplication of effort.
And budget and resources constraints is a challenge for all businesses, especially small businesses.
Now, the not-so-obvious challenges of managing your content effectively don’t become apparent until you actually start trying to manage your content effectively.
Then you discover that effective content management is a Catch-22 situation.
If you are not familiar with this expression, think about the dilemma that most people face when they first try to get a job.
You’ve probably heard people complain that no one will give you a job if you don’t have experience, but how can you get experience if no one will give you a job?
That’s an example of a Catch-22 situation.
Similarly, when it comes to managing your content effectively, you discover that “You can’t plan, produce, promote, and manage your content effectively until you have put in place the right systems and processes to plan, produce, promote, and manage your content effectively.”
But then you are faced with the challenge of do you put content management systems in place first and then start to create and promote your content, or do you start creating and promoting your content first and then worry about putting systems in place later?
As we will see, this has a significant and direct impact on our content strategy.
So, let me explain what I mean.
Your content strategy is part of your content management system, so if we start creating and promoting content before developing our content strategy and putting systems in place to manage our content effectively, then what’s the point of having a content strategy?
Let’s go back to our definition of a Content Strategy from module 1.
A content strategy is…
A plan for creating, publishing, and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to achieve specific business goals and objectives.
A content strategy also helps you:
Define who your target audience is and understand their needs and interests
Create the right content to address their needs and speak to their interests
Determine the most effective channels for distributing your content
And track and measure performance so you can continue to improve your results.
So, without a content strategy, we are just creating content blindly with no real direction or ways to measure and track our content’s performance, so it’s all going to be hit-and-miss and guesswork and assumptions.
As we will see later in this course, eventually your business will end up with a very difficult mess to deal with and many more problems to try and sort out.
So we want to put a content strategy in place before we start creating and promoting our content.
But, this has its own challenges.
The first challenge is that a content strategy involves all areas of our business because content impacts all areas of our business.
Even writing a simple article or blog post for our website has to take into account areas like marketing and research, product development, accounting, legal stuff related to what you can and can’t say in your content, and even different types of technology like servers and different applications that are used by different teams or departments to store and send information, and so on.
You can read more about this challenge by following the link on your screen.
The point is that our content strategy has to take all of this into account.
The next challenge is that creating high-quality content and managing our content effectively requires quite a sizeable team.
There are many different roles involved in the process of planning, creating, promoting, and managing content.
So, whether you’re an individual blogger or part of a larger organization, all of these roles and responsibilities have to be met, so our content strategy also needs to take all this into account.
This leads to the next challenge, which is that it takes significant resources to create high-quality content and manage this content effectively.
You need a sizeable budget and personnel with the right skills and expertise, plus spending time doing content research, content planning, and documenting systems.
All of this is time-consuming and takes resources away from other areas of our business.
Most businesses operate with very limited resources and have very little time to devote to areas like content planning and documenting systems, so that’s a big challenge when it comes to creating a content strategy.
And finally, the last of the “not-so-obvious” challenges only becomes obvious when we try to start putting our content strategy together.
And this challenge is that all of the basic business foundations need to be in place for our content strategy to be truly effective.
Let’s think about what this means.
If the aim of our content strategy is to help our business achieve specific goals and objectives, then our business first needs to define those goals and objectives before we can put a strategy together to achieve these goals and objectives.
But it’s not just setting goals and objectives.
Before we can put an effective content strategy together, we also need to have a clear marketing plan, and this comes from having a clear marketing strategy, which comes from having a clear business plan, which comes from having a clear business strategy, which comes from having clear strategic goals and objectives, which come from having a clearly-stated business vision, mission statement, and core values.
If all of these processes are not clearly defined, then our content strategy will not be as effective.
So, let’s recap what we need to know and do before developing a content strategy for our business.
First, we need to be aware of the challenges of managing content effectively and
Then, we need to make sure that all of the basic business foundations are in place.
I’ve listed a number of articles on this screen that I recommend you read, as these cover in more detail everything that we’ve talked about in this lesson.
So, make sure to visit the website and if you have subscribed to the free email course, you will get additional information on everything that we cover in this video course.
So, that’s the end of this lesson.
In the next video, we’ll cover module 3, which is all about understanding our target audience.
Thank you for watching and I’ll see you in the next lesson.
Learn how to perform effective content research before investing time and effort into creating content for your business.
Content Research
Learn how to perform effective content research before investing time and effort into creating content for your business.
One of the best ways to avoid creating content that may end up delivering poor results is to learn how to perform effective content research before investing time and effort into creating it.
Please review and complete the Content Planning lesson before starting this lesson.
What Is Content Research?
Content research is the process of gathering and analyzing information about a specific topic or audience in order to inform the creation of your content.
Why Do Content Research?
The goal of doing content research is to analyze content online and use your analysis and conclusions to help develop a unique content strategy that will benefit the long-term growth and brand visibility of your business.
By performing content research, you can make informed decisions about what type of content to create, how to create it, and how to promote it. This helps you produce content that is more likely to be read, shared, and ultimately drive the desired outcomes of your business.
Content research can include things like looking at the top posts ranking in search engines for your industry, niche, or topic, content that is attracting lots of social shares and engagement, what your competitors are writing about, discussing, or sharing online, etc.
Some of the reasons why content research matters include:
Helping your business understand its target audience, what kind of information it consumes, shares, and engages with on social media, and what content works best for reaching it. You can use this to build a content library of information and resources for users.
It helps to shape your content marketing strategy.
It helps you understand how to build authority, credibility, and trust online with users.
It lets you identify third-party resources your target audience likes and tends to gravitate toward.
It shows you what content you need to build to carry prospects through their entire buying journey.
It gives you insights on how to build sustainable growth for your brand, increase organic search traffic and social media visibility, and improve your lead generation activities.
Content Research Goals And Objectives
The goals and objectives of performing content research include:
Understanding your audience: Identifying the characteristics, needs, and preferences of the target audience in order to create content that resonates with them. This can be achieved by surveying a group of potential customers to learn about their pain points and what type of content they prefer to consume.
Identifying gaps in existing content: Analyzing existing content in order to identify areas where new or additional content is needed. This can be achieved by performing a content audit and reviewing the content on your company’s website to identify topics that are under-represented or missing.
Identifying competitors: Analyzing the content produced by your competitors in order to identify opportunities and strategies for creating unique and valuable content. This can be achieved by reviewing the blog posts, social media posts, and e-books of your direct competitor(s) to identify common themes and formats that they use.
Identifying trends and topics: Researching industry trends, news, and popular topics in order to inform the creation of timely and relevant content. This can be achieved by monitoring social media channels, search engines, and news articles to identify trending topics and keywords to include in your content.
Optimizing search engine visibility: Researching keywords and phrases that are relevant to the content and audience in order to optimize the content for search engines. This can be achieved by using keyword research tools to identify keywords and phrases that are frequently searched for by the target audience and incorporating them into the content.
Measuring the effectiveness of your content: Gathering data on how your content is performing in terms of engagement, shares, clicks, conversions, etc., in order to determine how well it is meeting your goals and objectives. This can be achieved by using analytics tools to track the number of views, shares, and engagement on a blog post or social media post.
Key Areas Of Effective Content Research
Effective content research focuses on three key areas:
Your Market
Your Audience
Your Competition
Focus on each of these key areas when doing content research.
Let’s take a brief look at each of these key areas:
Your Market
Focusing on gaining a better understanding of the market will help you answer questions about:
The environment the business operates and sells its products or services in (e.g. is it a growing or shrinking market? How do political or global events affect it?)
Technological disruptions, changes, and innovations in the industry or niche that the business should be aware of and prepare for or begin to embrace.
Emerging opportunities (new product development, new territories, new sectors, etc.)
Current limitations and barriers to growth or expansion.
Which distribution channels are available to or work best for the business.
Industry best practices.
Your Audience
Focusing on gaining a better understanding of the audience the business is targeting will help you answer questions like:
Who is the ideal target audience? What do they look like? What are their values and preferences? What do they like or dislike?
Where does your audience congregate online? How can you reach them? What are the most cost-effective ways to reach them?
What type of content does your audience consume? What is their preferred content format?
What are their pain points, concerns, and challenges? How can your business help them solve these?
Some of the ways to know your audience better and get to understand their desires, goals, fears, frustrations, and pain points include:
Keep an eye on your competitors.
Monitor audience feedback, engagements, and comments through surveys, online forms, and how they engage and comment on your blog, social media channels, community forums, and customer support channels.
Craft buyer personas to understand the main customer categories that convert for your brand.
Your Competition
Knowing which content channels your competitors are targeting, what topics their content is addressing, and where they spend their marketing and advertising budgets can tell you a lot about where you should be focusing your content marketing efforts.
Researching your competition can help you answer questions like:
Who are the main competitors in your niche?
What are they doing that your business isn’t? Similarly, what is your business doing that your competitors aren’t (yet)?
What are they doing right? What are they doing wrong?
Is your competition doing anything that your business can’t match because it lacks the resources, budget, etc.?
Is there anything unique about your business that your competitors can’t match?
Some of the ways you can research your competition includes:
Signing up to receive their email updates.
Analyzing their video content.
Tracking their social media activity.
Reviewing their top-performing content (post titles, subheadings, main keywords, word count, social shares, meta descriptions, etc.).
Attending their webinars and other events.
Tracking changes to their website.
According to BuzzSumo here are the data insights you need to create the best content:
The content volumes and trends for your industry topics.
The most successful articles in terms of shares and links.
The content types and formats that your audience shares.
Identify social influencers and backlink opportunities for your content.
Engagement benchmarks.
Researching the key areas and gaining the insights above will provide your business with the valuable information needed to create a content strategy and a content plan.
How To Do Content Research
The best way to do content research is to begin the process and record your findings, thoughts, snippets, ideas, links, quotes, URLs, etc. as you go in an organized manner. This allows you to immerse yourself in the process, document your research, and retrieve the information when it’s time to create the content.
Let’s break this down into doable steps:
1. Begin The Content Research Process
If you don’t know where to begin your content research, you can start with Google Search.
You could begin by simply typing in a keyword search term related to the topic you are researching and looking at the first page (i.e. top 10) search results for your content’s topic. This will give you an idea of what it will take for your content to outrank your competitors.
For example, let’s say that your business sells supplies for coffee drinkers and you want to create content on ways to make “barista-like” coffee at home.
You could begin the content research process by simply typing in something like “how to make barista coffee at home” into Google…
Begin your content research with a Google search.
This immediately provides you with lots of useful information and ideas for new content topics and ways to present content to your target audience.
For example, you can do further research into areas like:
Similar or related article topics.
Article titles, excerpts, and meta descriptions.
Similar or complementary products that users are looking to buy.
Video topics.
Additional information that users are searching for (e.g. the “People also ask” section).
Ideas for new images, infographics, artwork, ad banners, etc.
Opportunities to fill in gaps in your content strategy.
This is a simple yet great way to start. However, you can use Google to dig even deeper into your content research work.
For example:
Look For Paid Search Ads
Businesses don’t spend money advertising on unprofitable keyword searches. Ads displaying on search queries indicate there is commercial intent behind the keyword or topic, so it may be worth researching further into ways to try and rank for the keyword in Google’s organic search results.
Paid ads indicate that the topic you are researching may be profitable to rank for in organic searches.
Check Autocomplete Suggestions
Google’s predictive search feature (Autocomplete) is a great way to find ideas for long-tail keywords or topics related to your research.
Google’s Autocomplete feature is a great way to research content ideas related to your searches.
You will also want to research and analyze:
What your target audience shares and engages with on social media, the social influencers they follow, etc.
What your competitors and industry leaders are writing about or discussing on social media.
Forums, industry publications (whitepapers, reports, published research), expert interviews, news sites, case studies, surveys, polls, statistics, etc.
Keywords, including paid ads, related searches, etc.
There are many great time-saving tools and resources available online to help you research content topics and ideas, find sources of authoritative information, analyze keywords, gather data and stats, and more.
For example, in addition to search, Google provides other content research tools you may not have thought of using, such as Google Trends, Google Alerts, Google Scholar, and Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio).
Google Trends is a useful tool for researching user interest in content topics.Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is a powerful data-driven content research tool.
You can use different data sources for your keyword research projects.
For example, you can use Google Analytics to analyze user behavior and site interaction, Google Search Console data to identify mismatches in search intent, Google Trends to identify search behavior for spelling variations (e.g. eCommerce vs e-Commerce) or regional variations, etc.
See the Content Research Tools section for tools and resources that will help you with your content research.
3. Organize & Document Your Content Ideas
In addition to knowing where to go for research and using tools to help speed up your content research, it helps to have a system for organizing and accessing your research information quickly and easily.
For example, you can use tools like your web browser’s bookmarks to store useful website URLs…
Chrome Bookmarks
Content organization tools or apps like Microsoft OneNote let you build up a collection of research notes, copy and paste snippets, ideas for blog posts and web pages, etc. …
Microsoft OneNote
For additional tools and tips on organizing and storing your content research notes and information, see the Content Research Tools section.
4. Perform A Content Audit Of Your Existing Content
When researching new content topics and ideas, remember to look at the existing content too. There may already be similar content written that has been previously published by your business.
A content audit can provide valuable information about the state of the content of your business and help you answer questions about what may be missing in the current content compared to your research that needs to be developed, whether the business has already published similar articles, what can be updated, rewritten, consolidated, or discarded, etc.
For more information about creating a content inventory or auditing your existing content, see this lesson: Content Audit
5. Add Topics And Ideas For Discussion To Your Content Planning process
As you gather more research from different sources for your content plan, make sure to update the relevant information in your editorial calendar and communicate these to your team via your content collaboration tools and channels, like your content production team meetings.
Content Research FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about digital content research:
What is content research in content management?
Content research involves gathering information, trends, audience insights, and competitive analysis to create effective content that aligns with user needs and business goals.
Why is content research important for a content strategy?
It helps ensure that the content is relevant, valuable, and strategically tailored to meet both the audience’s needs and the organization’s objectives, such as increasing engagement or sales.
How does content research influence content strategy?
Content research provides insights into audience preferences, competitive landscape, and trending topics, which inform content strategy development and optimization.
What are the key steps in content research?
Key steps in content research include defining objectives, identifying the target audience, conducting keyword research, analyzing competitors, and evaluating existing content performance.
How do you conduct content research?
Begin by identifying your audience, their needs, and content preferences. Use tools like surveys, keyword research, and social media analytics to gather data. Also, analyze competitors to understand market trends.
What tools are commonly used for content research?
There are various content research tools that are commonly used for gathering data on keywords, trends, and competitor content performance.
How does content research influence content creation?
Content research informs the topics, tone, and format of the content you produce, ensuring it resonates with the target audience and fills gaps in the existing market or content strategy.
Can content research affect SEO?
Yes, effective content research includes keyword research and search trend analysis, which are critical for optimizing content for search engines and improving organic search visibility.
What is the best way to keep content research organized?
Regular updates are crucial as market trends, consumer behaviors, and search algorithms evolve. Ideally, review and update your content research quarterly or bi-annually.
How does content research benefit FAQs on a website?
Research identifies common customer questions and issues, enabling the creation of FAQs that directly address user concerns and improve customer service.
What is the difference between content research and market research?
Content research focuses specifically on creating and optimizing content based on user interests and search behaviors, while market research explores broader market trends and consumer needs impacting overall business strategies.
What role does content research play in content marketing campaigns?
Content research informs the development of targeted, high-quality content that resonates with the audience, driving engagement, leads, and conversions.
Summary
Content research is invaluable to strategic content planning. It can tell you what content to create, how often to create it, where to distribute it, and how to best promote it.
Well-researched content that shows that the business understands the market and the competitive landscape and that connects with its audience can make a significant and sustainable difference to brand visibility, web traffic, lead generation, and revenue.
Action Steps
Review the following sections before you begin researching content. It will help you create great content for your audience:
Learn why businesses need a content audit and how to perform a content audit for your organization.
Content Audit
Learn why businesses need a content audit and how to perform a content audit for your organization.
If your role involves managing content for an organization, it’s important to know what existing content the organization already has.
A content audit provides an excellent planning resource and roadmap for future content creation. It helps businesses develop a content strategy and involves analyzing all of the published material in an organization to determine what is and isn’t working, and uncover gaps to fill.
In this lesson, we’ll cover:
What Is A Content Audit?
Why Perform A Content Audit?
Benefits Of Performing A Content Audit
What Are The Different Types Of Content Audit?
Goals Of A Content Audit
How To Perform A Content Audit
Taking Your Content Audit Further
Before You Begin
Please review the sections below before starting this lesson:
“A content audit is a process of systematically analyzing and evaluating the performance and effectiveness of your existing content.
It involves identifying and cataloging all of your content, evaluating its quality and relevance, and determining which content should be kept, updated, consolidated, or removed.
The goal of a content audit is to ensure that your content is aligned with the goals and objectives of your business, and that it is providing value to your target audience.”
According to Wikipedia,
A content audit is an accounting of all currently published web content and a cornerstone of content strategy.
A content audit is the only way to fully understand the structure and quality of the content on your website.
Prepare content for migration or for the development of a new site’s information architecture or design.
Evaluate content against business goals, editorial style guidelines, and templates.
Establish a common language among team members.
Evaluate content for removal or revision.
Pinpoint gaps in content.
Additionally, a content audit can be performed in different ways, e.g.:
Full Content Audit – a complete and comprehensive accounting of website content.
Partial Content Audit – this focuses on a subcategory of the site, often one among the top site hierarchy.
Content Sampling – this merely examines samples of content.
Rolling Content Audit – this helps to monitor and maintain the initial scan. A content manager may go through the audit process at some agreed-upon time to scan for changes, i.e. weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, or annually.
A content audit is a qualitative analysis of information assets on a website, while a content inventory is a quantitative analysis of a website.
A content audit answers questions like:
Is the content any good?
What content do we already have
Who is making this content
How do people find it
How is it performing?
Is the content current (accurate) or outdated?
A content inventory, on the other hand, simply logs what is on a website. It answers the question: “What is there?” and can be the start of a website review.
Let’s say that a business has been publishing content regularly for some time as part of its investment in content marketing, but isn’t sure whether all the time spent posting articles on blogs, creating videos, and releasing infographics across multiple channels has paid off.
Also, some of their content may have become old (i.e. outdated, irrelevant, obsolete), aimed at serving an outdated purpose, or it may no longer reflect the brand.
After performing a content audit, the business can decide what to cull, refine, or develop to make sure that when moving forward, everything will be consistent and aligned to its current strategy.
It’s also important to note that while a content audit refers mainly to published content on a website, this can also extend to published content stored outside a website. For example, price lists, catalogs, reports, etc., as the information in these publications may also be outdated or misaligned with the brand and require a review.
Goals Of A Content Audit
Setting goals for your content audit is an important step in ensuring that your audit is focused and effective.
Here are the general goals you’ll want to set for your content audit:
Identify the purpose of the audit: Start by identifying the main objectives of the audit. This could be to improve the user experience, increase conversions, or align the content with the business’s overall goals.
Define specific goals: Once you have identified the main objectives, define specific goals that will help you achieve those objectives. For example, if your goal is to improve the user experience, a specific goal could be to reduce the bounce rate on the website.
Set measurable targets: Make sure that the goals you set are measurable so that you can track your progress and evaluate the success of the audit. For example, if your goal is to reduce the bounce rate, set a target percentage that you want to achieve.
Establish a timeline: Set a deadline for when you want to achieve your goals. This will help you stay focused and motivated throughout the audit process.
Review and revise goals: Once your content audit is complete, review the results and evaluate whether the goals you set were met. If they weren’t, revise the goals and identify any areas where you need to improve.
It’s important to have clear goals that are aligned with your overall business objectives. This will help to ensure that your content audit is focused, effective, and produces the desired outcome.
Benefits Of Performing A Content Audit
Performing a good content audit is time-consuming, but it offers a number of benefits, such as:
Alignment with business goals: A content audit helps ensure that your content aligns with your business’s overall goals and objectives.
Improved user experience: A content audit can identify and remove confusing, outdated, or irrelevant content, which can negatively impact the user experience. It can also help make your website easier for users to navigate.
Identification of gaps in content: A content audit helps to bring your content up-to-date and allows you to identify gaps in your content, which can be used to inform future content strategy and planning.
Improved SEO: By identifying and removing duplicate or low-quality content, your business can improve its search engine rankings and visibility.
Evaluation of content performance: A content audit provides data-driven insights into how well your content is performing in terms of engagement and conversions. It helps identify which content is resonating with your audience and which isn’t, and makes content maintenance easier by giving your business a clearer understanding of what it is offering.
Cost-effective: By identifying the content that is not performing well or is outdated, your business can reallocate resources and focus on creating new, high-performing content.
Consolidation and streamlining: A content audit can help identify and consolidate content that is similar or redundant, areas where multiple content items address the same topic (keyword cannibalization and content topic exhaustion), areas for content repurposing or updating to boost results, and best-performing pieces of content that can be leveraged in marketing materials streamlining the overall user experience.
Better targeting: An audit can help you understand which pages are visited the most and by whom, giving you an idea of the audience that comes to your site, and the information they are looking for.
The more data you look at, the more things you will spot that need doing. You could end up going in so many different directions and drawing so many different conclusions that nothing ends up getting done. It’s important to avoid falling into the analysis paralysis trap.
So, decide before you begin that you will:
Stay focused on what’s most important,
Break larger findings into smaller tasks to be done later, and
Make sure that deadlines are met.
You don’t need to get hung up on getting everything done perfectly. As long as the metrics are being tracked and you’re revisiting the content audit process on a periodic basis, you should see incremental improvements in content performance. This will also help you detect and prevent issues or problems sooner.
What Are The Different Types Of Content Audit?
A content audit can be viewed from several perspectives. You can look at it from a content marketing perspective, an SEO perspective, or a combination of both.
Content Marketing Audit
A content marketing audit aims to determine how the content marketing strategy of the organization is performing across all channels.
A content marketing audit involves asking questions as you analyze each piece of content, such as:
What is the purpose of this piece?
Is it achieving its objective (e.g. prompting users to complete an action, aligning with the brand and tone of voice of the business, generating user traffic and social media shares, driving them towards an eventual conversion, etc.)
How well does this help readers move through the customer journey?
SEO Audit
The goal of an SEO audit is to identify how well the content is performing on search engines.
This involves cataloging content elements like keywords, word counts, optimized images, etc. for each content asset on the site, keeping track of these over time, comparing them to current page rankings, and determining what changes need to be made to improve the site’s natural search performance.
If most of the traffic coming to the site is from organic search, performing an annual SEO audit is recommended, as search engines regularly change their algorithms.
As you analyze each piece of content, consider on-page SEO elements like:
Article length – Content length is more important than keywords. Well-written long-form content tends to be comprehensive, useful, and full of organic keywords and phrases that people are searching for.
Structure -e.g. H1, H2, H3 heading tags
Metadata – post title, meta description
Internal and external linking – look at things like anchor texts and whether links are pointing to broken URLs, error pages, outdated content, etc.
Keywords – What keywords it’s currently ranking for (vs. the keywords you would like it to rank for).
Additionally, it’s good to have an idea of the ranking factors that Google looks for when indexing and ranking content.
Ideally, you would combine both types of audits to make sure that the content is performing optimally. This, however, can be quite an enormous task, especially if the business has been publishing content for a very long time and lacks the resources to perform an extensive analysis of its content.
Content Gap Analysis
Perform a Content Gap Analysis is another valuable tool in addition to the above.
What is Content Gap Analysis?
Content Gap Analysis is a strategic process aimed at identifying and evaluating missing content pieces that align with various stages of the target audience’s buyer’s journey.
It involves auditing existing content and devising a strategy to fill the gaps, ensuring comprehensive coverage across multiple touchpoints.
Why is Content Gap Analysis Important?
Content Gap Analysis is crucial for enhancing content performance, especially in terms of SEO and social engagement. By identifying content gaps beforehand, you can ensure that your content surpasses existing offerings, improving its chances of success upon publication.
Best Practices for Performing Content Gap Analysis
Analyze Google’s First Page
Examine top-ranking content on Google to identify common gaps such as freshness, thoroughness, usability, and the wow factor. This allows you to create content that fills these voids, potentially outranking competitors.
Utilize Tools for Scalability
Tools like SEMRush and Ahrefs can streamline the gap analysis process by pinpointing topics with significant content gaps. By analyzing competitors’ keywords and scrutinizing their top-performing pages, you can uncover opportunities to create superior content.
For example, here’s a video from Ahrefs showing how to use their tool to perform an effective Content Gap Analysis of your competitors’ site:
Ways to Improve Content Using Content Gap Analysis
Audit Your Own Content
Conduct a thorough audit of your existing content to identify areas for improvement. Look for gaps such as outdated information, lack of examples, or difficulty in comprehension. By refining your content based on these insights, you can enhance its relevance and effectiveness.
Optimize Content Elements
Shorten or expand introductions as needed, incorporate more visuals to enhance engagement, and ensure that the content is easy to follow and comprehensive. By addressing these aspects, you can elevate the quality of your content and attract organic traffic.
In summary, Content Gap Analysis is an essential process to optimize your content strategy. By identifying and filling content voids, leveraging tools for efficiency, and refining existing content, you can elevate content performance and better meet the needs of your target audience.
If you need help performing an SEO Audit, we recommend downloading this guide on how to run an SEO audit.
Here is an example of what a content audit for a real estate company might look like:
Inventory: Blog posts, case studies, videos, property listings
Evaluation:
Blog post: Relevance to the audience, effectiveness of the topic, engagement level
Case studies: Relevance to the audience, effectiveness of the topic, engagement level
Videos: Relevance to the audience, effectiveness of the topic, engagement level
Property listings: Relevance to the audience, effectiveness of the topic, engagement level
Identify gaps: Lack of videos on commercial properties, no information on property management services
Organize:
Blog post: grouped by topic
Case studies: grouped by location
Videos: grouped by property type
Property listings: grouped by location
Decide on the next steps:
Keep: Blog post, case studies
Update: Property listings to include more information on property management services
Create: Videos on commercial properties
Plan:
Create a video series on commercial properties
Update all property listings to include information on property management services
Create a blog post on property management tips
By following these steps, the real estate company will be able to identify the areas of their content that are working well and the areas that need improvement. This will help them make more informed decisions about their content strategy and improve the effectiveness of their overall marketing efforts.
Now that you understand what a content audit is, why your business needs one, and what the goals and benefits of doing a content audit are, let’s look at how to perform one.
How To Perform A Content Audit
The steps below show you how to do a content audit.
For links to free and paid tools that will help you with each stage of the process, see this section: Search Optimization Tools.
Auditing content is like opening Pandora’s box. Once you begin analyzing your existing content (especially if there is a lot of published content), it’s very easy to become overwhelmed or distracted by some of the more glaring and obvious things that need fixing, start following different trails and rabbit holes as you gain new insights and end up falling into seemingly endless circular labyrinths, as one article that needs fixing leads to many other articles that also need fixing, and so on.
The best way to avoid becoming trapped in this never-ending process is to start with one or more clearly defined goals in mind. This will also help you to better categorize your audit later
Think about what you want to accomplish. Your goal might be to:
Identify ways to improve organic search performance and determine which pages, articles, blog posts, etc. need to be optimized or improved.
Find which content pieces on the website have performed best (e.g. Top 20, 50, 100 most visited pages) and look for ways to improve these, or increase their visibility (e.g. email newsletter roundups, social media posts, etc.).
Highlight and troubleshoot content pages with high impressions and low conversions.
Determine which content topics audiences seem to prefer.
Discover pages or topics that can be consolidated because of overlapping content.
Make sure that all pages have an effective and compelling CTA (Call To Action) to help increase leads and conversions.
Identify and locate gaps in the existing content for different stages of the sales funnel
Make sure that all content aligns with the corporate culture or a new branding strategy, or has a cohesive voice (especially if the content is created by multiple authors, e.g. freelance or guest contributors), and remove content that no longer reflects the values, goals, or culture of the business.
Select content that the business wants to move/migrate to a new website or section of its website.
Generate ideas for future content pieces.
Also, it’s important to keep in mind higher-level goals such as company goals and objectives, content strategy goals, etc., and align your content audit goals to these.
Once you have defined specific goals for your content audit, the next step is to gather an inventory of the content.
2. Make A Content Inventory
Depending on the size of the website, you may want to start with a spreadsheet and manually add each content item, or use online tools to automate this process for you.
You can use tools to automatically scan your site and generate a list of exportable URLs.
If your website runs on WordPress, you can use a plugin to export the URLs of all the site’s pages, posts, and custom post types to a CSV file, which can then be easily imported into a spreadsheet.
If you plan to perform a more comprehensive content marketing audit that includes analyzing other digital channels (e.g. social media and email), many platforms allow you to download a CSV file of your content and metrics (e.g. you can do this from Facebook’s Settings or MailChimp‘s Reports sections).
Note: You can also analyze printed publications, but you’ll have to collect this information manually (from customer surveys, focus groups, etc.).
If you are collating data from various sources and adding these to different spreadsheets, you can merge your spreadsheets into a master document and use a tool like Power BI or Tableau to analyze the data and look for patterns.
3. Categorize The Content
After making an inventory of your content, the next step is to categorize it on a spreadsheet. These categories will help keep things organized and make the content audit more efficient.
Some online tools can categorize information for you, but it’s just as easy to set up a spreadsheet and add these yourself.
At a minimum, your spreadsheet should list your content URLs, various useful categories, metadata, and metric data.
Add each content item as a new row on your spreadsheet.
Here is a list of suggested column headings and descriptions for your content audit spreadsheet:
Content
Page Title
Page URL
Date of publication
Date last updated
Content summary
Word Count
Type of content
Content owner
Supporting Content(images, videos, or infographics)
Create your own content audit spreadsheet or use a content audit template. Image: GoInflow.com
3. Analyze Your Findings
This step is where you take a critical look at the data to make a true assessment of the content’s performance.
Go through your spreadsheet and start asking questions like:
Which topics or themes are you mostly focused on writing about?
Which content types are you mostly focused on creating?
How often are you producing this type of content?
What is the purpose of the content (e.g. educate, entertain, generate leads, etc.)?
Who is its intended audience?
Which stage of the buyer journey is this content aimed at?
Which types of content perform the best?
Which types of content are most popular with your audience?
Are there any obvious gaps in the content that you are producing?
etc.
For each content item listed on a row, work through each of the columns and record the results of your analysis.
This will provide insights to help you decide if any further action needs to be taken with the content, or if it can be left as is.
As you analyze the data, make a note of the following:
Missing content – Are there any topics that the content hasn’t covered which would be of interest to the audience?
Underperforming content – Looking at the numbers, are there any items that aren’t performing as well as they should?
Outdated content – Can the information be refined (i.e. updated or reworked) to remain optimized and relevant to your audience?
Hit Content – This content is performing well and its metrics and results are meeting or exceeding all targets and expectations.
It’s important to not only analyze the content but also to organize it in the spreadsheet. Having a clear classification system in place to organize all the analyzed content should help make the auditing process actionable (see the next step).
An effective way to do this is to assign colors to different categories in your analysis, then highlight the rows with these colors as you go.
This will help you (and anyone you share the spreadsheet with) understand which category each piece of content is assigned to, and what predominant categories your analyzed content falls into.
The descriptions below may help with your analysis.
Content
Page title
This is the first thing people see when they read your content. Does the page title accurately describe the content? Is it compelling and attention-grabbing (and not clickbait)?
Page URL
It’s best not to change your URL without a good reason (if you have to change the URL, see the tutorial on redirecting links in the Link Managementsection). Check that the URL is well-structured and that there aren’t any spelling mistakes. Generally, a good URL is short and clear – it shouldn’t contain symbols or long strings of numbers.
Date of publication
This helps you decide if the article is too out of date.
Date last updated
This lets you see when the content was last edited or updated.
Content summary
Copy and paste this from the article excerpt or write this information manually. It will tell you whether the content is relevant and up to date.
Word Count
Is the article’s word count consistent with other articles on the site? Keep in mind that longer content improves SEO ranking as it’s usually more comprehensive and helpful.
Type of content
If you’re doing a complete website content inventory, you may want to note down what type of content you’re assessing (e.g. article, blog post, landing page, user documentation, product description, infographic, etc.)
Content owner
Does the website or blog have multiple authors? If so, it may be worth logging who is responsible for writing, editing, or fixing it.
Supporting Content(images, videos, or infographics)
Note down any other content format types present in the content (e.g. images, videos, etc.). Look at content quality. Does the content conform with branding or style guidelines? Has the information dated? Also, check for missed opportunities (e.g. can you add a video, downloadable report, etc.)
Accessibility
Is the content accessible on desktop and mobile devices? Are images and tables responsive on smaller screens and different browsers?
Quality score
Is the content accurate, well written, and well structured? Give the content a quality score (e.g., 1 = poor, 5 = excellent) then use this score to decide whether to keep or discard the content. If the quality score is a 4 or 5, it may be worth keeping. If it’s a 2 or 3, consider improving it with an update or rewrite (depending on how time-consuming it would take to fix it). If the content scores only a 1, consider retiring or trashing it.
SEO Data
Meta title
This is the title that displays on Google searches. It doesn’t have to match the page title. Make sure that it is enticing for readers to click on, and try to keep the character limit under 60 characters to avoid having cut-off titles displayed on Google search results.
Meta description
This is a brief summary of the content. Make sure that the page has a meta description under 160 characters so it displays fully on Google search results. Meta titles and descriptions make users click through from search results to your site, so make sure they are both compelling. Note: Google sometimes chooses to display a different excerpt from the content, so your meta description won’t always show up, but you should still write one.
Internal and external links
Check that all links are working. Broken links are commonly found on older content. Also, make a note of any new or existing website articles that the content could link to internally.
Compare the keywords the content is trying to target with the search terms it is actually ranking for. If these are not the same, make a note to review and optimize the content.
Keywords ranked
Search optimization tools can tell you what search terms are being used to find your content, and where it is ranking on Google SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages). If the content is bringing in decent organic traffic, you might not need to do anything. If there are wild card keywords bringing in significant traffic, however, you may want to look into further optimizing the content for these newer terms.
Calls to action (if any) and where they lead
Does the page have a clear call to action? Is it driving users to its intended destination? Consider updating this if your content strategy has changed or if there is a newer or better resource to promote.
Performance Data
Note: We recommend gathering at least 3 months of data for the items below.
Bounce rate
Your bounce rate represents the number of people who immediately leave after visiting the page. Ideally, you’ll want the bounce rate to be under 40%, although anything up to 70% is often no cause for alarm. If it’s above this, however, consider ways to make the page more readable, attractive, and engaging for users.
Average page views
High page views mean that users are interested in your content. Low page views don’t necessarily mean that the content is bad. It could mean that users are having difficulty finding the content. Look for ways to increase the content’s visibility using different content promotion methods. This could be via using social media or improving SEO for better organic search results.
Average time on page
How long do people spend reading the content? The average time on page across all industries is 54 seconds, so aim for that as a benchmark. If actual time spent on the page is significantly less, look for ways to increase content engagement (e.g. expand the content, add a video, etc.)
Are users interacting well with the content? Comments and shares are sure signs that users are resonating with the content. If a content piece is not getting much traction, try to work out why and identify ways to improve it (e.g. repurpose it for other channels).
Set up conversion events on Google Analytics to track page conversions. A low conversion rate (under about 2%) indicates that users aren’t resonating with your message.
Action Columns
Action
Record here what needs doing with the piece of content.
Notes
Add notes here if required. Use this column to list suggestions and ideas, and to prioritize tasks for the content.
Note: People in organizations come and go all the time, so make sure that everything you record in the spreadsheet is accurate and can be easily understood by any new person hired to make sense of the data.
This step is important if you plan to rank content by priorities or include a timeline for the audit.
Add a priority column to your spreadsheet.
After analyzing results, implement a system to prioritize what needs to be executed first.
You may want to prioritize content from “1-5” or “A-E”, then define what happens to the content in each of these levels. Use the goals defined in Step to help you decide.
For example, if your goal is to improve conversions, your classification system could specify that all items ranked “A” are your top-converting content and should be given top-priority treatment.
“Priority treatment” could then be defined to mean looking for ways to:
Improve the content (e.g. make sections clearer or more detailed, add supporting media like explainer videos, downloadable reports, etc.)
Improve search ranking through different SEO methods (e.g. internal linking, more helpful content, etc.)
Similarly, your classification system may specify that all items with a score lower than “C” (or “3” depending on your rating system) should be transferred to a separate spreadsheet, analyzed in more detail by the marketing and SEO team, and assigned different highlight colors to determine whether to update, rewrite, or trash the content.
See the Content Reviews lesson for an example of using colors to highlight content based on what needs doing.
Ultimately, the objective of the content audit is to decide whether to keep, discard, refine, or develop content based on the analysis of each content item inventoried.
Classifying your content should help you with this step.
Here are the specific action steps you want to take after classifying each inventoried content item:
Keep vs Trash
Discard (if ‘Trash’)
Refine (if ‘Keep’)
Develop
Refer to the flowchart below as we go through each of these briefly.
Content Audit Actions.
1. Keep vs Trash
As you examine each content item, ask yourself questions like:
Is this piece of content well-written?
Is the topic/information still relevant to the audience?
Is it getting good results?
If the answer to the above is mostly “yes”, then you will want to keep the item. However, it doesn’t end there. There are further steps you will want to take, based on a review of the item. (See the ‘Refine’ step further below).
If the answer to the above is mostly “no”, then you will want to discard (i.e. trash) the item. Before trashing the item, however, there are additional criteria we recommend taking (See the ‘Discard’ step below).
2. Discard (If ‘Trash’)
Creating web content requires a significant investment of time and resources, so it can seem counterproductive for an organization to discard any piece of content that it has spent time and effort creating.
Keeping low-quality content alive on a website, however, can have a negative impact on user experience and search rankings.
If a first-time user lands on a piece of content on a website with information that is completely outdated, irrelevant, obsolete, or filled with links to pages that no longer exist, their first impression of the website (and the organization behind it) will probably be negative and they will most likely move on never to return.
Also, if Google deems your content to be unengaging due to factors like little to no visitors or time spent on the page, high bounce rates, etc., it will push the page down in its search results, which can impact the overall performance of the website.
If the content is no longer useful to its intended audience, then consider discarding it.
Before discarding any piece of content, however, we recommend doing an SEO analysis of the item to see whether it has any traffic or backlinks. If the content still has significant traffic and/or backlinks, then it’s probably best to try and redirect users visiting that content to another related article or blog post on your website before trashing it.
3. Refine (If ‘Keep’)
If you decide that the content is well written, performing well (e.g. generates traffic, has significant backlinks, has a reasonable conversion rate), and worth keeping, the next step is to review the item in more detail.
Could the content be improved with additional sections to provide readers with more in-depth information, update facts or statistics, maybe add a video, infographic, or downloadable guide, or just improve general readability or SEO?
If a lot of the work has already been done and you have a solid foundation to work with, then it’s better to preserve and salvage the content with a little bit (or a lot) of editing.
After reviewing each item, the next step is to classify the content into one of the following categories:
Leave As Is – This is the “if it ain’t broken, why fix it?” option. If the content is fine and performing well, you may simply want to leave it as is.
Quick Fix – If most of the content is fine but there are some minor glaring issues (e.g. spelling or grammatical errors, a sentence or paragraph that should be removed or added, links that need to point to different pages, etc.) and it would take no more than 15-30 minutes to fix this, then mark the item as a “quick fix” (or just fix it on the spot).
Update – If sections of the content are outdated, irrelevant, or obsolete and it would take more than an hour or so to fix these, the item may need to be scheduled for an update.
Rewrite – If the topic is worth preserving but the content contains mostly outdated, irrelevant, or obsolete information that would require a complete rewrite to fix, then the item may need to be scheduled for a rewrite.
For a more in-depth tutorial on this section, see the lesson on Content Reviews.
3. Develop
Seeing everything that the business has published makes it easier to identify and prioritize other content areas that the business may have missed.
For example, often, a content audit will help to uncover content that is missing on topics that haven’t been written about or addressed yet.
Another benefit of performing a content audit is that it can help to identify opportunities for content repurposing.
Often, a content audit will also uncover multiple articles covering the same topic. This is not good for SEO as it can lead to keyboard cannibalization. When you uncover a cluster of articles all covering the same topic, a simple check of traffic and backlinks will tell you which of these articles is performing better than the rest. You should then consider consolidating these articles into a single authoritative piece of content, as Google loves useful, long-form articles.
Additional action steps that can result from a content audit include making decisions like:
Assess which content supports different stages of the buyer’s journey (e.g. awareness, consideration, decision).
Implement a new content marketing method (e.g. set a regular schedule to create and publish videos).
Assign team members to review the results and identify patterns in the data that will help to improve areas like content quality, content performance, customer experience, etc.
Reuse the content: Combine different items to create new content or publish it in a different format (slides, ebook, infographics, etc.).
Rewrite the content: Rewrite underperforming articles and blog posts with new examples, tips, step-by-step tutorials, etc.
Expand the content: Look for ways to add more detailed information to the existing content. Research shows that longer articles of 3000+ words get 3x more traffic, 4x more shares, and 3.5x more backlinks than articles of average length.
Refresh the content: The content may simply need updated or relevant information like newer stats, the latest trends, or updated product details.
Structure the content: Make sure the content has a clear and logical structure with relevant H2 and H3 tags. Adding heading tags and a table of contents can help users and search engine bots interpret content better, which can help to boost traffic. Well-structured how-to articles are more likely to rank on featured snippets.
Update CTAs: Review and replace outdated banners on your blog or other web pages with relevant offers. This will help reactivate your content marketing funnel and improve conversion rates.
Add images: Images not only make web pages more attractive and engaging to users, but they can also increase traffic from Google Images. Consider integrating videos and images on web pages to increase the content’s chances of appearing in SERP features.
Optimize metadata: Review your titles, meta descriptions, and sections with SEO tags (h1, h2, h3). Ideally, try to use keywords in a natural and compelling way to make the content more attractive to users and search engines.
Optimize internal linking: Have new articles or blog posts been added to the website since the content was last written or edited? If so, look for related content to link to internally. This can help improve website organization and decrease bounce rates. Internal linking can also be used to optimize the buyer’s journey, sending users down the funnel from top-level content aimed at raising user awareness, through to decision-making content.
Use 301 redirects to avoid users running into “not found” error pages and having poor user experiences when searching for content on pages that have been removed from the website.
After performing a content audit, list 5-10 immediate action steps to be taken based on the results and the content audit goals defined in Step 1 and set a deadline for completing these tasks.
Keep in mind that some actions that require little effort can deliver big results (e.g. improving page structure or adding links), while other actions require a lot of effort but could deliver poor results (e.g. creating a downloadable guide or eBook).
After performing your initial content audit, schedule subsequent content reviews to be done regularly (e.g. annually). This will deliver valuable insights for the continuous improvement of your business, website, and your content marketing strategy.
5. Taking Your Content Audit Further
A content audit doesn’t have to be limited only to content on your website.
You can also perform audits on areas like:
Offsite Content Assets
When assessing the effectiveness of your content marketing efforts it’s a good idea to include as much data as you can gather on any external content pieces you’ve published (e.g. infographics, slide decks, etc.) if these are relevant to your audit goals.
Other Marketing Channels
Do you run email marketing campaigns? Is the content in your autoresponders up-to-date? Are there messages with higher open rates than others? Many email services provide analytics and reports that can help to improve the performance of your emails.
Social Shares
If your site displays share counters on pages, you can measure social shares by looking at the post itself, or by entering the URL of the page or post into various online services. This should provide plenty of actionable data about areas where your competition is currently outperforming your site. Think about approaching sites that are linking to your competitors who could potentially link to your site if you approached them with a better piece of content or guest post idea on that topic.
Competitors’ Websites
You can use many of the same tools used to analyze your own site to perform competitive analysis on your competitors’ sites. This can help to improve your content performance, especially in areas like SEO or driving more traffic to your site.
While you won’t be able to access certain metrics about their website (e.g. bounce rate, average time on page, and conversion rate), there are things you can track, like who is ranking higher for the keywords you are targeting, the number of backlinks, etc.
Here are frequently asked questions about content audits:
What is a content audit?
A content audit is a systematic review of all content on a website to evaluate its strengths, weaknesses, and overall alignment with business goals, leading to decisions on improvements, removals, or changes.
Why should I perform a content audit?
Performing a content audit helps identify what content is performing well, what is outdated or ineffective, and opportunities for new content. It informs content strategy and enhances SEO performance.
How often should a content audit be conducted?
The frequency of content audits can vary based on the size of your website and how frequently you publish content. Generally, it’s recommended to perform a content audit annually or during major website changes.
What are the main steps in a content audit?
Main steps include creating a content inventory, evaluating each piece based on metrics such as traffic, engagement, and relevance, and deciding on actions like updating, deleting, or creating new content.
Which tools can assist in conducting a content audit?
There are several tools available for analyzing performance metrics, creating inventories, and performing competitive analysis. Some stages will also require manual review for qualitative insights.
What should I do with outdated or underperforming content?
Options include updating it with new information, merging it with more relevant content, or deleting it if it no longer meets your business goals or user needs.
How do I analyze the results of a content audit?
Analyze content audit results by comparing current content performance against set KPIs like traffic, conversions, and engagement. This analysis helps identify trends and develop actionable insights for content strategy.
What are the benefits of a content audit?
Benefits include improved SEO, higher user engagement, better content quality, and alignment with business objectives. A content audit also helps in reallocating resources more efficiently towards high-performing content.
Summary
A content audit is a process of reviewing, evaluating, and organizing the existing content of your business in order to understand what is working well and what needs to be improved.
By conducting a content audit, your business can identify gaps in its content strategy, make sure that your content is aligned with your overall marketing goals, and decide which pieces of content to keep, update, or delete.
A content audit of your website content and other marketing channels also gives your business a high-level view of everything it has published and provides an opportunity to realign your content with your current strategy.
Creating an inventory of your existing content can also provide valuable insights into your business and your audience. It lets you assess data and make informed marketing decisions that can help grow your brand, reduce costs, and improve ROI.
A well-executed initial content audit and subsequent content reviews (e.g. done annually) can deliver significant insights into your business, website, and your content marketing strategy.
Action Steps
Use the checklist below when performing a content audit for your business:
Inventory your content: Make a list of all the content your business currently has, including the format, title, and location of each piece. This can include blog posts, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, social media posts, etc.
Evaluate your content: Review each piece of content and assess its effectiveness based on factors such as quality, relevance, engagement, and alignment with your business goals.
Identify gaps: Look for gaps in your content, such as missing topics or underperforming pieces, and make note of them.
Organize your content: Group your content into categories, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, whitepapers, etc., and create a spreadsheet to keep track of each piece of content and its assessment.
Decide on the next steps: Based on your findings, decide which pieces of content to keep, update, or delete.
Create a plan for improving your content: Use your findings to create a plan for improving your content, including how you will fill gaps, create new pieces of content, and update existing content to better align with your business goals.
Notes:
You don’t need to get everything done in one go. A content audit can be a monumental task, especially if there is a lot of published content to analyze and no prior audit has been done.
Ideally, it’s best to perform a complete audit of your content. However, it’s completely up to you to decide which content you will audit, how you will do it, and what goals you are trying to achieve with it.
If time is a limiting factor, for example, you can break things down into smaller goals and audit only content that falls within a certain period (e.g. the previous 6-12 months), or content that meets only certain metrics (like your 50 most popular articles ranked by traffic or conversions) or auditing only your website’s blog posts.
You also don’t have to undertake the entire audit process by yourself. You can delegate some of the data-gathering steps internally to another employee in the organization or to an outsourced worker.
Resources
Search Optimization Tools – Free and paid tools that will help automate parts of the content auditing research process.
How To Run An SEO Audit – Download this free template, checklist, and 9-step guide on how to run an SEO audit for your organization.
Moz: On-Site SEO – This is a great site to help you learn all the fundamentals of on-page SEO.
Visit our tools and resources section for additional courses, guides, and helpful tools and resources for content managers.
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.
Additionally, you should take into account these three truths of Content Strategy by Professor John Lavine of Northwestern University, which shape and limit our content:
There is an ever-rising tidal wave of information and it will continue to rise forever.
Everyone you want to reach has 1440 minutes in their day; not a minute more.
The world is becoming ever more complicated, but people will give you their time and attention if you give them more of what they want.
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 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
The content planning process
How to create a content plan
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Before You Begin
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).
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This is Part 2 of our free How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business video course.
Now, there are obvious and not-so-obvious challenges to managing content effectively.
Now, the not-so-obvious challenges of managing your content effectively don’t become apparent until you actually start trying to manage your content effectively.
Your content strategy is part of your content management system, so if we start creating and promoting content before developing our content strategy and putting systems in place to manage our content effectively, then what’s the point of having a content strategy?
Let’s go back to our definition of a Content Strategy from module 1.
So, without a content strategy, we are just creating content blindly with no real direction or ways to measure and track our content’s performance, so it’s all going to be hit-and-miss and guesswork and assumptions.
The first challenge is that a content strategy involves all areas of our business because content impacts all areas of our business.
The next challenge is that creating high-quality content and managing our content effectively requires quite a sizeable team.
This leads to the next challenge, which is that it takes significant resources to create high-quality content and manage this content effectively.
And finally, the last of the “not-so-obvious” challenges only becomes obvious when we try to start putting our content strategy together.
So, let’s recap what we need to know and do before developing a content strategy for our business.
So, that’s the end of this lesson.
One of the best ways to avoid creating content that may end up delivering poor results is to learn how to perform effective content research before investing time and effort into creating it.
If your role involves managing content for an organization, it’s important to know what existing content the organization already has.
In the previous module, we looked at 
An effective 
