Content strategy and planning

Content strategy and planning

Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, delivery, management, and governance of content. Content not only includes the words on the page but also the images and multimedia that are used.

A great content strategy will attract and engage a target audience, meeting their needs while driving business goals.

Why Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads.

If you can create just one blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, an embedded link to an ebook or free tool will continue generating leads for you as time goes on — long after you click "Publish."

How to Create a Content Strategy Framework

1)                 Define your goal.

2)                 Conduct persona research.

3)                 Run a content audit.

4)                 Choose a content management system.

5)                 Determine which type of content you want to create.

6)                 Brainstorm content ideas.

7)                 Publish and manage your content.

1. Define your goal.

What's your aim for developing a content marketing plan?

Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan?

It may seem obvious, but these questions are the core of a useful content strategy. Look at high-level business goals, notes from meetings, and notes from your team, and then do some solo research to make sure your goals have staying power.

Organize goals by priority.

Once you have a list of goals, rank them from most to least important. This can help you decide which parts of your strategy is an immediate need and which are for long-term action. This step can also help with resource questions later in the process.

Use the SMART framework to define goals.

The SMART framework can help you make broad goals more specific and actionable.

Know your goals before you begin planning, and you'll have an easier time determining what's best for your strategy.

2. Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content's target audience — also known as your buyer persona. This is a crucial part of the planning phase of content strategy.

This is especially important for those who are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they'll want to read and convert on.

Collect data and analyze it to find patterns.

If you don't already have defined personas, you'll want to analyze your data to find who you want to create content for and the types of content they enjoy. This post has some useful tips for how to create buyer personas using your data.

As you analyze metrics like contact trends and demographics, group your leads by what they have in common first. Then, look closely at these groups to find other similarities.

Use your research to refine buyer personas.

If you're an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience?

Revisiting your audience parameters by conducting market research each year is crucial to growing your audience. Taking a closer look at your current customer segments can also help you refine your personas.

3. Run a content audit.

Early on, many brands start with blog posts or social media. If you want to venture out into different formats, you can run a content audit to assess your top-performing and lowest-performing content.

If you've been in business for a while, you should review your content marketing efforts and last year’s results.

As you review your content, be sure to record page titles, content formats, word counts, and a summary of what your content covers. This can help you find areas for improvement.

Review content for quality and relevance.

Next, analyze content quality and whether your content reflects what's most important to your audience. Then, use that information to inform which direction you take next.

Look for repurposing opportunities.

There are many ways to repurpose content. And, this strategy can help you optimize your content on multiple channels. It might mean grabbing your most popular blogs and creating YouTube videos, an ebook, or launching a podcast with that content. Check out this post for more content-recycling ideas.

Create a content workflow.

Another way to approach your audit is to look at your team's process. Your content workflow impacts how you come up with ideas, what you publish, and the quality of your work.

Do you have a strategic workflow in place or is your workflow organized around the habits of your team?

An audit can help you see blocks and slow-downs that can affect your content long-term.

Use your content audit to figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals. Now is also a great time to align your team's goals with the rest of your organization's goals.

Whatever stage you're in, a content audit will help you decide what resonates best with your audience, find gaps in your topic clusters, and process and brainstorm fresh content ideas.

4. Choose a content management system.

A few vital parts of content management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics.

You want to invest in a CMS to create, manage, and track your content in an easy and sustainable way.

Figure out specific CMS needs.

Finding the right CMS for your team may take some time. First, talk to your team about their current processes to get a sense of the top features you'll need. Then, start researching the best CMS for your needs with this list. A CMS for a business should be easy to use, customizable, secure, and cost-effective.

Choose the right content management system.

With the HubSpot CMS, you can plan, produce, publish, and measure your results all in one place.

Another popular CMS is WordPress, to which you can add the HubSpot WordPress plugin for free web forms, live chat, CRM access, email marketing, and analytics.

This list of the best content management systems offers a comparison between the tools above and other popular choices.

Adopt a content governance model.

As you get to know your new CMS, be sure to put a content governance model in place. This is a process to manage content creation, publishing, and maintenance. It helps you make sure that each piece of content aligns with business standards and policies.

As your content presence grows, this model will also help you create processes for updating and removing outdated content.

5. Determine which type of content you want to create.

There are a variety of options out there for content you can create, from written content like ebooks and blog posts to audio content like podcasts. Great content strategy is a balance of decision-making, data analysis, and risk-taking.

Those skills will all be put to the test in this step.

Review personas and goals.

You may need different types of content for different personas and goals. Take a careful look at your end goals and the actions you want each persona to take. Then, work backward to choose the right kind of content for each goal and user.

For example, say you're trying to decide between starting a blog or a podcast. Blogs tend to be better for conversion, while podcasts are great for building brand awareness. Your goals and audience should be the deciding factor for which is best for your business.

Assess your resources.

Use a critical eye when you're reviewing the resources you have for content production.

Questions like the ones below can help you narrow your focus and create a sustainable content strategy.

How big is your team?

How much time does your team have to create content?

What skills does your current team have?

What types of content would you need training on and what would you need to outsource?

What is your content budget?

Choose the right topics, formats, and channels for your content.

Using your personas, choose a set number of high-level topics to focus your content on. Then, using your audience and topic choices, narrow down your chosen content formats and channels.

For example, say your team is launching a video channel, but they don't have a lot of experience. You might consider creating video shorts. But if rankings for that topic tend to be long-form videos or podcasts, you'll want to think about that decision — do you want to stand out and hope your audience pivots to a new format? Or should you get help creating the content you think will top the current competitive landscape for your topic?

Once you’ve made these big decisions about your content strategy, you’ll be ready to get into the details.

6. Brainstorm content ideas.

Use your content audit, persona research, and goals to make the best content decisions for your business. A quick review of this information before brainstorming can help you keep these insights top of mind.

Use a range of brainstorming approaches.

Next, it's time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project.

Here are some tools to get the juices flowing.

1. Feedly

The Feedly RSS feed is a wonderful way to track trendy topics in your industry and find content ideas at the same time.

You start by telling the software what topics you're most interested in and its AI tool will do the rest.

You won't need to scour the internet to find new content ideas anymore. Instead, you can go through your curated list, compiled from news sites, newsletters, and social media.

2. BuzzSumo

Want to discover popular content and content ideas? This company offers several market research tools, one of which uses social media shares to figure out if a piece of content is popular and well-liked.

This information helps you see which content ideas would do well if you were to create content about them.

3. BlogAbout

Get your mind gears going with IMPACT's blog title generator. This tool works a bit like Mad Libs, but instead of joke sentences, it shows you common headline formats with blanks where you can fill in the subject you have in mind.

This brainstorming technique helps you put general ideas in contexts that would be appealing to your target audience. Once you have a headline you like, BlogAbout lets you add it to your "Notebook" so you can save your best ideas.

4. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

You can get blog post ideas for an entire year with HubSpot's Blog Ideas Generator. All you need to do is enter general topics or terms you'd like to write about, and this content idea generator does all the work for you.

This tool analyzes headlines and titles and gives feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword search volume.

If you have an idea in mind, run a few title options through the Headline Analyzer to see how you could make it stronger, and to move your idea further along in the brainstorming process.

5. HubSpot's Website Grader

This is a great tool to use when you want to see where you're at with your website and SEO efforts. The Website Grader grades you on vital areas of your website performance and sends you a detailed report to help you optimize.

With this tool, you can figure out how to make your website more SEO-friendly and discover areas of improvement.

Content Marketing  6

Content creation and distribution 9