Content Marketing process flowchart

Jan 1

Content marketing processes should go beyond assigning writers, editors, and publishers. Initial steps should answer questions surrounding goals like:

What is the goal of content production? Are you supporting ads, providing content for social and newsletters, or driving organic traffic?

And it uses data and competitive research to help you ideate, answering questions like:

What trends can you find in content performance? What do competitors cover? Where are the gaps?

When your content builds on these steps, the resulting plan supports business goals and wins more buy-in from other teams. And the support of other teams can be valuable!

Let’s take a look at a comprehensive content marketing process that covers all essential steps.

1. Planning & strategy

Your content strategy includes determining target personas and determining goals to measure success in engaging them.

Persona research & data review

Collect information about your target content readers (or personas) through market research. Whether you conduct this research on your own or leverage existing work, you should consider:

Persona profiles
Keyword research (what queries do they search to land on your website)
Competitive analysis
Performance data (which content types historically perform the best)

Strategize & determine goals

Based on your findings from the research phase, create a basic strategy: who are you targeting, and what do you want them to do? Then, get more specific by channel.

Determine your blog strategy

Support other channels: If B2B sales outreach or customer newsletters will include blog posts, you’ll need to produce content for them. This content can be anything your audience will be interested in. For example, when targeting medical students, you could offer mental health advice and help them avoid burnout.
Drive new website visits (SEO): Content written to drive visitors has its own process. It has a keyword research step, where you need to use search queries to weed out your target audience. Offering mental health advice with no cultivated audience would not be appropriate - you’ll drive tons of irrelevant traffic.
Build authority for existing website visitors: If someone lands on your homepage and views your blog, you want to have a variety of impressive content for them to browse.
All of the above: These blog strategies can coexist in peace.
Determine marketing efforts you need to support
Consider other marketing channels and which will lean on support from the content team: ads, social media email campaigns, marketing automation, sales outreach, conferences, etc.

Determine your content types and schedule

Now, you can create a quick idea of what types of content should follow. Choose your content mediums, publish date, cadence, and some general topics. Here are several approaches to building this plan:

Quick quarterly content planning
Content plan as part of a strategy
SEO content strategy (solely based on keywords and buying intent)

Determine volume and publishing cadence

One of the trickiest items of a content plan is choosing a cadence. People often ask about the ideal publishing schedule for SEO. The answer is - the more the better! That might be frustrating to hear, but if you’re writing five quality, keyword-optimized posts per day, it’s that much more likely that people will take interest and find your content.

Instead, ask yourself - what resources do I have available? How much quality content can I consistently produce each quarter? Do the best you can with what you have.

2. Ideation

If you followed this process, you already determined basic writing topics.

Here are some additional ways you can brainstorm ideas:

Competitor research: Browse competitors to see what they are writing about. Can you write something they did better? Do you have a unique perspective?
Keyword research: Look at popular and longtail keywords to see what can drive traffic.
Persona research: Think about your persona pain points. What content will help them, whether or not it’s directly related to your product? My persona keywords guide blends keyword research with these pain points.
Find blog prompts: Rely on some open-ended blog prompts to help get you thinking, or try the content ideation worksheet.
Turn to your coworkers: Here’s how to create a company culture that supports new blog ideas.

Next, refine these ideas into content pieces with titles, briefs, and keywords.

If your company uses a standard project management tool (like Jira, Trello, or Asana), this is the point where you should transfer your content ideas into your determined schedule. Assign publish dates and add essential details to ensure completion.

3. Research and outlining

An outline might include some, or all, of these elements:

A list of resources that will help the writer reference factual material
A list of headlines and points to cover
A list of questions to interview a subject matter expert or client
A keyword and brief summary

Outlining for SEO blog posts can be a bit more difficult. To determine what to include in these outlines, type a keyword into Google. Who else is ranking? What topics do they cover?

Use competitors for ideas on what to include - but make sure you offer your own unique perspective. In fact, Google looks to include fresh perspectives on page 1.

4. Writing

When writing your content, keep these principles in mind to boost quality:

Make sentences clear and concise
Include descriptive headings and bulleted lists to make your content skimmable - aka content chunking
Include useful graphics where possible; such as charts, graphs, and diagrams
Back up each point with an example or statistic

5. Editing

A best practice: writers should never edit their own work. That’s because people are naturally blind to their own grammatical errors.

Furthermore, as the writer has already done research and has baseline knowledge, their brain fills in context that others might not understand. If that’s the case, parts of your writing might be hard for future readers to decipher.

You need a fresh pair of eyes to help fill in the blanks and ensure pieces are clear and direct.

6. Formatting and publishing

While formatting some content is left to design or email teams, blog posts tend to remain with content teams.

The difficulty of formatting and publishing your content will depend on your Content Management System (CMS). In WordPress, for example, you can usually paste an article into an editor and quickly clean up some formatting. Or, you can use drag and drop components to build new pages.

Follow this checklist to ensure your blog posts are ready to go live:

Optimized URL slug
Author
Graphics
Alt tags
Meta tags
Categories

The most challenging part of this phase is ensuring you have all the SEO metadata and are finding or creating engaging images.

If you’re spinning your wheels formatting content, make sure you speak up! Tricky CMSs are usually the key pain point that leads companies to a website redesign.

7. Promotion

A piece of content is only as useful as how many people see it; if you don’t have a plan for promotion, it will probably be floating around unseen.

You might promote content through SEO efforts (like backlinking), social media, paid ads, email newsletters, or sales enablement.

There are many channels through which your content can reach your target audience, and it’s up to you to choose which ones are worth your time.

8. Evaluate and optimize

When you find meaningful ways to measure success, you’ll feel proud of your work and easily prove your value to others. Most importantly, you’ll gain an understanding of what’s working so you can incorporate these insights into future content plans.

Here are some different ways of measuring content performance:

Sales performance: How often is sales leveraging your blog posts, PDFs, or other content in their sales communication? Can you match any revenue to your content in this way?
Organic traffic: How much organic traffic does your content generate? Better still, if you can break the organic traffic down by the buyer journey (awareness, decision, conversion), you truly paint a picture of where you’re driving value.

For instance - you may say that last quarter, your awareness phase content increased by 10%, decision increased by 1%, and conversion decreased by 2%. Now the entire team can see value generated and where you should focus efforts next quarter.

UX metrics: Always track how people engage with your content to measure quality. Engagement metrics include bounce rate, scroll depth, and pageviews per session.
New and returning visitors: Content that generates new visitors generates awareness. If your content has a high number of returning visitors, it means that people find your content valuable enough to return.
Conversions: Most content should include some sort of call to action - a whitepaper, free trial, or some sort of further reading. Tracking these conversions shows how valuable your content is in generating leads and revenue.

Before you implement: get company buy-in with your process

Your content marketing process can set clear rules and facilitate productivity - but it’s only as good as how often it’s used. When done correctly, several factors will come into play that benefit the team as a whole:

You’ll be task-batching, or working on similar tasks (within each cycle phase) at once. For instance, in the Research & Outlining phase, you’ll create all content outlines at one time. As explained in my writing productivity and organization article, working on tasks requiring the same tools and thought patterns at one time boosts efficiency.
You’ll have clearer job responsibilities. Who is accountable for each step? As a content manager, you might be responsible for ensuring the content flows through each stage without being stuck. You also might be in charge of writing or editing. Mapping out your process in this way makes it easy to assign phases to people.
Your job will become more tangible. Instead of being viewed as a simple “blog manager”, you can show the level of effort, strategy, and attention to detail that goes into publishing content.

Your company should support taking the time to create a process and help each other stick to it.

Final thoughts on the content marketing process

Having some sort of structure to producing and publishing your content has many benefits: productivity, morale, tangibility, and more. Be sure to take some time to map out your process and improve over time.

Whether you follow this cycle or adapt your own, establishing process is an essential step in content production.

If you’re looking to get in the weeds on market research, SEO, and performance metrics - try the Advanced Content Marketing Guide.

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