Creating valuable content can sometimes be tricky. After you’ve published it, you can’t just sit and wait for it to perform. All the following steps need to be taken into consideration when creating content, from planning to measuring it.
Content Planning
Most actions start with an idea, which develops into a plan. Whenever you have an idea for what content you want to create, it is important to have a plan for how to reach the objectives with the content. A content plan straightens out the who, what, when, where, and how of developing content. Deadlines help to make sure that the content is delivered in the right time to be relevant for the audience. A SWOT analysis of your current status might be helpful to understand what needs improvement and to decide how you should proceed. What does your brand stand for and who is your targeted audience? In order to make valuable content for the audience, you have to know who they are and what they are interested in reading. Brainstorm ideas to find out what KPIs will be relevant for the content! If you find this part of the content planning difficult there are several tools that can help you with the planning and brainstorming. Some of the useful tools are: HubSpot’s Marketing Grader, Buzzsumo, and Content Forest.
Content Research
While brainstorming content ideas you have to take into consideration where the idea came from in the first place. Probably the idea arose from the fact that there are some unanswered questions about topics related to your industry. Content research is the process where you get to understand what these questions are and find matching answers. The first step in the process is to find out what keywords have been searched for lately. What do people want to know more about? Search engines are good tools to use to find more information from articles, forums, and sites in which the keywords are included. There are a bunch of tools that allow you to join discussions, question-and-answer sites, as well as keep an eye on your competitors in the research process. Google AdWords Keyword Tool, Topix, and LinkedIn Discussion are a few examples.
Content Creation
Creating qualifying, valuable, and relevant content is hard and takes a lot of time, effort, and knowledge. The central ethos of content marketing is to continually create great content on a regular basis. Some of the areas where content creation is most commonly used are client onboarding and training, customer education, marketing and blogging efforts, and employee training etc.
Content creation is explained as the contribution of information to any media or digital media in specific contexts. It includes everything from writing a simple blog post or creating and posting an extremely complex graphic. It is something that is expressed through a medium such as speech, writing, or other arts, for the purpose of for example distribution, marketing or publication. Content creation includes both maintenance and updates of web sites, social media accounts, blogging, photos, videos, and editing and distribution of digital media. To create the best content, the right content creation tools are necessary. A few examples are PicPlayPost, Storify, Evernote, Worlde, and Infogr.am.
Content Curation
The process in which you discover, gather, and present digital content is known as content curation. You can get inspiration from others shared content during this process. The content has to be relevant to your audience, surround a specific subject, and strategically shared through your different communication channels. Well-managed content curation is personal in order to create a favorable relationship with the reader. The value it brings to the audience is the time they save by having content organized, which makes them spend less time browsing the web. In short, any piece of digital content that can be shared online can be curated. There are content curation tools on the market that are directed to the beginner, the intermediate, and the advanced user. Scoop.It, Feedly, Curata, and Klout can help you in the content curation process.
Content Distribution
To grow and engage the audience, you need a great distribution plan. In fact, without any distribution, even the most innovative, creative, and groundbreaking content might not be discovered. Content distribution involves the way brands can disseminate content to larger, more targeted audiences through paid efforts, such as influencer outreach or free methods such as brand partnerships. Paid efforts include, for example native ads on Twitter, but distribution can also involve free content swaps with other companies, which is a brand partnership. By doing this, the media will cover your content, but first you must answer the question: does your distribution plan match the content plan? Here are some of the most popular tools you can use to make sure your content is doing its job: Outbrain, Taboola, SimpleReach, Gravity, and Zemanta.
Content Promotion
A content promotion plan is something you have to do right from the beginning. It includes three parts: branded media, paid media, and owned media.
There are several different strategies helpful for promoting content. It is important to create awareness and reach out to people. If you optimize the content, search engines will likely be the best source of driving traffic. As the cause of content creation, content promotion also takes a lot of time and effort; therefore, efficiency is important. A lot of the content promotion tools help automate ordinary, repetitive tasks and give you an insight into the relevant data. For example, there are tools that help with keeping track of the emails you’ve sent. Yesware and FollowUpThen are great tools for this.
All social medias, such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+, just to mention a few, are very important in the case of creating shares, awareness, and engagement. There are tools to help you find potential influencers, create buzz around your content, and make it easier to be found by people. Examples of these kinds of tools are Followerwonk and BuzzStream. To give old content a nudge or to create calls-to-action there are tools like Buffer and Snip.ly. By linking old content and new content together, you can drive traffic back to it once again.
Content Optimization
The whole idea with content optimization is to create relevant content the audience finds appealing. By optimizing the content, more qualified customers will come across it, which will help to drive revenue. With several techniques, the content provider is able to improve search results and rankings to easier be found in search engines. If the content doesn’t show up when people are searching for related subjects it’s like the content doesn’t exist, nor does the company behind it. The optimization could be directed to text, images, videos, as well as news. Keywords and focus terms are useful to optimize the search of your content, which will guide the audience right to your company’s sites. Scribe and Yoast are a couple of tools that can help you get started.
Content Measurement
If you are a content producer you need to know to what extent your content marketing efforts are successful. Content measurement should strive to answer the following types of questions: What is working and what is not? What can we do to make it work better? Thanks to several innovative content measurement tools, it’s also possible to answer these other important questions: How did the reader find your content and for how long did they consume it? Did they make it past the headline and intro paragraph before tuning out? Where did they go afterwards? To optimize your content measurement you need a system for monitoring and reporting the results of your activities in a way that answers these questions. Metrics can give you the chance to evolve the perspective of how people interact with the content online. When you want to prove that your content marketing brings value to your business it’s also important that your metrics relate back to your goals. Thus, content measurement makes the analytics easier – and the marketing efforts better. AddThis and Nudge are companies that provide these types of content measurement tools.
From Nudge’s perspective, we consider content measurement to be the most interesting part, which is why we help others with it. What’s the point of publishing a piece of content without knowing how it performs?
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