This lesson covers how to use your target audience information to set SMART goals for your content, plus defining your business goals, aligning your content strategy with your business goals, and determining what you want to achieve with your content (e.g. drive traffic, generate leads, build brand awareness, etc.).
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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 4.
In the previous lesson, we looked at understanding our target audience.
In this lesson, we’ll look at setting content goals for our content strategy.
Setting content goals involves identifying what we want to achieve with our content, and then developing specific, measurable, and actionable targets to help us achieve these objectives.
Here are the general steps to follow when setting content goals:
First, identify our target audience. Understanding their demographics, interests, and pain points will inform the types of content that we should be creating.
Next, define our business objectives. We need to determine how our content will support our overall business objectives, such as driving website traffic, increasing conversions, building brand awareness, and so on.
Next, establish specific, measurable, and actionable goals: For each objective we set, we’ll need to create specific, measurable, and actionable goals that align with our objective. For example, “Increase website traffic by 30% within the next six months.”
Also, we need to prioritize our goals based on importance and feasibility. This will help us focus our resources on the content that creates the most impact.
We also need to regularly review and adjust our goals, because the digital landscape is always changing, and so what worked well before may not work as well now.
So, we need to make sure that our goals are current and feasible.
Another important area is to measure and analyze our content’s performance. Here, we can use analytics tools to track performance and measure the success of our content against our goals. This will then help us identify areas for improvement and allow us to make data-driven decisions instead of guessing.
By following these steps, we can set clear and measurable content goals that will align with our business objectives and that will help us achieve our desired outcomes.
So, let’s explore each of these areas now in a little more detail.
The first step is to identify our target audience.
We’ve already covered this in module 3, so if you need help identifying your target audience, just go back and review that module.
The next step is to identify our business objectives.
Before we can identify our business objectives, however, we should have a clear idea of our business vision, mission, and core values.
If you need help with any of these areas, then visit the URL on this screen for an in-depth tutorial.
The next step is to establish specific, measurable, and actionable goals. For each objective or goal that we specify, we need to create specific, measurable, and actionable goals that will align with our objectives.
For example, our goal might be to increase website traffic by 30% within the next six months.
We can use SMART goals to set specific, measurable, and actionable goals to help us achieve this objective.
At this point, we will also want to define the metrics that we will use to measure our results.
If you need help or more information on content metrics, visit the URL on the screen.
The next step is to prioritize our goals based on importance and feasibility.
This will help focus our resources on the content that will create the most impact.
When prioritizing content goals, it’s important to consider both the importance and the feasibility of each goal.
Importance refers to how closely the goal aligns with our overall objectives, while feasibility takes into account the resources, time, and any other constraints that can impact our ability to achieve the goal.
One way to prioritize content goals is to use a method like the Eisenhower Matrix, which separates goals into four categories based on their importance and feasibility:
So…
Important and feasible are goals that should be prioritized and tackled first, as they will have the greatest impact and can be completed with the resources that we have available.
For example, creating product announcement blog posts when new products are released or existing products are updated would likely fall into this category.
The next category is important but not feasible. These goals are important, but can’t be completed given current constraints, so we might need to put these on hold or reevaluate them later to determine if they can be made more feasible.
An example of a goal that might fall in this category is producing a high-budget video ad campaign when we’ve only been given a very low budget to create our content.
Not important but feasible goals are not critical to our objectives, but could still be achieved within our available resources.
These goals can be completed if time allows but should be given lower priority than more important goals.
For example, translating website pages into another language that isn’t critical for our target audience would probably fall into this category.
And the last category is not important and not feasible, If goals are neither important nor feasible, then just drop them. They are not important and they are not feasible.
When using a method like the Eisenhower Matrix, it’s important to list all of our goals, then evaluate each one, add them into one of these four categories, and make a decision based on the category we’ve selected.
The next step is to continually review and adjust our goals.
As mentioned earlier, the digital landscape is always changing, so what worked well before may not work as well now.
The last step is to track our goals and measure and analyze our content performance using analytics tools. This will help us identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions.
So, to summarize what we have covered in this lesson, setting content goals involves steps like:
Identifying our target audience
Defining our business objectives
Establishing SMART goals
Prioritizing our goals according to importance and feasibility
Regularly reviewing and adjusting our goals to make sure they remain aligned with our objectives, and
Measuring and analyzing our content performance against the goals that we have set.
For more information about each of these areas, see the tutorials and lessons that are listed on the screen.
That’s all for this lesson.
In the next lesson, we’ll look at the different types of content to include in our content strategy.
Thank you for watching and I’ll see you in the next lesson.
This lesson looks at ways and methods to identify the demographics, interests, and pain points of your target audience, create user personas for your business, and understand the buyer’s journey and what types of content will be most relevant and valuable to your audience at each different stage of their journey.
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Watch the video lesson below or refer to the video transcript:
Video Transcript
Hello and welcome back to our video course on how to create an effective content strategy for your business.
So far, we’ve looked at what a content strategy is, why your business needs one, and the benefits and importance of having a clear and defined content strategy in module 1.
We then looked at the main challenges of managing content effectively and what we need to put in place before we can develop an effective content strategy. That was module 2.
This is module 3, and this lesson is all about identifying and understanding our target audience.
Understanding our target audience is essential to develop an effective content strategy that will help our business succeed.
By identifying key characteristics of our target audience such as demographics, their interests, and their pain points, we can then create content that will speak directly to their needs, desires, and motivations.
So, how do we identify our target audience?
First, let’s look at what we are trying to understand about our audience.
Demographics relates to a market or a sector of the population.
Understanding our audience’s demographics lets us tailor our content strategy and content to better meet the specific needs of our customers.
Demographics relates to attributes like age, gender, income, education, occupation, geographical location, maybe even their family structure or lifestyle, if that’s important, and psychographics.
Psychographics is similar to demographics, but it deals with attributes that are harder to observe, such as mental and emotional characteristics and motives, whereas demographics are more visible and easier to determine.
So, things like your audience’s values, beliefs, and attitudes are psychographic attributes, whereas age, income, and occupation are demographics.
Now, the next set of information that we want to identify relates to our target audience’s interests and hobbies.
Understanding our target audience’s interests and hobbies can help us create messaging and advertising content that will fit their preferences and resonate with our audience, keep them engaged longer with our business or website, and create a more personalized approach that will help to increase our chances of attracting new customers and retaining existing ones.
To identify the interests and hobbies of our audience, we need to know things like:
What do they like to do in their free time?
What are they interested in learning more about?
Here are some examples of questions we can ask to uncover these answers:
“What are some of your favorite hobbies or activities outside of work?”
“What are some of the books, movies, or TV shows you enjoy?”
“What are some of the websites or blogs you like to visit?”
“What kind of music do you like to listen to?”
“What kind of events or activities do you like to attend?”
“What kind of sports or fitness activities are you interested in?”
“What kind of hobbies or activities do you enjoy with your family?”
“What are some of your favorite travel destinations or dream vacation spots?”
“What are some of the volunteer or community activities you’re involved in?”
“What are some of the causes or social issues that you care about?”
Another area we want to identify about our target audience are their pain points.
Their challenges, problems, and frustrations.
So what problems are they trying to solve?
And how can your product or service help to address these pain points?
Understanding our audience’s pain points lets us tailor our content to address their specific needs, desires, and concerns.
Now, how do we gather data about our target audience’s demographics, interests, and pain points?
If you visit the page listed on this slide, you will find more detailed information about each of these sources and links to tools and resources that you can use to gather this data.
Another way to identify your target audience is to create user personas for your business.
A user persona is a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
User personas provide a detailed and specific picture of who your target audience is, what their needs and goals are, and how they think and behave.
You create a user persona from the data and research gathered about your target audience.
And these allow you to address your ideal customer when creating your content.
And there are a number of free user persona online generators that you can use to create user personas.
Visit the URL on the screen for a list of free tools.
The other important area that will help you identify your target audience and their needs, is understanding your customer’s buyer journey.
The buyer journey is the process that a potential customer goes through before making a purchase.
The stages of the buyer journey are typically divided into Awareness, Consideration, Decision, and Retention.
In the awareness stage, your potential customer becomes aware of a problem or need that they have.
In the consideration stage, our potential customer is actively searching for a solution to meet their needs and is considering their options.
In the decision stage, potential customers have made a decision to solve their problem, and they are now looking for the best solution, and they are ready to make a purchase.
In the retention stage, the customer has already purchased the product or service and is now using it.
Since they have already purchased, this stage is not typically considered to be part of the customer’s purchasing journey but your content strategy still needs to accommodate this audience group in terms of retaining them and building customer loyalty.
Visit the URL on the screen for more details on understanding your customer’s buyer journey, the types of content you can create for each different stage of their journey, and useful tools and resources that will help you save time.
So, to summarize what we have covered in this lesson, let’s look at the action steps that we need to take to identify our target audience.
One, gather data about their demographics, interests, and pain points. There are various methods you can use to do this,
Two, create user personas. There are free online user persona generator tools that you can use, and
And three, understand the customer’s buyer journey and the best content types to help them at each stage.
For detailed tutorials covering each of these areas and links to tools and resources, just visit the URLs shown on your screen.
In the next lesson, we’ll look at setting content goals to create an effective content strategy.
Thank you for watching this video and I’ll see you in the next lesson.
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 set up a simple and effective system for generating, storing, organizing, and managing your content ideas.
Managing Your Content Ideas
Learn how to set up a simple and effective system for generating, storing, organizing, and managing your content ideas.
Your business needs content. Your website needs content. Your social media needs content. Your blog, newsletters, product descriptions, post headlines, sales copy, social media, ads, articles, promotional pieces, news releases, customer training sections, FAQs, forum signatures, SEO meta descriptions, etc. all need content.
There’s no way around it…to have a successful digital presence, you will need lots of content!
Whether you plan to create this content in-house, outsource it, or a mix of both, having an effective system for generating, storing, organizing, and managing your content ideas will help your business immensely in areas like content planning and content production.
In this article, we’ll show you how to set up a basic, simple, and cost-effective system that will keep new ideas for content flowing regularly in your business.
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A Simple System For Turning Content Ideas Into Published Content
Coming up with new ideas and publishing new content regularly will help to improve your online business results.
Fact: Businesses that publish new content regularly get better results online.
The most effective way to manage the content in your business is to turn every content-related area into a process and then turn your content-related processes into systems.
By focusing on managing systems, your business can improve its results and realize its goals and objectives.
When using content to grow your business, it’s important to think of the processes involved in generating, storing, organizing, and managing your content ideas as a system.
This will allow you and your content team to continually generate new ideas and easily store, organize, and manage these so they can be accessed, retrieved, and added at any time to your content planning and content production systems.
Your content strategy is the blueprint that describes how your business will use content to achieve its overall strategic goals and objectives.
Your content plan is the document that specifies how your content team will execute the content strategy.
Once your business has created a content strategy and content plan, you can then begin to turn your content ideas into published content through your content planning and content production systems.
Where your Content Ideas System fits in with other areas of your overall Content System.
Your Content Ideas System, then, connects your Content Plan to your Content Planning processes.
Your Content Ideas System, however also requires processes for generating, storing, organizing, and managing your content ideas.
Let’s have a look at these processes and how we turn these into a simple and practical system.
A System For Generating Content Ideas
Great content ideas can strike at any time!
There are many ways, methods, and techniques for generating new content ideas for your business.
If you don’t know where to start, check out this long list of content ideas and content topics we’ve created here: Content Ideas
To save you a massive amount of time, we have also created a comprehensive and 100% free content ideas course that you can subscribe to if you need help coming up with new ideas and topics for articles, blog posts, and newsletters.
All you have to do to start receiving our +120-part email course on how to generate endless content ideas delivered straight to your inbox is go here and signup.
With this process out of the way, let’s look at the next step.
A System For Storing, Organizing, And Managing Content Ideas
How are you going to store, organize, and manage your content ideas?
Turning your content ideas into published content typically involves a lot of researching, planning, organizing, editing, and refining a bunch of notes, files, links, media content, etc.
All of these activities can get in the way of the creative process or require putting ideas on hold until they can be further developed.
Suppose you suddenly get an idea for a new article or blog post but you’re too busy to expand further on it or do something with it.
What do you do? Do you write it down on the nearest piece of paper you can find? Do you not write it down and hope that you will still remember it later?
Your business will struggle to improve its results and grow with content if your approach is to let ideas come to you spontaneously, work through them chaotically, and publish content only when you feel inspired or have the time to write.
Too many of your competitors are regularly publishing information online to make a “spontaneous and chaotic” approach effective.
So the first step is to have a simple, practical, and cost-effective way to effectively:
Jot content ideas down.
Store, organize, and manage these ideas.
Outline and draft (i.e. flesh out) ideas into content, and,
Have these ideas ready to publish.
For this example, we’ll set up a simple process like the one shown below using free/inexpensive tools and the WordPress CMS...
A simple and effective process for storing, organizing, and managing your content ideas.
For a comprehensive list of useful tools and apps that can help you research and organize your thoughts and ideas, see our Content Research Tools lesson.
1. Jotting Down Your Content Ideas
Got an idea? Jot it down!
You can be struck with a great idea for a new article, blog post, video, podcast, ebook, lead generation report, etc. anywhere, at any time.
This could happen while you’re in the shower, getting ready in the morning, going on a walk, shopping, standing in a queue, on your way to or from work, sitting in a meeting, watching TV, just before falling asleep…even while you are sleeping!
Knowing that this can happen, then, it’s important to be prepared.
When an idea suddenly comes to you, you need an easy tool that will let you quickly jot down your idea.
This can be an app on your phone that lets you create and save simple memos, a small writing pad that you carry in your purse, briefcase, or in your pocket, etc.
Whatever tool you choose to use just make sure that you keep it handy so you can record your ideas when inspiration strikes.
For example, years ago, I spoke with a business owner after a business networking event who didn’t have a website. When I asked him why he didn’t have a website, he replied that he doesn’t believe a website would help him grow his business.
I was intrigued by this answer, so I asked him to tell me more. He then told me that a website was just something businesses need for ‘credibility.’
This business owner couldn’t see how a website would help his business grow but believed that if he didn’t have a website, prospects would doubt the credibility of his business (or even whether the business existed).
As a non-technical website owner who has spent years helping businesses grow using WordPress websites, this naturally got me thinking about how I could educate other non-techies about the benefits of using a WordPress website to educate their prospects about their business and generate new business leads.
Knowing the importance of jotting down ideas as soon as these come into my head (instead of telling myself that I’ll “remember these” for later), I took out my phone while waiting for the lift to take me down to the car park, and fired up the ‘Memo’ app I have installed specifically to record new content ideas…
You can use a memo app to record your content ideas.
I then quickly jotted down some rough ideas for an article on “how to use a website as more than just a credibility tool”…
When inspiration strikes, you need some way to record your content ideas immediately.
Note: At this stage of the process, it doesn’t matter if you know the ‘5 ways to do XYZ’ or not … the important thing is to simply record the idea as soon as you can.
I certainly didn’t know what the ‘5 ways’ were going to be when I wrote the idea down. By the time the content is written it may very well end up being the ‘3 ways,’ or the ’19 ways,’ to do XYZ, or it may become something completely different altogether.
The end result is not important at this stage, only the process of recording the idea down. This should become a habit, so you need to have some type of tool or way to document your ideas.
2. Storing Your Content Ideas
After writing an idea down, the next step is to store it in a way that it can be easily found and retrieved when it’s time to expand on it further.
A phone app makes it easy to email the idea to yourself or to your content team, and, depending on which tools you use, even to add it directly into your content planning or production systems.
Email the idea to yourself, to your content team, or add it directly into your content workflow.
Work out with your content team a process for storing and adding ideas to your content workflow and make sure to document this process.
3. Organizing & Managing Your Content Ideas
At the time I jotted down the example idea being used here, I was also using a tool called TreePad to keep my ideas organized.
I used TreePad (no longer available) but now there are newer and better content organization tools available.
Essentially, all you need is a tool that lets you create a hierarchical structure of folders where you can store text snippets, images, links, etc.
If you create different folders for each section of an article or ebook, for example, you can then easily rearrange or organize these sections by moving folders up, down, or nest these inside other folders.
With an organization tool, you can easily add, organize, prioritize, and keep track of unlimited new content ideas, and make these immediately accessible when required.
In my earlier example, after sending the content idea from my phone app to my email inbox, I then added it to a simple content production planner I created using nested folders…
You can easily keep track of your content ideas using a simple content production planner created using nested folders.
As you can see from the above screenshot, this is nothing more than a folder I’ve created and labeled “Content Production” with new folders created for every new content idea.
A simple content production planner like this lets you easily:
Add content ideas with a rough working title (you can change it anytime)
Work on developing any idea you have stored further at any time it suits you.
Prioritize ideas in the content production schedule (just move folders up or down to prioritize items)
Add rough notes and bullet point sections, play with title ideas, etc.
Add and save research notes, URLs of videos, images, additional references, resource links, etc.
Archive the folder containing all of your notes for the content idea once you have completed and published it (just create an “Archive” folder and move completed projects into it.)
Delete the content idea folder if the idea turns out not to be worth pursuing further.
Once the idea has been safely stored and saved in your simple content planning system, you can get on with other things and come back to it anytime to work on the idea and develop it further.
Whenever you come across new information that would be useful to add or help expand on the idea, simply open the tool, paste in the content, save, and continue working on it later.
For a list of great tools you can use for this step, refer to the Content Research Tools section.
4. Outlining And Drafting Your Content Ideas
What tool will you use to flesh out your new content ideas?
An important part of your content ideas system is to set aside time on a regular basis to either work on coming up with new content ideas or to develop your content ideas further.
When the time comes to develop an idea further, you will want to retrieve your idea file from its stored place and select the item to work on next.
You can then create an outline with the main points your will cover in your content, and assemble all the information and research you have gathered into a draft article, blog post, video/audio script, etc.
During the outline creation and draft stage, don’t waste time worrying about things like formatting, styling, typefaces, font colors, font sizes, etc. These are unnecessary time-wasting distractions at this point.
The best way to create a draft of your content is to write it out using a plain text file. You can format this later.
Some tools you can use for this step of the process include:
Plain Text Editor
A plain text editor lets you create draft content without distractions.
Your computer comes with a built-in plain text editor like Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Apple). Using these free tools lets you focus entirely on what you want to say and create content quickly and without distractions.
Notetab
NoteTab lets you work on multiple text files at once.
NoteTab is a plain text file editing tool that lets you work on multiple text files at once. This is like using your computer’s plain text file editor on steroids.
NoteTab is great for organizing your ideas during the initial draft phase. You can build your article in one open tab and paste in snippets of text like lists, quotes, research URLs, tags, etc. into other open tabs and perform a whole range of other functions while you work and assemble your content.
If you are more comfortable fleshing out your content ideas using a word processor application like MS Word or Google Docs, you can use these tools instead to create your outlines or drafts
Google Docs is a free word-processing tool.
If using a word processing tool, just keep in mind that all of the formatting options and features can become a distraction (remember, when working on content ideas, it’s best to focus on the message, not the formatting of the content, which is why we strongly suggest using a plain text editing tool.)
Also, some word-processing tools add hidden formatting code to the content which needs to be removed before publishing.
For example, when pasting content from Google Docs into WordPress, you will often see a bunch of hidden formatting code added to the content (switch to ‘Text’ mode in the content editor to see this).
Look out for hidden formatting code when copying and pasting content from word processors into your CMS.
Speaking of which…
WordPress
Jot down and flesh out your content ideas directly in WordPress.
If you’re familiar with using WordPress, you can simply jot down and flesh out your content ideas directly in the WordPress content editor and save these as draft posts.
This method works well if your website has other posts or pages that you plan to link to in your new content.
Working directly in WordPress also helps you flesh out your outline or draft content and get it closer to the initial draft stage.
After creating your article outline or draft, the next step is to move it into the content planning and content production stages with the view of getting it published.
If you are working on an article or blog post, for example, using WordPress lets you easily create a new post, paste in your draft content from a plain text file, and format it using built-in formatting tools.
The WordPress ‘classic’ editor has formatting tools that look similar to MS Word.
WordPress has two content editors:
The older editor (called the WordPress Classic Editor) lets you format text by clicking on menu buttons that are similar to using a word processing application like MS Word.
The newer editor (called the WordPress Block Editor) uses ‘blocks’ to add content. You then format your content using the tools and options available in each block.
Remember to save your new article or blog post as a draft in WordPress until you are done editing, formatting, and checking it for spelling or grammatical errors and are ready to publish it.
If you need a grammar and spelling-checking tool, see the Content Editing Tools section of the course or check out the tool listed below.
Grammarly
Grammarly – Free Grammar Checking Software
Grammarly is a powerful grammar-checking tool for creating web content, reports, e-books, presentations, etc. You can install the free version of Grammarly on your web browser, Microsoft Word, etc.
After writing your content, run it through Grammarly and it will not only pick up all of your spelling and grammatical errors but also point out errors in your punctuation (e.g. wrong use of commas, double spacing between words, duplicated words, etc), poor sentence structure, style, etc.
As you scroll through each error, Grammarly shows you what’s wrong and gives you the option of automatically fixing errors with one click. You can also ignore the correction suggestions if you want and keep scrolling through to the next item.
The paid version of the software takes your content checking to a whole new level and lists advanced issues, suggests vocabulary enhancements, detects instances of plagiarism, etc.
Here are frequently asked questions about managing content ideas:
What is content management?
Content management is the process of organizing, creating, storing, and distributing content to meet strategic business goals. It involves planning, producing, editing, and publishing content across various channels.
Why is managing content ideas important?
Managing content ideas helps maintain a consistent flow of relevant and engaging content, ensures alignment with business objectives, and enhances audience engagement and retention.
How can I generate content ideas?
Utilize FAQs, customer feedback, industry trends, keyword research, competitor analysis, and content brainstorming sessions to generate diverse content ideas.
What is a content calendar, and why should I use one?
A content calendar is a schedule that outlines when and where content will be published. It helps maintain consistency, organize workflow, and ensure content aligns with strategic goals.
How do I categorize and organize content effectively?
Categorize content based on themes, topics, formats, and audience segments. Use tools like content management systems (CMS) to organize content assets efficiently.
What are some best practices for managing content ideas?
Regularly review and update content, repurpose existing content, collaborate with team members, track content performance metrics, and stay updated on industry trends.
Your Content Ideas System: Summary
Having a content ideas system will help your business publish new content regularly.
To get results online with content, your business needs to publish content regularly.
This requires having a system for coming up with new content ideas on a regular basis, then storing, organizing, and managing these ideas.
This lesson provides a simple, inexpensive, and cost-effective system you can use to do this.
Here are the steps again:
Jot your ideas down on a writing pad or phone memo app as soon as new ideas present themselves to you.
Add your ideas to a content tool that lets you store, organize, prioritize, and add research notes and additional information.
When you are ready to create an outline or draft of your article, blog post, or video/audio script, use a plain text editor like Notepad, TextEdit, or NoteTab to flesh out your content ideas with no distractions.
After writing your draft content, create a new WordPress post or page (if using WordPress) and paste your content in, then format it using the WordPress Content Editor. Save it as a draft until you are ready to publish it.
After you are done editing your content and checking it for spelling and grammatical errors (e.g. using a tool like Grammarly), you are ready to publish your content.
Resources
Free Content Ideas Course – Subscribe to this free and comprehensive course for endless new content ideas for your website, blog, or newsletter.
We hope that you have found the above information useful. Now you have a simple and effective system for generating, storing, organizing, and managing your content ideas.
Coming up with new content ideas and being able to store and organize these are all part of effective content management.
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:
How do you interlink content across many web pages when the content on those pages hasn’t even been written yet? Here’s how…
Linking Content On Multiple Web Pages
How do you interlink content across many web pages when the content on those pages hasn’t even been written yet? This article provides helpful content-linking planning tips for larger content projects.
Content linking is not only good for SEO, it’s also what makes the World Wide Web possible.
While interlinking topic-related content in existing web pages is easy to do, how do you link to content that has not been created yet?
This creates challenges when planning larger content projects with fully interlinked content such as an article series or an online course.
Planning a site like ContentManagementCourse.com is a great example of how challenging this can be. This site launched with over 100 fully interlinked course lessons.
In this article, we show you step-by-step how we created the course content for this site as a practical example of interlinking content across many pages.
ContentManagementCourse.com Content Planning Process
Here’s the planning process we used to create the content for ContentManagementCourse.com:
Step 1 – Set Goals
Our goal is to provide a comprehensive and practical online course to help businesses learn how to manage their content more effectively.
Achieving this goal required planning several course modules with many interlinked lessons covering several content-related areas.
Step 2 – Create A Content Strategy
Based on the goals described above, we defined a content strategy for this site that included creating the following content:
Site Pages – Create standard website ‘must-have’ pages (e.g. Home Page, About Us, Contact Us, Legal Pages, etc.)
Course Modules – Create comprehensive course modules with fully interlinked course lessons across six categories:
Digital Business – This module provides context for the other modules.
Content Management – Lessons on how to manage content and the above content-related processes.
Email Lessons – Create a series of emails aimed at helping users to understand and apply all of the course lessons on this site.
Blog – Create and publish new content that expands on the content of existing course lessons, with practical tips and additional information o help users improve their content management skills.
The main content sections of this site. All sections contain fully interlinked content.
Once the main content sections were defined, the strategy was to implement the creation of the course content and the launch of this site into the following stages:
Set up the site with ‘must-have’ navigational pages.
Create all course modules and lessons with fully interlinked content prior to launching the site.
Launch the site, and
Continually add new content on a regular basis expanding and linking to existing course content.
Stage #2 above is the challenging part and the focus of this article. The other stages are fairly common when developing business websites (i.e. set up and launch the website, then start publishing new content).
After defining the content strategy, the next step was to plan the course content outline describing the modules, lessons, and topics covered in each of these sections.
Step 3 – Planning The Course Content Outline
A simple spreadsheet was used to plan the course content outline, with columns to classify and organize course modules and lessons, track content production, and record information about each item of content created for the site.
The spreadsheet also employed a simple color-coding scheme:
White (No highlight) – Lesson planned but not worked on yet.
Yellow – Lesson worked on but not completed yet.
Green – Lesson completed.
Purple – New lesson or blog article to be added later (the content is not required to launch the course. It can be created, published, then linked to and from the main course content afterward).
The course content planning spreadsheet for ContentManagementCourse.com.
Note: In addition to adding course content planning columns, other columns were included for additional information about each content item, so this spreadsheet can be used to perform a content audit and content reviews.
Planning the course and creating the course content outline took several weeks.
Step 4 – Developing The Course Website
Here’s a breakdown of the steps required to complete this stage:
1 – Build The Website
As explained throughout this course, one of the most effective tools for managing content is to use a Content Management System (CMS) and WordPress is the world’s most widely used CMS platform.
So, this site was built with WordPress. All the steps are documented on our free WordPress training sites for non-technical users: WPCompendium.org (free tutorials on how to build a WordPress site without coding skills) and WPTrainingManual.com (free tutorials on how to use WordPress).
2 – Put Site In Under Construction Mode
After building the site and adding basic pages (e.g. Contact Us, Legal Pages, etc.), I then installed and activated an “Under Maintenance” plugin so I could work on the content without making it public.
3 – Add Placeholder Pages For Content
This step is really important for your content linking strategy to work. Careful planning is required before building your content pages.
After setting up and configuring the website (about a week’s work), I then returned to the spreadsheet and began to add “placeholder” pages (pages without content) to the website for each content item that would need to be created.
After creating a placeholder post for the content as per the above, I then published the page.
The reason for publishing pages instead of keeping these unpublished (i.e. in ‘draft’ mode) was to obtain the actual URL of each course module or lesson and record this on the spreadsheet.
I then used these URLs to link to other course content later.
I repeated this process until all the ‘placeholder’ pages (100+ pages) required to launch this course were created (about a week’s work).
Step 5 – Course Content Production
After creating all the placeholders for course modules and lessons listed on the course planning spreadsheet, the process of researching and writing the course content began.
The aim of this stage was to flesh out each lesson as much as possible and worry about final editing and putting the finishing touches later, so I used the content planning spreadsheet to track content production with most of the content being worked on highlighted in yellow.
While working on the lessons, new content ideas came to mind, and I recorded these on the spreadsheet for later.
Going from content planning to content production.
Writing the course content for this site took about a year.
After creating all the course content, I then went back and reviewed each lesson, making final tweaks and edits to the content, formatting, and structure, checking that the links worked, etc.
As each item was completed, I added the details to the spreadsheet and highlighted them in green.
When all the rows of the spreadsheet were green, the site was then ready to launch.
Tracking content production on the content planning spreadsheet. When all rows were highlighted in green, the site was ready to launch.
As you build out your content, you may discover that you need to make changes to the page URLs that you are linking to (e.g. you may need to assign the lesson to a different post category or edit the post slug).
Changing the URL of a page, however, can affect the existing links in your content. With WordPress, you can easily fix this using plugins like Better Search Replace and Redirection.
Step 6 – Launch Website
With all the initial content created and fully interlinked, the site was ready to launch.
All we needed to make the content public was to deactivate the “Under Construction” plugin. The site then immediately became “live”.
Step 7 – Add New Content With Links To Existing Content
The hardest part of creating a large project with extensive content interlinking is getting the content planning right and then building out all of your initial content.
Once this is done, adding new content (e.g. via the blog section) and linking it to existing pages is relatively easy, as the main content structure is already in place.
For example, this article was written after the site was launched. All the links you see on this page were easy to add as all of the content being linked to was already written.
In time, this article may also link to content that has yet to be written.
When/if this content eventually does get written, it will simply be a matter of referring to the notes in the content planning spreadsheet, editing this article, adding a link to the newly-created content, and marking the task as done (i.e. highlighting it in green on the spreadsheet ).
Summary
While linking content between existing web pages is simple and easy to do, planning how to fully interlink content on larger projects can be challenging, as it may require linking to content that hasn’t been created yet.
Here’s the strategy for addressing this challenge in a nutshell:
Create and publish ‘placeholder’ pages to get all the web addresses you will link to in your content project.
After obtaining the URL of all your interlinking pages, start building the content for those pages.
As you build out the content on each of your ‘placeholder’ pages, link your content to other content using their page URLs.
Creating content placeholders allows you to build out fully interlinked content for larger projects
Editorial calendars are sometimes also referred to as content calendars. However, according to Neil Patel, there is a difference:
“These terms are often used interchangeably. However, an editorial calendar generally outlines each step of the process, while a content calendar usually covers one aspect—such as when posts are published or shared to social media.”
Source: NeilPatel.com
You can use a template to build your content calendar. Image: Airtable.
Let’s briefly cover what a content calendar is and how to create one, and then we’ll focus on the editorial calendar.
What Is A Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a schedule for creating, publishing, and promoting your business’s content.
A content calendar helps your business stay organized and on schedule when creating content and ensures that you have a steady stream of relevant, high-quality content to share with your audience.
How To Plan And Create A Content Calendar
Follow the steps below to plan a content calendar for your business and see the rest of this lesson for more detailed instructions on how to create one:
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 format of your content (e.g. blog post, video, podcast, infographics) and schedule out when you will publish it.
Create a production plan: Decide how you will produce your content, and include it in your content calendar.
Create a promotion plan: Decide how and when you will promote your content, and include it in your content calendar.
Use a tool: Use a content calendar tool or spreadsheet to organize and schedule your content, and to make it easy to track progress and make adjustments as needed.
Example Of A Content Calendar
Here is an example of what type of information might be included in a content calendar for a marketing agency:
Audience: Small to medium-sized business owners
Goals: Increase website traffic, generate leads
Competitors: other marketing agencies
Topics:
Inbound marketing
Content marketing
Social media marketing
Plan:
Blog post: once a week
YouTube video: once a month
Webinar: Once a quarter
Promotion plan:
Social media: LinkedIn, Facebook
Email marketing: send a newsletter once a month
Paid Advertising: Google Ads, Facebook ads
Tool: Google Sheet
By following these steps, the marketing agency will be able to create a content calendar that helps them achieve its business goals while engaging its target audience with relevant and valuable content aligned with its overall promotion and distribution strategy.
Also, by using a tool to organize the calendar, it will be easy to track progress, make adjustments as needed and share it with the team members.
What Is An Editorial Calendar?
“An editorial calendar is a visual workflow that helps a team of content creators schedule their work on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Editorial calendars can help you track content types, promotional channels, authors, and most importantly, publish dates.”
Records how, when, and where you plan to publish upcoming content.
Lays out every step of the content planning and production process from idea to publication.
Lets you track and manage different content types (e.g. articles, videos) and promotional channels (e.g. blogs, social media, emails).
Editorial calendars are typically used to track upcoming pieces, planned promotions, and social media posts. Image: Asana
An editorial calendar should be the single version of the truth, and only projects that are actually going to be created should be added to the calendar.
Note: You can have a column in your calendar where content topics or ideas for review and discussion can be added and then either moved into production or discarded if the team decides not to go ahead with it.
“The editorial process for a business can be surprisingly complex; it’s not just a way to plan a few content ideas ahead of time, but rather it implies establishing content marketing objectives, developing a strategy and carefully strategizing all of your content ahead of time so that you can generate better results for your business – whether it’s an improved search engine ranking, more traffic, more social shares or more leads and conversions.”
Source: Forbes.com
If you are working with a team of content creators, you need organization, structure, and a system for planning, writing, and scheduling content on a regular basis to avoid missing deadlines, miscommunication with team members, and the accumulation of a growing pile of unfinished content.
If your business is serious about using content marketing (e.g. blogs, social media, email marketing campaigns, etc.) to improve its results, then it needs to plan, strategize, create, publish, and promote content in an organized manner, keep track of its content production in one place, and give its team complete visibility into the process.
An editorial calendar allows businesses to do this effectively.
Content Calendar Goals And Objectives
Common content calendar goals and objectives include:
Content planning: The goal is to plan and strategize the creation, distribution, and promotion of content. This can be achieved by creating an editorial calendar, identifying your target audience, and defining KPIs.
Timeliness: The goal is to ensure that content is created and published in a timely manner. This can be achieved by scheduling blog posts, social media posts, and other content well in advance, and creating deadlines for content creation and review.
Consistency: The goal is to ensure a consistent flow of content to keep your audience engaged and interested. This can be achieved by publishing regular blog posts, scheduling recurring social media posts, and creating a content calendar that covers the year/month.
Brand alignment: The goal is to align content with your company’s brand messaging and values. This can be achieved by creating and sharing branded graphics, videos and infographics, and guest blogging on relevant websites.
Audience engagement: The goal is to engage your target audience by creating and publishing content that is relevant and valuable to them. This can be achieved by creating a calendar that includes a mix of different types of content, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, and social media posts.
Content optimization: The goal is to improve the visibility 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
Integration: The goal is to integrate your content calendar with other systems and tools to improve efficiency, collaboration, and automation. This can be achieved by integrating with a CRM system, integrating with social media platforms, and integrating with analytics and reporting tools.
Flexibility: The goal is to ensure that your content calendar can be easily adapted to changing business needs and goals. This can be achieved by incorporating a feedback and testing process, making it easy for stakeholders to provide input and feedback, and implementing agile methodologies.
Collaboration: The goal is to promote collaboration and communication among team members to ensure that content is created and reviewed in a timely and effective manner. This can be achieved by using shared tools for content creation, review and publishing, setting up regular meetings and check-ins, and providing clear guidelines and instructions
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 your content.
Benefits Of Using An Editorial Calendar
Some of the benefits of using an editorial calendar include:
Better Planning
Better planning creates better content.
With an editorial calendar, you can include content research information in the planning process that content writers and creators need to create in-depth content targeted to the right audience, like supporting sources, quotes, stats, and references, keyword research, editorial briefs, notes from other team members, competitive intelligence data, etc.
An editorial calendar lets you include all the background information your team needs to create high-quality targeted content.
This can save valuable time and help generate an ongoing pipeline for the production of high-quality content.
One Place To Organize, Delegate, And Manage Everything
Depending on your content strategy, after a certain point, it can become unwieldy to keep track of all content production activities using spreadsheets, emails, text files, word docs, or sticky notes.
An editorial calendar allows businesses to plan, organize, delegate, track, and manage all of their content production effectively from one place.
It also allows a content production team to plan and work collaboratively and break the process into manageable workflow steps, assign tasks to individual team members, set priorities and deadlines for each item, adjust shifts in content needs and timing, and communicate with each other during each stage and level of production through notes and comments.
Keep in mind, however, that while some businesses may choose to use one ‘source of truth’ application for managing all of their content production, other organizations may have different departments or teams with different calendars to meet their content schedules.
For example, an organization may have a team of writers focused on creating content for their blog, a team (or individuals) managing their social media campaigns, and a marketing team or person running email campaigns and newsletters.
In this case, the organization could have different calendars to manage different content needs and all these separate content schedules would need to be coordinated to make sure that every team meets its targets and deadlines.
Some organizations may need to run multiple schedules and calendars to meet their content needs.
Helps Achieve Strategic Goals
An editorial calendar can assist a business to achieve goals set in its content strategy in a number of ways, including helping to:
Improve focus.
Meet critical milestones.
Track promotional activities.
Grow leads and improve conversion rates.
Increase sales and sign-ups on newsletters and registrations.
Build brand awareness.
Determine whether sufficient content is being produced for each persona being targeted by the business.
Meet Deadlines
An editorial calendar can help team members plan content ahead of time to meet specific timeframes and deadlines.
This is especially important if the business strategy requires new content to be published by a certain date to coincide with product launches, sales, or other time-based events.
It can also help to eliminate writer’s block. If the topic is set, a brief is clearly stated, and all background information is provided, the content writer can log in for the day, check the calendar, and begin working immediately on their project or assignment.
Managing Your Content Calendar
As a content manager working with a content production team, you will probably be the person responsible for managing the content calendar (unless someone else is appointed as calendar manager).
Even if you allow team members to add and edit items on the calendar, it’s helpful to have one person managing it and being accountable for it.
The calendar manager is responsible for deciding:
Who manages the calendar
Who can access the calendar (view only, view and edit, etc.)
Which projects will be added to the calendar
How often the calendar will be reviewed, updated, and cleaned up
Additionally, the calendar owner/manager is responsible for:
Making sure that deadlines are being set and met.
Nudging team members as deadlines approach.
Calling out anything that doesn’t look right.
How To Create An Editorial Calendar
Before creating an editorial calendar, make sure that the following processes are already in place:
Goals, audiences, budgets, etc. have been defined in your content strategy.
You have set up a schedule for your content production team. See this lesson for an example of what this step might look like: Content Production Team Schedule.
Once these processes are in place, you are ready to create your editorial calendar. The video below provides an overview of the process.
Source: coschedule.com
Let’s go through the steps:
1. Decide On Content Types
Check your content plan and decide on the content types your team will create.
For example:
Blog posts and articles
Social Media posts
Emails
Videos
Infographics
Lead Gen Reports
Guides and Ebooks
Webinars
Podcasts
Print magazines, brochures, or newsletters.
Other marketing projects.
2. Choose Your Tools
You can use a range of tools to create and track content production. Often, a combination of tools is needed to achieve the best results and these can vary from organization to organization and even from team to team.
Your business may or may not have already invested in some of these tools. If it has, then learn to use these tools. If not, refer to the Content Production Tools section for free and paid tools that will help you build and manage a content production workflow.
Types Of Content Calendars
An editorial calendar doesn’t have to be a digital tool to begin the process. Depending on what the business wants to do and how much content it plans to create to start with, you could begin with a diary, printed calendars and/or a whiteboard.
This is a step in the right direction if you’re just getting started but has many limitations for content planning and production. Image: Pixabay.
While this is a step in the right direction toward organizing your content workflow if you’re just getting started, non-digital tools are limited in what they can do. You can’t edit these easily, or use them to coordinate assigning editorial work or move projects through different stages of content planning and production.
In this case, using a spreadsheet is a better option to start with. You can make your own content calendar or use a spreadsheet template. There are many editorial and content calendar spreadsheet templates available and we provide links to these in the “Resources” section of this lesson.
You can use a spreadsheet template to create a content calendar. Source: Vertex42
You can also use a tool like Google Calendar to schedule your content.
Using a spreadsheet template or Google calendar is not a bad way to start, especially if you’re designing a prototype for your content scheduling or production workflow.
You can also use a Kanban board to create your content calendar. A Kanban board application looks like a virtual whiteboard with digital post-it notes that contain information about each project and can be moved across different columns after each stage of the process is completed.
Editorial calendar template from Trello. Image source.
For a list of free and paid tools you can use to create and run an editorial calendar that lets you assign tasks to individual team members or authors, set publishing schedules, allow your entire team access to track content through different stages of production, and know what and when content is being published, see these sections:
3. Set Up Content Production Processes And Workflows
The easiest way to get your marketing/content team involved in using the editorial calendar is to build workflows for your standard content creation processes into it.
To do this, you need to:
List all the individual steps (processes) in your content production process,
Organize these in a logical sequence, and
Set up a workflow in your calendar tool.
For example, the following processes and team members may be involved in the production of new blog posts or articles:
Add a new topic. (Editor)
Research background information (e.g. create a content brief, do topic research, competitive analysis, keyword research, linking opportunities, etc.) and add these to the item. (Editor/SEO)
Assign an author. (Editor)
Create an outline of the post or article. (Author)
Make changes to draft and submit for review. (Author)
Review/edit amended draft. (Editor)
Make changes to draft, then transfer to CMS, format content, and add additional elements like artwork, media, etc. (Author)
Submit draft for technical review [optional]. (Author)
Technical review/edit. (Product Manager)
Make changes and submit the final draft for review. (Author)
Approve content in the final draft. (Editor/Product Manager)
Publish. (Editor/Author)
Schedule content for promotion. (Editor/Marketing Team)
So, documenting the above workflow would look something like this…
Example of a content production workflow for creating new blog posts.
Once you have figured out your content production workflow, set the processes up in your content planning tool/editorial calendar as columns in your spreadsheet, kanban board, etc.
Add the workflow processes to your content planning tool.
Note: Some workflow processes include subtasks that need to be completed before content production can proceed to the next stage, so make sure to document these as well.
For example, adding a new task to production can involve completing subtasks like:
Gathering research sources and references
Performing keyword research
Analyzing content from the competition
Creating an editorial brief for authors
Sourcing internal linking opportunities
etc.
And creating an initial draft can involve subtasks like:
Requesting visual artwork (images, banners, etc.) from illustrators or graphic designers
Requesting media (e.g. videos) to be created
Interviewing subject experts
etc.
Some tools allow you to add checklists and templates to explain the workflow and ensure that all essential or required tasks and subtasks are completed successfully at each stage.
Task templates help to ensure that workflow processes get followed and tasks get completed on time. Source: Coschedule
4. Create A List Of Content Ideas
After deciding on the editorial calendar tool(s) you will use, the next step is to build a content backlog (i.e. a list of content ideas) to start organizing and tracking ideas and topics for articles and other content.
You can use a spreadsheet for this or just create a column on your content planning board for adding content ideas and topics for team discussion that may or may not make it to production.
Add a column to your content planning board for content ideas and topics for discussion. Source: WPMU DEV
Next, start adding a few headings to organize your content.
For example:
Title – Article title or content topic
Author – Assign an author (if there are multiple writers)
Status – Set the project status here (e.g. discussion, assigned, draft, review, published, etc.)
Date – Add the publication date
Additional headings you can add include special dates and anniversaries, themes and distribution channels, trending topics/new launches relevant to your industry or niche, seasonal content, and key sales dates.
Once you have this information, you are ready to begin using your editorial calendar.
How To Use An Editorial Calendar
With the prerequisite Content Strategy and Content Planning steps done, you can avoid the chaotic, disorganized, and often stressful scramble to come up with content at the last minute, begin the more methodical and effective route of scheduling content in advance, and get your content production pipeline rolling.
5. Schedule Your Initial Content
Ideally, you would schedule anywhere from 2-6 weeks’ worth of content ahead of time, depending on how much content you plan to produce and how many people are on your team.
Set up your content tasks into your content production tool, allowing enough time for each step of the process to meet content production targets and deadlines.
6 . Move Content Into Production
After scheduling your initial content, your team can begin to produce it. Make sure that every member of your team knows how to access and use your content production tool to move things along when each stage is completed (e.g. from writing an initial draft of an article to initial review).
Color-Code Content
Color coding the content on your calendar helps to keep your content activities organized, and allows your team to quickly identify content types, projects, or other agreed-upon ways to classify your processes.
You can color-code your editorial calendar however you like, as long as the color scheme is consistent and everyone in the team understands what the colors refer to. Some tools offer built-in color-coding functionality and allow you to specify custom colors and color schemes.
Some examples of using color-coding in your calendar include classifying content by:
Campaign, theme, or category
Team member/author
Content marketing channel
Any content-related activity where there is more than one type involved.
Use a color-coding scheme to organize your content calendar. Source: Quill.com
7. Build Your Content Pipeline
If the goal of your organization is to keep publishing content on a regular basis, then you need to build a forward-looking content pipeline into your editorial calendar.
You should be continually adding and queuing up new content for production, moving things along each stage of the pipeline, and having articles or other content ready for publication coming out at the other end.
If you’re just getting started with your content production process, you will probably need to put in extra work at the beginning to start filling your editorial calendar and feed your content pipeline.
This might mean getting a team of in-house or outsourced writers to create extra content until you have a suitable volume of content to publish or spending some time each day or week creating additional content.
8. Optimize & Refine Your Content Process
Content production is not a “set and forget” process. It needs to operate like a well-oiled machine. And like all machines, your content process needs to be periodically reviewed, maintained, and adjusted.
This means identifying and eliminating unnecessary processes, removing bottlenecks, making sure that all tools being used are fit for their purpose, reviewing processes and procedures with your team, and ensuring that the editorial process works for everyone.
In addition to making sure that your content team isn’t being slowed down or affected by a lack of skills or training on using tools or understanding processes, some of the more common areas to review periodically include:
Your content production schedule
Your content production tools
The volume of content that’s backed up and why it’s not getting published
The average time the content sits in the pipeline between each stage of production.
Infographic: How to plan a perfect editorial calendar. Source: Co-Schedule
Content Calendar Checklist
Define the goals and objectives of your content calendar: Clearly define the goals and objectives of the content calendar, such as ensuring a consistent flow of content and aligning with business objectives.
Identify key themes: Identify the key themes that align with your business goals and audience interests.
Gather existing content: Gather existing content, such as blog posts, videos, and social media updates, that can be repurposed or used as a starting point for new content.
Research content ideas: Research content ideas based on the themes and audience interests identified earlier.
Create a content calendar template: Create a content calendar template that includes columns for the content type, topic, target audience, deadline, and any other relevant information.
Fill in the calendar: Fill in the content calendar with the content ideas and existing content.
Set a publishing schedule: Set a publishing schedule for the content, taking into account the desired frequency and the target audience’s behavior.
Allocate resources: Allocate resources for creating, publishing, and promoting your content.
Coordinate with other teams: Coordinate with other teams, such as marketing and product development, to ensure the content aligns with the overall company goals and objectives.
Continuously monitor and update: Continuously monitor and update the content calendar based on the results and feedback.
Content Calendar FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content calendars:
What is a content calendar?
A content calendar is a scheduled plan for publishing all forms of content across different media platforms. It helps organize the way content is curated and distributed, ensuring timely publication while aligning with marketing goals.
Why use a content calendar?
Using a content calendar helps with planning, organization, and consistency in publishing. It enables teams to track content from the idea stage through to publication and promotion, ensuring strategic alignment with business objectives.
How do I start a content calendar?
Begin by determining your content strategy goals, understanding your audience, and deciding on the types of content you will produce. Then, choose a tool or template to organize the information, such as publication dates, channels, and content types.
What should be included in a content calendar?
A content calendar should include topics, dates of publication, responsible team members, channels of distribution, and stages of content creation. Additional details might include keywords, required images, and calls to action.
Can you share examples of content calendars?
Yes, there are various types of content calendars such as editorial calendars for blogs, social media calendars, and marketing campaign calendars. Each type serves different purposes and platforms, addressing specific content management needs.
How often should I update a content calendar?
Update your content calendar as often as necessary to respond to feedback, track the progress of content creation, adjust to shifting marketing strategies, and incorporate new ideas and insights.
What tools can I use to create a content calendar?
How do I manage multiple content types in one calendar?
Organize different types of content by using color codes, tags, or separate layers within the same calendar. This approach helps maintain clarity and prevents confusion across different content strategies and platforms.
What are common challenges when using a content calendar?
Common challenges include maintaining consistency, aligning with strategic goals, resource allocation, adapting to changes in content trends, and ensuring collaboration across teams. Addressing these challenges requires regular reviews and updates to the calendar.
How do I measure the success of my content calendar?
Success can be measured by tracking engagement metrics such as clicks, shares, comments, and conversions from published content. This feedback can then be used to refine and optimize future content plans.
Summary
Creating and managing a content strategy can be daunting and trying to maintain a regular publishing schedule without a tool for planning, tracking, and coordinating content activities can be challenging.
An editorial calendar is an ideal tool for managing content planning and streamlining content production activities from a central hub. It will help your team stay focused and on track and ensure the consistent delivery and publishing of high-quality content for your business.
Action Steps
Decide on the right editorial calendar tool for your business, set up a content production schedule, get your content team involved in using it to build a content pipeline and publish regular new content, and periodically review and improve your processes.
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).
Learn how to define a content workflow for your organization, from content ideation and creation to scheduling and publishing.
Content Workflow
Learn how to define a content workflow for your organization, from content ideation and creation to scheduling and publishing.
Keeping content projects on track and on time requires organizing and managing processes with specific tasks, done in a specific order, by team members assigned to specific roles.
If you are building a content pipeline and your content team is working on various projects, things can quickly become unwieldy and difficult to manage. People will start to get confused about where things are at, and projects will end up getting stuck and delayed.
This is where having a defined content workflow can help.
“A content workflow is a set of tasks that a team needs to complete for a given client or content type — a web page, a blog post, a white paper, an email, or any other kind of content that the group needs to deliver.”
The article also mentions Kristina Halvorson, author of Content Strategy For The Web, as saying that a content workflow determines “how content is requested, sourced, created, reviewed, approved, and delivered,” and goes on to explain:
Why a business needs to define a content workflow
How to define a content workflow, and
How to:
Identify the roles (who is involved in production)
Identify the tasks (what each role does)
Determine when tasks should get done by to maintain consistent production flow, and
Assign accountability for overseeing and tracking projects through to completion.
As we touched on in the Content Production Overview lesson, creating a content workflow involves defining things like the steps involved, who does what to make each step happen, how/when the process should move from one step to the next, what formats, guidelines, and procedures should be followed to ensure consistent standards, how/when to deliver each step, etc.
Even a simple content workflow can have many moving parts. For example, consider the steps involved in writing an article for a blog.
At first glance, it may look something like this:
Create an outline.
Write a draft.
Review the draft.
Edit the draft.
Get changes approved.
Publish the article.
A simple content workflow.
However, if you map out the sequence of all the steps involved in the actual article writing process, you may find that your article creation workflow ends up looking something more like this:
Your content workflow for creating articles could look like this.
From the above, it should be clear that:
Certain aspects of the process need to be assigned to and performed by different roles.
Some steps cannot proceed until other steps have first been completed.
Certain processes involve steps that “loop” (i.e. repeat) before the workflow can move to the next phase.
Different content requires different content workflows – a workflow used to create content like blog articles won’t necessarily work for other types of content (e.g. videos).
It’s important, then, to define content workflows in the content production process, as it helps the content team to:
Keep everything organized, saving time, reducing costs, and increasing production efficiency,
Break down different processes into manageable tasks,
Identify each stage of development and what needs to happen for the item to move forward and get approved,
Know who should take over responsibility for each step and when,
Identify and deal with bottlenecks in the production process.
Identify different workflows for different types of content.
Content Workflow Goals And Objectives
Common content workflow goals and objectives include:
Efficiency: The goal is to streamline the content creation process and reduce the time and effort required to produce, review, and publish content. This can be achieved by creating a content calendar, using project management tools, and automating repetitive tasks.
Collaboration: The goal is to promote collaboration and communication among team members to ensure that content is created and reviewed in a timely and effective manner. This can be achieved by using shared tools for content creation, review, and publishing, setting up regular meetings and check-ins, and providing clear guidelines and instructions.
Quality control: The goal is to ensure that all content meets the established standards for quality, accuracy, and compliance with legal, ethical, and brand guidelines. This can be achieved by creating and enforcing a content style guide, regularly reviewing and updating content, and ensuring that all content is accessible and inclusive.
Scalability: The goal is to ensure that the content workflow can easily adapt and scale to accommodate changes in content volume, team size, and complexity. This can be achieved by using cloud-based tools, creating a flexible and modular content creation process, and implementing a version control system.
Security: The goal is to protect the confidentiality and integrity of the content and the workflows by implementing security protocols. This can be achieved by using encryption and access controls, creating backups, and monitoring for unauthorized access.
Flexibility: The goal is to ensure that the content workflow can be easily adapted to changing business needs and goals. This can be achieved by incorporating a feedback and testing process, making it easy for stakeholders to provide input and feedback, and implementing agile methodologies.
Automation: The goal is to automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks to improve the speed and efficiency of the content workflow. This can be achieved by using a content management system (CMS) to automate the publishing process, using workflow automation tools, and integrating with other tools and software.
Integration: The goal is to integrate the content workflow with other systems and tools to improve efficiency, collaboration, and automation. This can be achieved by integrating with a CRM system, integrating with social media platforms, and integrating with analytics and reporting tools.
Key Elements Of An Effective Content Workflow
As mentioned, you may need to define different content workflows depending on the content strategy of the business and the purpose of the content it intends to create.
For example, consider the following types of content:
Blog articles to boost search engine visibility and drive traffic to the business,
Videos to inform and introduce products to potential customers,
Social media posts to increase brand awareness.
Each type of content listed above requires different processes to create and serves a different purpose. Each of these processes needs to be clearly defined to ensure efficient content production and consistent standards of quality.
While each of these content types requires different workflow processes, they also have certain elements in common.
Let’s look at these.
Content Production Phases
Different phases of content production.
While different content production processes result in the creation of different content types, they all tend to move through similar phases.
Your content workflow has to move content production through the various phases below:
1. Concept Development / Strategic Ideation
In this phase, team members brainstorm content ideas. Ideally, this will flow from the content strategy and include input from all stakeholders (e.g. the content team, designers, writers, editors, channel managers, creative agencies, etc.) to provide a fuller perspective of all the essential aspects of the project.
This phase should also involve a discussion of factors that can affect the project, like concept, style, budget, resources, timeframes, etc.
2. Pre-Production
This is the preparation phase where you source, gather and line up everything you will need before starting the actual process of creating the content. Depending on which project the team is working on, pre-production may include activities like researching, preparing outlines, sourcing graphics, scripting, etc.
For example, if you are shooting a video, pre-production will probably involve doing things like:
On the other hand, if you are planning to write an article for a blog, pre-production will involve different activities, such as:
Create an outline
Research information
Gather quotes, stats, etc.
Source media (images, banners, videos, etc.)
Interview subject experts
etc.
3. Production
This is where the content gets assembled. Production can take place internally (e.g. by the content team) or externally (e.g. an agency or outsourced provider), or split between the two.
4. Post-Production
In this phase, content either gets fine-tuned and polished (e.g. adding video titles and intros/outros to videos) or prepared for different channels and purposes (e.g., adding video transcripts or translations, creating longer and shorter versions of videos, repurposing articles for social media, infographics, slide presentations, videos, etc.).
Post-production activities can also be split between internal and external teams.
5. Feedback Loop
Once the content is ready for initial review (e.g. an article draft or video rough), it will typically bounce around a loop (e.g. Draft 1 > Review 1 > Draft 2 > Review 2 > Draft 3 > Review 3) involving different people (e.g. editors, subject experts, managers) or different departments (e.g. HR, legal) who provide feedback and additional suggestions until the final content is approved.
6. Final Delivery / Publishing
This is where the content is approved for publishing or distribution via the agreed channels (e.g. blog, social media, email newsletters, etc.)
Content Purpose
There are different ways to define your content’s purpose. For example, the overall purpose of the content may be to help the business achieve a strategic goal, such as building brand awareness or generating leads and sales.
While knowing why you are creating a certain piece of content is important and should be incorporated into the workflow’s production notes and the content brief (see further below), asking a writer to write an article or a video producer to create a video designed to “build brand awareness” doesn’t provide sufficient direction to help them with the actual article writing or video scripting process.
So, additional information about the purpose of the content may be required.
For example, SEOptimer describes the three types of content produced for most websites, often to be used in conjunction with one another:
Cornerstone Content – This is longer, authoritative content that will remain mostly unchanged, covering single topics in a definitive way to build awareness of your brand and establish authority rather than to sell products. Cornerstone content is the content you want to rank highest in the search engines, so it needs to be well written, updated often, and targeted to rank for your most competitive keywords.
Gated Content – This is content (usually of very high value) designed to be exchanged for something of equally high value (e.g. opt-in subscriber or lead information), such as email newsletters, downloadable guides or templates, podcasts, etc.
Evolving Content – This is content produced regularly that changes over time and often needs frequent updates, such as blog posts, news, a video series, etc.
While the aim of content marketing is to use content to convince your audience to take an intended action (e.g. buy something), the aim of content production is to connect with individual members of that audience, and this also has to be reflected in the content’s purpose.
EngageContent describes three types of content that connect with individuals:
Entertaining content – Content that connects with people on an emotional level, such as subjective stories centered around people.
Educational content – Content that connects with people on an intellectual level, such as objective content that describes processes or analysis of data.
Informative content – Content that connects with people on an attentional level, e.g. news content that attracts the reader’s attention because it’s current, new, and relevant.
Understanding the above differences and incorporating these into your content workflow will help your team create and deliver content that is on-purpose.
Content Types
Your content workflow may be geared exclusively to the production of one type of content or to multiple content types, such as blog articles, videos, emails, social media posts, downloadable PDF guides, whitepapers, infographics, templates, etc., and/or produced for print and digital formats.
See the Content Types lesson to learn more about different types of content that can be included in your content workflow and content production.
Team Roles
When defining a content workflow, it’s important to understand and identify:
Who will be involved in the content production process,
Which stage of the project they will be required to participate in, and
What the responsibilities of each role will be.
A project may require assigning different roles to people who may also be working on other projects or areas of the business at the same time, so it’s important to define how all the different roles will work together seamlessly and efficiently in the workflow.
Swimlane diagrams, for, example, are a useful way to map roles in content workflows.
We provide an entire section dedicated to helping you understand different team roles in a content production team and a digital organization.
Tasks
After identifying the roles in the workflow, the next step involves the following:
Identifying the tasks required to complete a project (i.e. what needs to be done).
Defining each task in detail (to minimize time-wasting and confusion once the project gets underway).
Assigning tasks to the roles (i.e. who will do what).
Organizing tasks in a logical and sequential order (i.e. their flow).
Without clearly-defined tasks, things can fall through the cracks, especially if there are multiple people working on a project and/or or multiple teams responsible for ensuring the completion of projects. Vaguely-defined tasks can lead to confusion and lack of accountability (e.g. “I didn’t know I was supposed to do that…I thought such and such was looking after that area!”).
For this reason, it’s important that tasks be made clear enough so that anyone occupying the role assigned to the task will know exactly what needs to be done to complete their part and move it along to the next stage of the production process.
Here’s how to ensure this happens:
Break each task down into its smallest possible elements. For example, after a blog article has been approved for publishing and before hitting the “publish” button, there may be additional steps involved to the post itself (i.e. not the content), like adding a post excerpt, meta description, author’s note, related articles, categories, tags, etc.
Work out who is responsible for each element. For example, if you are creating an infographic, make sure to specify who will do the research and who will supply the graphic designer or illustrator with accurate data (and in which format, e.g. a list, table, slide mock up, etc.). Similarly, who will upload the final article to the blog and hit the publish button…the writer, the editor, or the production manager?
Assign each element of the task to a specific team member. This will help you work out whether certain roles have excessive workloads in the production process and whether these can be distributed, reassigned, or consolidated within existing roles and the available resources.
Ask for feedback when assigning tasks. It may be more efficient for someone else to take on a task. For example, when writing a technical article, a product manager may be more suitable for writing out all of the key points and then handing this to a writer for making the content flow in a more readable way to the audience. This can be worked out during the team production meeting.
Work out agreed ways to signal the completion of a task. Using good workflow management tools can help in this area.
As most tasks in workflows tend to be repeatable processes, it’s best to document these tasks and anything else that helps to complete them, like style guidelines, company information (e.g. mission, vision, and value statements, legal compliance policies, etc.), and store this documentation somewhere where your team can easily access it.
Timelines
Ideally, you would start from the deadline or final publication date for the content, then work backward to create a timeline, adding in specific dates or time frames for all the steps in the process. This way, each team member knows when their task is coming up and when it is due and can plan their workload accordingly.
For example, Let’s say that you are in the first week of July and during your production meeting, the team is informed about a new product due for release on August 1st that needs an accompanying article to be written and ready to publish by the end of July.
Let’s also say that from past experience, you know that it takes articles one working week to go through the feedback loop for reviews and approvals, 2-3 days to write the first draft, and 2-3 days to research and create an outline once the writer is given a content brief.
Working backward from the deadline, the initial schedule for making sure that the article will be ready in time for publishing would look something like this…
What your production calendar timeline would look like working backward from a deadline for submitting publish-ready content.
From the above schedule, you would then assign all the tasks required to complete the project to different roles and incorporate your content workflow into your content management tool to track its progress.
While this approach may work for getting content delivered in sync with a specific marketing promotion or event (e.g. a “Black Friday” sale) and is quite useful for content planning purposes, things often don’t work out to plan, so it’s important to include enough time into the content production process for additional edits, revisions, and unexpected events, such as:
A team member gets sick or goes on leave,
Competing priorities create delays, hold-ups, or bottlenecks in the production process,
The project schedule is brought forward (e.g. to match a product release or company announcement).
Tools
Using the right tools allows everyone involved in the project to have a clear idea of what, when, and where their contribution is required in the workflow, and to keep track of where things are at during production.
Once everything has been defined — phases, timelines, roles, tasks, etc., the next step is to choose a workflow approach and arrange all production elements in a way that will work for the business or organization.
As explained in this article, there are three main workflow approaches:
Status-based: The workflow is organized around the status of a content piece.
Task-based: The workflow is organized around the tasks needed to complete the project.
Swim lane: The workflow is organized across different roles over time.
An example of tasks organized using the ‘swim lane’ workflow approach. Source: Smartsheet.com
Project/Content Brief
A content brief (or project brief, or creative brief) is a document that outlines the project’s context, purpose, and deliverables. It provides whoever is assigned to create the content with all the information and direction they need to make sure that their efforts will be on track and on purpose.
A content brief helps to:
Set out project expectations clearly and concisely.
Make the team focus on the most important areas of the project.
Save unnecessary editing and revisions.
Deliver content that fits the purpose and goals of the organization’s content strategy.
Depending on the project type, a content brief may include/address the following areas:
Project background (i.e. why is this content required?)
Target audience/buyer persona (if the organization targets multiple audiences)
Content type(s) and deliverables
Project timeline, deadline, and key milestones
Suggested titles, target keywords
Initial research (e.g. competing articles, reference sources, etc.)
Resources (e.g. supporting statistics, quotes, related articles for internal linking, etc.)
Access to subject matter experts (if required). This can be as simple as pointing out who to contact in the organization to obtain information (e.g. a product manager), or something more elaborate, such as lining up interviews with industry experts.
To help you understand what a content brief looks like, here is an example of a content brief for an article listing the best espresso coffee machines:
*** Start Content Brief ***
Title: “Top 10 Best Espresso Coffee Machines for At-Home Brewing”
Purpose: To provide readers with a list of the best espresso coffee machines for at-home brewing, based on factors such as performance, ease of use, and price.
Target audience: Home coffee enthusiasts who are interested in purchasing an espresso coffee machine for at-home brewing.
Objectives:
To help readers find the best espresso coffee machine for their needs and budget.
To provide detailed information about the features and performance of each espresso coffee machine.
To offer tips and recommendations for selecting the right espresso coffee machine.
Keywords: espresso, coffee machine, at-home brewing, performance, ease of use, price, features
Outline:
Introduction
Explain the purpose of the article and introduce the topic of espresso coffee machines.
Provide a brief overview of the different types of espresso coffee machines available, and explain why they are a popular choice for at-home brewing.
2. Top 10 Best Espresso Coffee Machines
Introduce the list of the top 10 best espresso coffee machines, and explain the criteria used to select them (performance, ease of use, price, etc.).
For each espresso coffee machine on the list, provide a brief overview of its features and performance, and explain why it made the top 10.
3. Tips and Recommendations
Offer tips and recommendations for selecting the right espresso coffee machine, based on factors such as budget, intended use, and personal preferences.
Provide guidance on how to properly use and maintain an espresso coffee machine to ensure optimal performance.
4. Conclusion
Summarize the main points of the article and encourage readers to consider purchasing one of the top 10 best espresso coffee machines for at-home brewing.
**** End Content Brief ***
Content briefs are not only useful for helping your content team nail projects when creating standardized content types internally but they can also be used in projects that involve working with new or inexperienced writers and content creators, outsourced (e.g. freelance) writers and marketing agencies, partners who are writing content about your company, or when creating projects on behalf of clients.
In all of the above instances, writing content or creative briefs before starting on the work will help content creators stay focused on the project’s goals, audiences, topics, keywords, etc., and deliver content that will meet your defined standard, voice, style, and needs.
Useful Tips:
Don’t overload content creators by supplying them with more information than they need to complete the project.
Ideally, the brief would also incorporate some form of initial meeting or discussion with the content team and individuals involved in the project to address any questions or concerns they may have and to make sure that everyone clearly understands the project and what is expected of them.
It’s also useful to develop a content brief template that the team can easily understand and follow.
For additional information on creating content briefs, see the ‘Resources’ and ‘References’ sections at the end of this lesson.
Workflow Sub-Processes
Depending on the size of your business and the complexity of its projects, certain aspects of content production may take place in different areas of the business or outside the organization.
In this case, you may want to consider creating separate workflow sub-processes to ensure that content production remains manageable.
For example, in larger companies, content approval and content publishing often involve more people, different departments, or outsourcing to professionals outside the organization, so the business may want to consider treating these as sub-processes of the content production process and having separate workflows to manage these areas.
The content approval workflow would then focus on the ‘sign-off’ process and deal specifically with content approval or rejection, while the content publishing workflow would focus specifically on the publication process.
Document Storage
An efficient content production process needs a system that allows content to be stored, organized, and retrieved at each stage of production.
This will depend on what works best for your organization.
You can use workflow management software to do this or just simply set up a numbered series of folders on a shared drive or cloud storage location that allows each member of the team to go into the folder on a specified date and see at a glance whether there is work waiting for them to do and what their tasks and responsibilities are for that day.
Ideally, you will use a combination of both methods. For example, you can run content projects from a workflow management tool and allow team members to add and access media elements such as images, videos, and downloadable files from numbered folders saved on a shared drive.
You can organize your content project using content workflow software of numbered folders. Source: EngageContent.com.au
The next step after defining your content workflow is to create a content production schedule.
This is the schedule that your content team will work to in order to meet content production targets and deliver content within specific deadlines.
The content production schedule will depend on how much content the business needs to create and the structure of your content team. This schedule can be refined as you go.
Once your content team gets into its stride, you will have a better idea of how long it takes to create content outlines, edit drafts, wait for people to review articles, coordinate items and events between different calendars (e.g. content production and content promotion calendars), what days are best to publish content, etc.
Define the goals and objectives of your content workflow: Clearly define the goals and objectives of the content workflow, such as streamlining the content creation process and ensuring consistency in the quality of the content.
Identify all stakeholders: Identify all stakeholders involved in the content creation process, including content creators, editors, and approvers.
Define roles and responsibilities: Define the roles and responsibilities for each stakeholder in the content creation process.
Establish a content creation process: Establish a content creation process that outlines the steps for creating, reviewing, editing, and publishing content.
Use a content management system (CMS): Use a content management system (CMS) to manage and organize the content creation process.
Set deadlines and milestones: Set deadlines and milestones for each step of the content creation process.
Implement a content review process: Implement a content review process to ensure the quality and consistency of the content.
Use a version control system: Use a version control system to keep track of the different versions of the content and ensure that the final version is accurate.
Set up an approval process: Set up an approval process for the final version of the content before it is published.
Continuously monitor and improve: Continuously monitor and improve the content workflow based on the results and feedback.
Content Workflow – FAQs
Here are frequently asked questions about content workflow:
What is content workflow?
Content workflow refers to the structured processes and steps involved in creating, managing, and distributing content. It ensures consistent execution and quality across content projects.
Why is content workflow important?
Content workflow is crucial because it helps teams maintain efficiency, consistency, and quality in content creation and distribution. It also facilitates better collaboration and accountability among team members.
What are the typical stages of a content workflow?
The stages usually include planning, creation, review, approval, publication, and analysis. These stages help in managing the content lifecycle effectively.
What tools are commonly used in content workflows?
How do I choose the right content workflow for my team?
Assess your team’s specific needs, the types of content you produce, your publication frequency, and your team’s size. It might also be beneficial to consider customizable templates or software that can adapt to your organization’s changing needs.
What are the benefits of a well-defined content workflow?
A well-defined workflow improves operational efficiency, reduces errors, ensures content quality, and helps meet deadlines. It can also lead to better content alignment with business goals.
Can content workflow impact content quality?
Yes, a well-managed workflow ensures that all content is properly vetted and refined through stages like editing and approval, which significantly enhances the quality of the final output.
Summary
Defining content workflows ensures that the content production process works efficiently by following a logical and repeatable order.
Content workflows also help your content team set clear milestones and recognize any dependencies required to help them meet project deadlines on time.
Action Steps
Identify and document all the different content workflows your organization requires to meet its strategic objectives.
Resources
Free content workflow checklist – this useful article includes a downloadable checklist that will help you identify tasks, timeframes, and assign responsibilities.
Content Brief Templates (MarketMuse) – Use this online tool to create content briefs using AI-enabled technologies that analyze competing content on similar topics.
Useful content research tools, sites, and resources to help you save time in areas like content planning and content production.
Content Research Tools And Resources
Useful content research tools, sites, and resources to help you save time in areas like content planning and content production.
The World Wide Web is a huge library of content research.
In this section, you will find many useful content research tools, sites, and resources to help you in areas like content planning and content production, including:
Researching new content topics and ideas
Finding new content opportunities
Exploring current trends
Gathering data and stats to back up your arguments
Identifying profitable keywords and niches
Researching content for distribution in channels like blogging, social media, email marketing, etc.
***
AI-Powered Content Research
You can use AI technologies for content research and content planning, such as generating content ideas, creating article outlines, etc.
We explore various AI tools that you can use to research and plan your content in this section: AI Content Writing Tools
One of the easiest ways to begin researching content is to Google it.
Just Google it!
Start with a topic or keyword related to your business, niche, or industry and enter it into the Google search bar to begin exploring content ideas.
Additionally, as you type, you’ll notice that Google displays an autocomplete list of search terms below the search field where you have entered your keywords.
You can use the Google Autocomplete tool (formerly called Google Suggest) to explore additional content related to your search, build a list of keywords or topic ideas, etc. (Tip: learn how to manage Google’s Autocomplete predictions).
After you hit enter on any search term, Google displays even more content ideas you can explore.
For example, you have the People also ask tool, which you can use to research content ideas on ways to solve problems your customers may be experiencing…
Google’s ‘People also ask’ tool is great for exploring content ideas on ways to solve problems.
Google also displays the Related searches tool with topic-related content ideas you can research…
Use Google’s Related searches tool to explore topic-related ideas.
Add additional search terms you can click on for even more content-related research…
Explore even more content ideas using these additional search terms.
Don’t forget other search engines like Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc. You might find different answers and additional suggestions there to expand your content research.
Use other search engines like Microsoft Bing to expand your content research.
Not only can you do a ton of content research using only Google search but there are also other free content research tools that Google offers.
Let’s explore some of these.
Google Chrome Browser Extensions
Chrome browser extensions are small software programs that you can install to add new features or modify existing functionality in the Google Chrome web browser.
These extensions can not only enhance your experience as a user, increase productivity, and provide additional security and privacy measures, but there are many useful extensions that can be used for content research, content planning, content creation, etc.
To access Chrome browser extensions, follow these steps:
1. Open the Google Chrome browser on your computer.
2. Click on the three-dot icon located in the upper right corner of the browser window to open the main menu.
3. Select “More Tools” from the dropdown menu, and
4. Click on “Extensions” from the submenu.
How to access the Extensions menu in Google’s Chrome Web Browser.
5. This will open the Extensions screen where you can view and manage any extensions you have added to your web browser. Click on the Hamburger menu icon in the top-left corner of the screen to access the Main menu.
Google Chrome Web Browser – Extensions screen.
Click on the link at the bottom of the menu.
Click on the link at the bottom of the menu to visit the Chrome Web Store.
This will take you to the Chrome Web Store, where you can browse and download a variety of Chrome browser extensions.
Browse hundreds of extensions in the Chrome Web Store.
Use the search bar to search for specific extensions, or browse through the various categories available.
Search for extensions using the search bar.
When you find an extension you want to install, click on the extension to select it.
Click to select an extension.
Click on the “Add to Chrome” button to install the extension.
Click Add to Chrome to install the extension.
A pop-up window will appear, asking you to confirm the installation. Click on “Add Extension” to confirm.
Confirm if you want to install the extension.
The extension will then be installed in your Chrome browser and will be visible in your toolbar or in the extensions menu.
To manage your installed extensions, you can access the extensions menu by clicking on the three-dot icon and selecting More Tools > Extensions.
From there, you can enable or disable extensions, remove them, or adjust their settings as needed.
You can also Pin or Unpin extensions from your toolbar by right-clicking on the Extensions icon in the toolbar and selecting your preferred option.
View your extension in the Extensions screen and pin or unpin it from your browser toolbar.
Tip: Use the “Related” tab to find additional extensions related to the functionality you’re searching for.
Find related extensions for your Chrome web browser using the Related tab.
Google Trends
Google Trends
Google Trends is another free service from Google that shows you trends in search activity all over the world, with access to maps, charts, and other tools.
Use Google Trends to compare search activity between topics.
You can use Google Trends to compare search volume activity for related topics or similar keywords over a given period of time across different regions or languages, gauge public reaction to real-time events and news stories, monitor trends across different areas of interest (social, political, business, entertainment, sports, etc), optimize SEO for video or local search, glean insights about products and service demand, forecast and predict trends, etc.
Google Trends is also a great tool for identifying the seasonality of topics in your niche or industry. You can use this information to plan your editorial calendar with content promoting those topics during their peak season.
For an excellent article on how to use Google Trends, go here.
Google Alerts is a free service from Google that lets you keep up-to-date with the latest news about all kinds of topics, stay informed about people and companies, and track what other people are publishing about you and your business online.
Google Lens lets you do ‘real world’ content research.
Google Lens is an image recognition technology developed by Google and available as an app for Android phones that uses artificial intelligence to identify text and objects in images and in a live view from a phone’s camera.
Google Lens lets you do “real world” content research faster using your mobile phone’s camera.
When you point the phone’s camera at an object with the app installed, it tries to identify the object by reading barcodes, QR codes, labels, and text, and shows you relevant search results, web pages, and information.
For example, here is a photo taken of a tea bag label with Google Lens installed on an Android phone…
Point your phone’s camera at an object and tap the Google Lens button…
Google Lens immediately identified the object and returned relevant search results…
Google Lens brings you search results and lets you do various things with the information.
When you point your phone’s camera at an object, Google Lens gives you the following options:
Translate – take a photo of words to translate
Text – take a photo of words to copy
Search – Search for information related to the object
Homework – Take a photo of a homework question
Shopping – Take a photo of products or barcodes
Places – Identify landmarks, buildings, etc.
Dining – Take a photo of food or a menu
You can scan and translate text from a physical document like a book, paper, business card, whiteboard, or with writing on it, then copy that text to your phone’s clipboard, and paste it into anything – a Google Doc, email, note app, Slack chat, etc.
You can also use Google Lens to identify plants and animals, and get information about landmarks, restaurants, and storefronts (e.g. historical facts, ratings, hours of operation), as well as find information about similar clothes, furniture, home decor, or other objects that you come across.
Google lens is an excellent content research tool. You can copy text from objects and send it to your computer, interact with text from images, search for online images that match real-world objects, save contact information, create calendar events, find answers to questions, and a whole lot more.
See this article for more ways to use Google Lens or scan the QR code below with your Android phone to download the app to your phone from the Google Play store:
Scan this QR Code to install Google Lens on your Android phone.
Google Scholar is another useful tool from Google that lets you expand your content research by searching for information across academic literature from journal websites, university repositories, Google Books, etc.
Google Scholar results
The Google Scholar index includes peer-reviewed online academic journals and books, conference papers, theses and dissertations, preprints, abstracts, technical reports, and other scholarly literature, including court opinions and patents.
The video below provides more information on using Google Scholar:
Looker Studio (formerly Google Data Studio) is a free tool that gives you powerful insights into your website’s performance from various data sources like Google Search, Google Analytics, Google Ads, YouTube, social media platforms such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter, databases, etc.
Exploding Topics – discover trending topics before they take off.
Exploding Topics helps investors and entrepreneurs find new and upcoming trends before they become popular.
The tool uses a special algorithm to analyze millions of searches, conversations and mentions across the internet to identify under-the-radar industries, products, and categories.
Simply type in a search term into the search engine field, and its extensive database returns relevant and accurate results on where to find infographics matching your search term.
Infographiqs search results
From there. click on an entry from the results to visit the site with the infographic.
Wolfram Alpha is an answer engine based on natural language processing and a large library of algorithms.
According to the website:
Wolfram Alpha represents a fundamentally new paradigm for getting knowledge and answers—not by searching the web, but by doing dynamic computations based on a vast collection of built-in data, algorithms, and methods. Bringing broad, deep, expert-level knowledge to everyone… anytime, anywhere.
Wolfram|Alpha aims to make all the world’s knowledge computable by computing expert-level answers using Stephen Wolfram’s breakthrough algorithms, knowledgebase, and AI technology.
Its mission is to collect and curate all objective data; implement every known model, method, and algorithm; and make it possible to compute whatever can be computed about anything.
In terms of helping you with content research, Wolfram Alpha’s website is divided into several categories, like Mathematics, Science & Technology, Society & Culture, and Everyday Life. Each of these areas contains many subcategories.
So, for example, go to Everyday Life > Personal Finance and you will find ways to compute useful answers to thousands of personal finance questions, from computing interest rates to analyzing and projecting returns on stocks and other investments, converting world currencies, and more.
Wolfram Alpha lets you find answers by computing whatever can be computed about anything.
The website builds on the achievements of science and other systematizations of knowledge to provide a single source that can be relied on by everyone for definitive answers to factual queries.
Content curation tools offer a strategic approach to content creation by not only streamlining the process but also inspiring creativity by sourcing, organizing, and presenting relevant content from diverse platforms.
Scoop.it
Scoop.it – Content curation tool for individuals and businesses.
Scoop.it offers a robust content curation tool designed for individuals and businesses, enhancing your ability to research and publish top-tier content.
For Individuals:
Effortlessly publish topic pages featuring curated content in minutes.
Automatically distribute curated content within your network to bolster your professional brand.
For Businesses:
Curate, share, and read content within private hubs.
Publish curated content on websites, blogs, newsletters, and social media platforms.
Aggregate curated content seamlessly across multiple WordPress blogs.
Key features of this tool include:
1. Discover, Select & Editorialize, Distribute
A powerful content engine that monitors global sources to curate relevant third-party content.
2. Boost Credibility and Brand Awareness
Establish thought leadership and strengthen influencer connections.
Access diverse sources ranging from mainstream media to niche publications.
3. Create and Share Curated Content Pages
Publish topic pages swiftly.
Share curated content with your networks to build your professional brand.
Automatically feed social channels with curated content.
Embed content pages on your website.
Leverage curated content in templated newsletters.
4. Monitor and Share Knowledge Privately
Facilitate team collaboration with easy content discovery, curation, and sharing.
Automate content monitoring.
Share curated content privately within your team.
Generate internal email newsletters effortlessly.
Create private curated content hubs for your team.
Seamless integration with SSO, intranet, and enterprise social networks.
5. Publish Curated Content for a Targeted Audience
Store, share, categorize, and disseminate curated content.
Aggregate curated content on one or multiple websites.
Publish content on one or multiple WordPress blogs.
Share your team’s content on multiple social media platforms.
Generate customized newsletters for Mailchimp or any emailing solutions.
Scoop.it empowers users to streamline content curation, fostering brand credibility, thought leadership, and effective collaboration within teams.
Curata is a content curation tool that lets you streamline your curation experience.
Curata’s Content Curation Software (CCS) scours the web using keywords, news sources, authors, bookmarked or shared content, etc., and returns relevant published content that you can then curate, add your own summary and brand voice to, embed royalty-free imagery, schedule, and share.
Key features of this tool include:
1. Find
Automatically receive the most relevant content from hundreds of thousands of sources.
Dynamic adaptation to your content preferences.
Enable crowdsourcing across your organization.
2. Discover Fresh Content
Curata’s engine employs natural language processing to adapt to your preferences.
Fine-tune content flow by refining sources and focusing on preferred platforms like social media.
3. Curate on the Fly
Instantly curate content while browsing with a convenient browser plugin.
Empower your team through crowd-sourced curation and content suggestions.
4. Quality over Quantity
Curata’s engine programmatically filters out outdated, multilingual, or duplicative content.
With Curata, transform curation into a seamless three-step process: Find, Curate, Share.
Pocket is a content curation tool that allows users to save, organize, and manage articles, videos, and web pages from the internet for later consumption.
Its main function is to provide a convenient way to store content that users find interesting but may not have time to read or view immediately. Users can save content directly from their browser or through apps like X (Twitter), Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite, making it accessible from any device with an internet connection.
Once saved, content can be tagged for easy sorting and retrieval, although Pocket does not offer organizational tools such as collections, unlike some other curation tools like Feedly.
It also curates guides to the best of the web, featuring top-saved stories from its user base, which showcases popular and trending content across various topics.
Overall, Pocket serves as a personal content library where users can accumulate a personalized mix of content tailored to their interests and preferences, which they can access and read at their convenience.
Feed Readers
Feed Readers save you time visiting all of the different sites you like to keep up with when searching for new content posted on these sites, by allowing you to view all of the content on your desktop or phone from a single source.
Feedly
Feedly
Feedly is a content aggregation and curation tool designed to help users streamline their process of accessing, organizing, and sharing content across various topics. It functions primarily as a news aggregator, allowing users to subscribe to multiple online sources and organize articles into collections based on topics of interest.
This tool is particularly useful for social media content curation, as it enables users to create feeds tailored to specific content themes, making it easier to share relevant content across social media platforms.
Feedly employs AI to enhance its curation capabilities, suggesting content based on the user’s preferences and previous interactions. This AI component helps in discovering and following favorite sources and topics more efficiently, thereby keeping the user’s feed fresh with highly relevant content.
Additionally, Feedly integrates with various other tools and platforms, enabling a smoother workflow for gathering, reading, and distributing content.
Feedspot
Feedspot
As the video below states…“things move fast on the web and it’s hard to keep up with your favorite sites by visiting each of them separately. Feedspot lets you subscribe to websites so new content comes to you when it’s posted.”
Like most feed readers, Feedspot lets you add feeds from different sites to its service, as well as feeds from blogs, podcasts, YouTube channels, news sites, and RSS feeds. You then view the aggregated content from the tool’s content reader.
Watch the video below for an overview of Feedspot:
Get valuable insights into the latest trends, research reports, case studies, and white papers by performing a Google search for:
Reports: [your industry] + [research report].
Case Studies: [your industry] + [case study].
White papers: [your industry] + [white paper].
You can also link to tweets, papers, or reports from industry professionals and subject experts.
Subject Matter Experts (SME)
“A subject matter expert is a professional who’s cultivated a deep well of knowledge. They may be knowledgeable about a niche topic, a skill, a process, or a particular set of technologies, machinery, or materials.”
As part of your content research, you can find and follow influential people, interview subject experts, or reach out to social media influencersin your industry.
Following influential people can provide you with timely news, quotes, and more.
Interviewing subject matter experts is a great way to create content like videos, podcasts, and blog transcripts. Before interviewing a subject matter expert, make sure you’ve prepared your interview questions.
Social media influencers can ask your target audience questions about specific pain points and frustrations that your content can then address.
You can find subject experts and social media influencers on websites, social media platforms, forums, networking events, and many other places.
Let’s explore some of these places…
LinkedIn
LinkedIn is an excellent resource for finding subject matter experts and doing content research.
For example, LinkedIn lets you explore trending topics, news, and popular questions in your industry or niche.
Use LinkedIn’s content suggestions feature to research and discover new content ideas from areas like Trending Articles (shows suggested content based on current trends across LinkedIn), and Company News (shows content suggestions based on your organization’s mentions in the news).
Use LinkedIn’s content suggestions feature to explore new content ideas.
Hashtagify is an advanced Twitter hashtag tracking tool that lets you find hashtags to enhance your social media strategy through hashtag marketing, reach your audience, get custom suggestions, and analyze influencers’ and competitors’ strategies.
You can search real-time data and gain insights about Twitter hashtags (popularity ranking, related hashtags, trends, etc.), track hashtags, follow and analyze Twitter users and trending hashtags, monitor relevant content, and find influencers.
The tool also provides data in easy-to-read dashboards and charts, so you can audit performance, monitor aggregated analytics, and build custom reports.
Use Twitter Polls to gain insights from Twitter users for your content.
Twitter Polls is a feature of Twitter that lets you create polls to research opinions and gain insights from other Twitter users.
You can use Twitter polls to get customer feedback about upcoming events, new content, new product launches, rebranding, new releases, etc., curate industry-relevant discussions, and test how your audience feels about a certain topic before creating your content.
Forums are a great place to research information, especially if you are creating content designed to solve problems or looking for ideas to develop new products or services.
Often, you can find answers on forums that you cannot find by searching on Google. Forums allow you to engage with people, so if you type in your topic and find that an answer doesn’t exist, you can always ask the question.
Here are some popular forums and forum-like sites:
Quora
Quora
Quora is a question-and-answer social media and research website where users answer each other’s questions about all kinds of topics.
Quora has over 300 million monthly active users and over 400,000 topics to explore, so it’s a great site to research topics and questions people are asking and use the information to develop new content ideas relevant to your industry.
Reddit is another commonly used platform where you can find answers that will help you with your content research.
Reddit is a social networking site where over 300 million monthly active users (known as Redditors) share, interact with, and consume the latest news and trending topics. If you are unfamiliar with using the platform, see this Beginner’s Guide To Using Reddit before engaging with the community.
In addition to the above, you can join various social media groups and participate in communities of like-minded people across many different social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.
Content Idea Generation Tools
Below are some tools you can use to help you generate new ideas for content.
Infinite Content Creation Course
We provide a comprehensive 120-lesson FREE content creation email course right here on ContentManagementCourse.com, so make sure to sign up below to learn how to never run out of content ideas for your blog, website, or newsletter:
Keyword Magic Tool
Keyword Magic Tool
Keyword Magic Tool lets you find and explore millions of keywords for content ideas and SEO.
Note: You will need to set up an account with SemRush to use this tool.
Simply enter a target keyword related to your product or service into the tool and the Keyword Magic Tool will return a list of related keywords and metrics like average search volume, keyword difficulty, and additional features included on the SERP page for your keyword.
For example, suppose you are looking for content ideas to write about air fryers.
Go to Keyword Magic Tool and search for the phrase “air fryer” …
Next, select the “Questions” option in the toolbar to filter the results to questions, and you’ll see a list of the most frequently searched question-based results related to your search that contain your seed keyword.
Keyword Magic Tool returns a list of question-based search results.
In the above example, “how to clean air fryer” is searched 9,900 times per month. This indicates that users searching for this phrase may have a problem cleaning their air fryers or are beginning their buyer’s journey into buying one and are looking for help or solutions.
You could use this information to educate or engage your audience and provide them with advice or a solution. For example, you can create a guide on air fryer maintenance, or an article or video on cleaning air fryers and promote air fryer cleaning equipment or products, etc.
AnswerThePublic.com is a free tool that you can use to research new topic ideas for content marketing, SEO, etc.
Simply enter 1-2 words to describe a topic, band, or product, and click on the Search button.
The tool then explores autocomplete data from search engines like Google and returns ‘mindmap’-like visualization charts with useful search phrases related to questions people are asking around your keyword (e.g. where, what, how, why, etc.), searches based on your keyword+prepositions (e.g. near, for, with, to, etc.), and even comparisons (great for creating review articles).
Use AnswerThePublic’s visualization charts to explore ideas for new content.
The tool also provides a downloadable list of results segmented alphabetically.
Generate lots of great content ideas quickly with AnswerThePublic’s free tool.
Use this tool to generate and brainstorm useful new content topic ideas, and even to help you develop new products and services based on what consumers are searching for.
Ubersuggest is a keyword research and SEO tool that lets you generate content and keyword ideas, track your rank daily, do a competitor analysis, conduct a site audit, and more.
Get useful search results for content ideas.
Ubersuggest’s domain tool lets you reverse engineer your competitors’ SEO, content marketing, and social media marketing strategy, so you can get insight into strategies that are working for others in your market.
The tool’s Top SEO Pages report is an SEO analyzer that lets you see which of your competitor’s pages are ranking for popular organic keyword phrases and getting attention on sites like Facebook.
Use the free keyword research tool to research hundreds of suggestions for keyword ideas, from head terms to long-tail phrases, with analytic results for volume, competition, and seasonal trends for each keyword. You can also generate a list of keywords that let you see what is working for your competitors and what people are typing into Google.
Additional features include results for top-performing content pieces for your searched keywords with social shares and check for backlinks in your niche.
Ubersuggest provides keyword and content ideas based on your search.
Additionally, Ubersuggest integrates with an AI content writing tool, allowing you to create AI-generated content from your keyword searches.
Generate SEO-optimized content from your search results using an integrated AI content writer.
Keywords Everywhere is a browser addon (Chrome, Firefox, Edge) that lets you perform SEO, content marketing, competitor research, PPC and social media marketing while browsing the web.
It adds the following functionality to your browser:
Free version:
ChatGPT Prompt Templates
Instagram Hashtag Generator (no volume data)
Pinterest Insights and Trend widgets (no volume data)
The paid version includes everything in the free version plus accurate monthly search volume, CPC, competition & 12-month trend data.
Additional features of the paid version include:
Related keywords on Google & Bing, People Also Search For (PASF) keywords on Google.
Trend chart in Google & YouTube.
YouTube insights & YouTube Tags.
Monthly estimated traffic & the top 10,000 keywords that any URL ranks for
URL Analysis to get the list of keywords in the content of the page, and the density of those keywords.
Historical volume data in the trend charts for Google & YouTube (from 2004).
Support for 15+ websites, including Google, YouTube, Amazon, Bing, Google Search Console, Google Analytics.
Import keywords for accurate monthly search volume, CPC, and competition analysis.
Having a huge library of content research tools and resources at your disposal is great, provided you can access these quickly and efficiently.
Here are some tools and resources that will help you save time accessing your content research tools.
Web Browser – Bookmarks
You can speed up your content research simply by organizing and storing access to the URLs of the sites, platforms, services, and tools you regularly use in your web browser’s bookmarks…
Chrome Bookmarks
We recommend planning your bookmarking folders first so that when you come across content you want to save to research later, you have an organized way to retrieve it.
Planning your bookmarking folders will make it easier to find stored bookmarks later.
Additionally, you can edit the bookmark name to suit your own needs.
You can edit your bookmarks if it helps to improve your content research process.
See these guides to using bookmarks in different web browsers and devices:
You can also use content organization tools or apps to build up a collection of research notes, copy and paste snippets, ideas for blog posts or web pages, etc.
One Note
Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft OneNote is a digital notebook that lets you store and organize all of your notes into sections and pages and share these across all of your devices.
You can also highlight important and “to-do” notes, draw and annotate your notes using a stylus or your finger, record audio notes, insert online videos, add files, save content with one click, and share notebooks with your coworkers.
Simplenote
Simplenote
Simplenote is a free cross-platform note-taking tool that lets you organize your thoughts and content ideas, add tags to find notes quickly with instant searching, share to-do lists, post instructions, and publish your notes online.
Your notes automatically stay updated across all your devices, in real-time, and get backed up with every change you make.
MyInfo
MyInfo – organizer application for Windows.
MyInfo is another tool you can use to collect, store, and organize your content ideas, research notes, lists, links, to-dos, etc.
Some screens from the MyInfo application.
The tool lets you collect and organize information in a number of ways, including assigning tags and attributes, using entry forms or typing free text, creating notes from templates or from scratch, and using search filters.
Text Editors
Built-in Plain Text Editor
A plain text editor lets you save content research notes and create draft content without distractions.
Your computer’s built-in plain text editor like Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Apple) is a great tool to jot down and save your content ideas, rough notes, snippets, swipe files, research, quotes, link or image URLs, write an outline of topics, and organize your content research.
It also lets you quickly create content drafts without distractions (like formatting or styling text) so you can focus entirely on what you want to say and get your ideas or points across.
NoteTab – Text And HTML Editor
NoteTab Pro – Text And HTML Editor
While using a plain text editor is great, sometimes you may want to have multiple text files open while you work.
For example, let’s say that you are editing multiple articles or snippets of content on multiple text files and decide that you need to perform a search and replace operation across some or all of these files.
Being able to do one search and replace across all files would be a huge time saver. With your computer’s built-in plain text editor software, however, you can’t do this unless you merge the content of all your files together.
NoteTab is a powerful text and HTML editor tool that lets you edit multiple text files simultaneously, strip HTML from code, and a whole lot more. You can even use it to perform search and replace operations across multiple text files at once.
It’s a great content editing tool that will improve your productivity and help speed things up, especially when working with text or HTML snippets.
NoteTab Features
NoteTab is available in three versions: NoteTab Pro, NoteTab Standard, and the freeware NoteTab Light.
We recommend downloading and using the PRO version.
NoteTab Pro offers great features like:
Multiple-level undo/redo
Fast and flexible search & replace tools
Easy-to-use wildcards for searching (like * and ?)
An integrated two-pane outliner
Real-time word count (NoteTab or Microsoft Word method)
Text statistics for SEO (HTML code automatically ignored)
Support for HTML5 and CSS3
Support for Twitter’s Bootstrap toolkit
Syntax highlighting for HTML, XML, and CSS files
A multilingual spell checker and thesaurus
Customizable menu shortcuts and toolbars
The table of features below shows the differences between the three versions.
NoteTab – Feature Comparison
If you need to get more done in less time, NoteTab is fast, handy, reliable, and packed with time-saving productivity tools not found in other text editors.
You can copy and paste text from images using image capture tools to speed up your content research.
Swipe File Folders
Electronic folders are great tools for keeping your content research files organized.
By creating a hierarchy of nested folders mirroring your content structure, you can build an effective archive for your content research notes and files. This also lets you quickly locate archived files in the future should you ever need to retrieve these later.
The sites below provide additional useful resources for your content research.
Statistics & Data
Visit sites like the ones listed below for statistical data and information to validate your articles when getting your point across and adding credibility to your content:
Statista -Statista is one of the leading sites for market and consumer data.
NCBI – The National Library of Medicine’s National Center for Biotechnology Information site, which provides access to biomedical and genomic information to advance science and health.
JSTOR – JSTOR provides access to more than 12 million journal articles, books, images, and primary sources in 75 disciplines.
Idea Sharing Sites
These sites attract subject experts and independent authors willing to share their ideas on a wide range of topics:
Ted Talks – TED talks are short, online video talks and presentations designed to inform and educate global audiences by presenting “Ideas Worth Spreading.” TED Talks provide access to new knowledge and innovative research from experts across a wide range of fields, including science, technology, business, art, design, and more.
Towards Data Science – a site where independent authors publish work and share concepts, ideas, and codes on data science, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and programming.
Start it up – This site is aimed at the “creator economy” and focuses on all things that help people “get smarter at building their thing” through newsletters, podcasts, self-published books, online courses, social media channels like YouTube, TikTok, Clubhouse, etc.
English Language & Usage Stack Exchange – This is a “question and answer” site designed to provide detailed answers to every question about English language and usage. There are no “chit chats” or discussions on this site. Simply ask your question and you’ll get an answer.
Substack – Substack is a site where independent writers and podcasters publish directly to their audience and get paid through subscriptions.
Codeburst.io – If your content targets developers, coders, or programmers, this site provides an abundance of tutorials and ideas for technical content writers.
Video Courses For Beginners – Content Research
The video courses below cover basic areas of content research and are ideal for beginners (note: you can access all of the video courses below with a single all-access pass):
Password Managers provide an easy and secure way to keep track of all your passwords. This video course shows you how to use powerful and FREE password management tools.
The World Wide Web is a huge library of content research. All you need are the right tools to perform your research effectively. This section provides a list of time-saving content research tools and resources.
Action Steps
Use the content research tools, sites, and resources listed on this page to save time researching content ideas and to help you and your team with your content planning and content production.
Resources
Subject Matter Expert Interview Template (CoSchedule) – If you plan to interview subject matter experts, this question and note-taking template can help you during your interview.
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This is Part 4 of our free How To Create An Effective Content Strategy For Your Business video course.
By identifying key characteristics of our target audience such as demographics, their interests, and their pain points, we can then create content that will speak directly to their needs, desires, and motivations.
In the next lesson, we’ll look at setting content goals to create an effective content strategy.
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.
Your business needs content. Your website needs content. Your social media needs content. Your blog, newsletters, product descriptions, post headlines, sales copy, social media, ads, articles, promotional pieces, news releases, customer training sections, FAQs, forum signatures, SEO meta descriptions, etc. all need content.
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 
Keeping content projects on track and on time requires organizing and managing processes with specific tasks, done in a specific order, by team members assigned to specific roles.
