What Is Content Marketing Development?. As a content marketer, I look forward to this time of year. Let’s have a look: What Is Content Marketing Development? on your blog. What are the broad keyword categories/subject areas (this is helpful for blog post ideation)? Top-converting blog posts: Which blog posts are driving the highest conversions? What I like to recommend to clients is that they develop their editorial calendar on a quarterly basis, giving them enough time to build out posts predicted to drive results – and time to evaluate the performance of those posts prior to scheduling out the next quarter’s content. In other words, you need to regularly revisit your keyword strategy – instead of simply relying on the keyword set you’d identified when first starting out with your content program. The idea is, of course, to give blog contributors suggestions of what to write about, based on Search Console data from the previous month, in addition to social media insights and monthly blog performance. Obviously, a big part of content marketing development is developing actual content – and then seeing how it performs.
It’s that time of year again.
No, I don’t mean enduring your extended family for a full two weeks or being attacked by a squirrel leaping from your Christmas tree or letting your cousin Eddie crash in his RV in your driveway.
I mean gearing up for the year ahead.
As a content marketer, I look forward to this time of year. As the new year approaches, it gives me time to reflect on the successes (and failures) of the previous 12 months and think about ways to approach things differently in the year to come.
This past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of content advisory programs, where our team is making recommendations for our clients’ content marketing teams – and then they execute. Among other things, what it’s taught me is that content marketing development looks different for every organization and there’s no set blueprint for getting the job done right.
That said, there are a number of best practices to keep in mind when developing effective content marketing programs.
Let’s have a look:
What Is Content Marketing Development?
First of all, let’s define content marketing development. At its most basic level, “web content development is the process of researching, writing, gathering, organizing, and editing information for publication on websites.”
But any content marketer knows it’s more than just that.
Content marketing development is tied largely to content marketing strategy – as in, content is (or should be) developed with a specific goal in mind.
According to Content Marketing Institute, content marketing strategy is defined as “drawing and developing the larger story that an organization tells. [It involves] focusing on ways to engage an audience, using content to drive profitable behaviors.”
So, in a nutshell, content marketing development should be more than developing content for just the sake of it. Each piece of content produced must be tied to a certain goal (organic traffic, conversions, lead generation, brand awareness, etc.) – or else it’s just a waste of everyone’s time.
But, the question is, how do you get started? Like I said, there’s no one way to develop content – but I like to think about it in the following phases.
Analysis Phase
Before you ever begin with your content development plan, you’ve got to have an idea of what you’re working with already. In other words, you need to know how your existing content is performing in order to identify in any gaps, areas of opportunity, etc. on your blog.
This is the part where you need to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty. Whether you’re starting out with a client and doing an official content analysis to create a content development plan (where one may not have existed previously) or you’re doing an audit of a site you’ve been working on for some time to revise or improve your plan for the future, you need to get comfortable with content measurement.
I’ve done a number of content analyses over the past year (for both scenarios outlined above) and these are the key elements I’ll typically look at:
- Blog traffic (total & organic): How has the blog performed over a set timeframe? What have been the peak traffic periods and what may have accounted for them (this is where it’s helpful to have annotations in Analytics)?
- …
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