Few – if any – successful content marketers just wing it. Sure, you want to constantly evaluate content performance and make changes as needed. But you should never be in a position to just churn out content with no clear content management strategy or content goal in mind.
Every content piece, from blog post to white paper to tweet, should play an important role in your overarching content plan. Without that strategy in place, content marketers essentially throw stuff out into cyberspace on a wing and a prayer, hoping for the best.
Here’s what you need to know about creating a successful content development plan:
Ask the Right Questions
You don’t want to get too deep into the weeds of creating a content development strategy without first nailing down the fundamentals. Start by answering the following questions:
- What are your content goals?
- Who is your audience?
- What channels do they use?
- What do they care about right now?
- What do you want them to know?
- How are you measuring content performance?
You can’t craft an effective plan without knowing exactly who you’re trying to reach, what kind of valuable content will be relevant to them, and what success will look like.
In most cases, when we talk about content development, we’re referring to digital marketing material like infographics, newsletters, videos, eBooks, etc., but your own strategy might incorporate traditional media as well. Account for everything when devising your content development plan.
Prioritize Content Around Your Commercial Goals
High-quality content isn’t just well-written and engaging; it helps drive business goals. When crafting your content development plan, keep your main goals in mind and make sure that every single component supports those aims.
Are you looking to build brand awareness? Improve organic search traffic? Are you strictly interested in lead gen? Depending on what you want to accomplish, your content development strategy could come together in several different ways.
For example, a company that is really keyed into brand awareness and search engine presence will want to lean hard into top-of-the-funnel content, like blogs and infographics, while spreading the word with a strong social content presence through platforms like Sprout Social.
Meanwhile, businesses looking for cold, hard conversions will want to create downloadable, gated material like white papers and eBooks. Then again, if your goals are more along the lines of the lead nurturing variety, newsletters and email marketing campaigns may be what you’re looking for.
As always, be as specific as possible with your commercial goals. The more detailed those are, the easier it will be to assess your content development plan’s success – or lack thereof – later on. If the goal of the Brafton blog is to get 1,000 unique visitors and generate 10 high-quality leads each month rather than, say, “increase brand awareness,” that’s a much clearer metric to measure performance by.
When in doubt about what type of content to create, consult a content strategist.
Know Your Target Audience
Successful content not only reaches your target audience but taps into their specific pain points and concerns while providing a clear and meaningful message. Having done thorough keyword research on your audience gives your writers, designers, social media team and anyone else that’s involved in the content development process some much-needed background before they get to work.
If you know what social media platforms your audience tends to congregate on, you can build in tweets, LinkedIn Pulse articles or Facebook posts to get your message out to them. If there’s a particular business challenge they’re grappling with, that’s good fodder for a content topic.
Mapping out specific personas is helpful for your content creators if you have the time and means to do so. You may discover that there isn’t enough awareness out there around pressing issues that will have a major impact on your target audience. If that’s the case, educational content can help answer whatever questions people have or even address questions they didn’t think to ask.
By digging into user metrics, such as those provided by Google Analytics, you can find all sorts of interesting insights regarding your audience. For instance, your targeted buyer personas may not even be the ones actually consuming your content (you’re not alone – we’ve dealt with these situations ourselves). In those cases, it might make more sense to focus your efforts on influencers rather than the buyers themselves because if they never read what you publish, what good will it do?
Or, you might want to put extra time into creating middle-of-the-funnel content that specifically addresses your influencers’ day-to-day pain points and try to win them over.
Thinking hard about who you’re trying to reach and what matters most to them should guide your content development plan, from the broad strokes of your strategy to the nitty-gritty details of each blog, video or social media post.
Get Your Content Team Ready (Or Hire An Agency)
Even though each one of your content creators will have their own projects to work on, no one should be working in a silo. Everyone should be on the same page and collaborate as much as possible to ensure each facet of your content development plan neatly fits together.
Hold brainstorming sessions, and get input from different stakeholders on your planned projects. At Brafton, writers, graphic designers, videographers, strategists and project managers all work together in the early stages of content development to hash out a strategy and ideate around content pillars that our target audience will find interesting and relevant to their work.
Working out a viable production and delivery schedule is key. You wouldn’t believe how easy it is for the wheels to come off a content calendar because of a single delay. These things tend to snowball, especially when more complex content types are involved.
Meticulously plan out a content calendar that includes plenty of room for team members to complete initial drafts, provide and apply feedback, produce a finalized product and promote those materials on social media channels.
If you have enough material to map out an entire quarter’s worth of content, that’s awesome, but don’t feel like you need to necessarily look that far into the future. Focus on high-quality content first, even if it means you only have a concrete plan for the next month or so.
How An Effective Content Development Plan Transforms Your Content Strategy
Now that you know all the ingredients that go into developing effective (and delicious) content plans, you should know just how it’ll affect your content strategy overall (and what you stand to gain from your audience consuming the morsels of content). A little hint to preface this section: it’s for the better.
Great content, no matter the content type, is made even better when clear goals are outlined. As we’ve established, this is best done by building a content plan where:
- You ask the right questions.
- You prioritize content around your goals.
- You know your target audience.
- You prepare your content team.
Here’s how, in following those steps, your business stands to benefit:
Improves Your ROI
Through brand awareness and monetization, good content development plans help you improve your ROI. By content planning, you’ll know exactly what you need when the time comes to produce. You can better allocate resources to save time and money and, overall, discern ways to improve your process to increase efficiency.
Keeps Everyone Aligned
When everyone is aligned and on the same page about your content marketing plan, things progress with less friction and more collaboration. Aligned content production is integral to staying on task while you work toward your business goals — whatever they may be.
Drives More Traffic to Your Website, Product or Service
This is probably what everyone is here for. Web content, social media content, blog content — it all helps drive organic traffic to your website (or wherever you’re pointing people towards). And, of course, the more eyes that are on your content, the more eyes that follow through to your products and services.
Better Progress Tracking Capabilities
Data is a big part of content marketing. To track your progress toward your goals, you need something to monitor. Your content marketing strategy — specifically the collateral that’s produced from it — is a great tool. What’s working? What’s not working? These things can be discerned from a strong content development plan, enabling you to refine your content creation so it better aligns with what your audience wants.
Builds Your Credibility and Authority as a Brand
Quality content builds credibility — it’s that simple. Honing your content development plan to a place where you’re publishing consistent, high-quality content can position you as an authority in your industry, which can increase your trust, customer loyalty and reputation.
In Conclusion
A successful content development plan requires a lot of work upfront, but it’s totally worth it. Your content will be more focused and relevant to your target audience, and it will better serve your stated business goals. That little extra time investment will establish the right mentality when your content marketing team sits down to create material that speaks directly to your audience.
Additionally, integrating search engine optimization practices into your content development plan will ensure that your website content ranks well in search engine results, drawing more traffic to your site. Conducting a content audit on your existing content can reveal opportunities for optimization and improvement, ensuring that every piece of content you produce is aligned with your content strategy and contributes to your overall digital marketing efforts. Remember to include content promotion strategies, such as leveraging Google Ads, to enhance the visibility of your press releases and other important updates.
By focusing on these key areas, your content strategist can help you achieve better engagement and conversion rates, making your inbound marketing efforts more effective.
Editor’s Note: Updated March 2024.
