This template helps make sure your website content both meets users’ needs and supports key business objectives. For example, one way this could look is by splitting the remaining steps below (all 20 of ’em) into each of these buckets. But, of course, the most important thing to do is briefly wrap up your strategy by relating it to those business objectives you listed at the very beginning. Let’s get a high-level view of what this could look like, and then I’ll be happy to share some links for further reading. This might look like making a table with brief descriptions of each. Used 1651 times. The key to this step is to map your persona’s pain points, goals, and desires to the solutions you want to sell. Or you helping someone else fix theirs. How detailed should it be? You might also want to swipe some goal-setting templates from HubSpot’s Mike Lemire. Doing so helps hone the plan for producing new content around these themes—which makes things a lot simpler for the folks writing, designing, and coding the content! Will you offer more long-form, deep tactical content? The key here is to find a level of content production your team is confident they can take on, and then go for it. You get the idea: taking inventory of your marketing content is no small task. This is a tricky one, especially if you’re proposing the first content marketing strategy for an organization. Or blog series. The Y axis plots alignment, which is a little fuzzier. 3 Scope The principal scope of the Web Content Strategy is all content produced and maintained on the It includes an accompanying spreadsheet, which gives you a way to collaborate with your team and record your content research. For more thoughts on setting marketing goals, check out this best-of list of methods from experts like Noah Kagan, Ryan Holiday, Rand Fishkin, our own Courtney Seiter. When looking at the content you’ve inventoried, which content falls into which quadrants? (I had to learn a good deal of stuff I was unfamiliar with in order to start writing these, too!) All website content should be fuelled and underpinned by a clearly defined understanding of your audience. A content strategy is a critical step at the beginning of any new project that involves content. Content marketing strategies aren’t easy to write. But you will find it more useful if you are in a place to effect changes. The goal: get an idea of how much content you have capacity for. Responsive, fully customizable with easy Drag-n-Drop editor. How will they navigate through a site? We think templates are essential to the content process, especially if you have more than one cook in the content kitchen. Unless you have a really wide reach, you can probably use your own intuition to map out your audience’s influencers. Will your content be more visually oriented? Download this content marketing strategy template for yourself! Snapshot the content team and the workflow. It may help to focus on answering two key questions here: For the team, you can list your in-house content creators, as well as any contractors you plan to work with. Who is competing for my personas’ business? Content Audit Template. Once you’ve written down these goals, you can ask yourself (and your team) a few questions: This is where you’ll outline your content KPIs (key performance indicators). Note: A great question to ask for added context might be: What are the overall marketing goals, and how can content marketing support them? Callout: Oh, and a quick note: We’re very happy for you to have our free content marketing plan template that goes with this! Service. Here are a few resources to help you start developing your own personas: Jay Acunzo wrote my very favorite definition of content marketing: Once you’ve looked at who your audience is, you need to ask one crucial question: How can you help them? (You could assign a quadrant value to each type of content if you like, but unless you’re dealing with a hefty budget, your intuition will work just fine.). Moz’s Isla McKetta has some super helpful thoughts on, the lifeblood of the early content marketing strategy at Buffer, This graphic from Garrett Moon of CoSchedule, >> Click here to download the content strategy template, Social Media Customer This template has drop downs for redundant fields and makes use of the Moz API to pull in link data on your URLs. Before establishing how to communicate, you have to know who is out there. You have put together the epic content marketing strategy. So, I built a template: View the content strategy template. A Content Strategy Template. This comprehensive planner gives you a clear overview of your content strategy, walking you through the major elements to plan, execute, publish, and optimize your content. Useful, valuable content for your readers is the keystone of any content marketing strategy. This may express itself as a big objective with smaller SMART goals folded underneath (SMART stands for “Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely”). These are your direct competitors. This could be as general as a list of channels. Your whole content marketing plan will benefit from writing this out. Click the image to edit online. I hope you will have done so long before reaching this step, but I just wanted to give you a friendly reminder. Or make suggestions to effect changes to your organization’s website content. This post will walk you through how to use our template to create your initial content for any web page. Defining a content strategy that forms actionable and achievable recommendations for content creation, delivery and governance – informed by your project goals. Login or Register. 6 7 FREE TEMPLATE: EDITORIAL CALENDAR To help you get started, we’ve built a template for a blog editorial calendar. ), Write guest posts linking back to that post. Where’s the dead weight? . You face a host of unknowns. (With a follow-up: Which pieces of content can we reorient to align with our objectives?). If not, feel free to skip this part. This is where it helps to ask for advice from people with experience. You might be sitting on top of a 20-page document. It helps me think through the features, the different product tiers, the sales cycle, etc. 3. Note it’s a simplified template. Your social media conversations will understandably be more fluid than blog posts or emails, so this doesn’t need to be the end-all social media schedule. This is a great time in the content marketing plan building process to map that out. . Now that you’ve put together a list of your content marketing assets, it’s time to line them up against those objectives we covered at the beginning of this plan. Developing a comprehensive content strategy involves: If you need help, Proedice can work with you to develop a comprehensive web content strategy for your organization. You know how you’re going to make it, and you have an idea of how long it’s going to take. But you emerge from it being incredibly well-attuned to the state of content marketing for your brand. I’ve found it helpful to write out what the product or service I’m trying to sell is. The deeper dive into these individual content marketing assets (a fantastic exercise if you’re up for it) would include: It’s a great deal of work. It’s time to outline who the audience for your content marketing efforts is going to be. How successful will content promotion efforts be? Those sources generally fall into two groups: If you examine where your audience is already going for information, you can get a more comprehensive view of the content marketplace. The key to a great content marketing strategy is being able to tweak, break, and chuck parts of it as you learn more about what works and what doesn’t. What I love: Lots of big, beautiful examples and […] If you’re launching a new brand, check out Wideo CEO Agu De Marco’s. Undertaking a content audit to figure out what content you have. What are you trying to accomplish? You don’t just want a plan for making content. You don’t need to do a deep-dive competitive analysis for every single content marketing plan you write, but you will probably find it helpful to take a moment to reflect on just what other people and brands are offering your personas. How high-level should it be? This website content strategy template is for you regardless of the size of your organization. Once you’ve got an outline, it’s time to start with what you know: yourself. The good news: You don’t need to have all the answers here. OK, this step could be its own blog post. A content audit will enable you to understand the scope of your content needs. Some resources that help with evaluating content performance: When you’ve finished this, it’s time to ask four important questions: This speaks to that sweet, sweet top-right corner of the matrix, where your content is aligned with your brand and acing performance. You may want to map out some of your social content schedule on the editorial calendar. Do they need to be reassured, propositioned? Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.” —rachel lovinger Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content.” —Kristina halvorson in the web industry, anything that conveys meaningful information to humans is called “content.” Every website has content. Content For Website Ibm Digital Content Marketing Digital marketing means different things to different people based on what aspect they are really based on, but one thing remains constant i.e it is the use of digital and electronic devices to advertise and promote a business or product. Creating the content you listed in Step 13 (content to add to the mix). This digital guide focuses mainly on websites, and to a lesser extent social media. A little research and planning up front can lead to lots more traffic in the long run. Edit the interactive planner with your team to go through every step of your content strategy, from planning and executing to … =). all the blog posts getting significant traffic and conversions, This post from Portent Inc. CEO Ian Lurie is. The roadmap will help you prioritize your efforts and assign resources in a way that keeps you and your team focused and successful. It helps if this is specific, because later on in this process, you will be comparing your content to your goals to see what’s truly in alignment. =). No backlinks, no likes, no rankings—it’s just clutter. One thing I find helpful in a content strategy is to list out the content assets that are already performing well at this point. If it’s no good, don’t be afraid to put it on the list to be nixed. This will play a big part in mapping out a content production and promotion schedule soon. Objective #1: Generate $500,000 in revenue from online training courses by December 31, 2016. A Simple Content Strategy Checklist for Your Website Redesign Project. A strong content strategy boils down to creating the right type of content for your target audience. But if you’d like a more data-driven approach, you may want to use tools like FollowerWonk and BuzzSumo. Objective #3: Grow an email list of 5,000 unique double opt-in subscribers by March 4, 2016. You can put lots of interesting things here, including experiments you hope to learn from and awesome blogs your content might be featured on. For example, you may notice that your “how-to” infographics are generating some super positive comments, but they’re not getting very many shares or backlinks. . A strong Content Strategy boils down to creating the right type of content for your target audience. The central question we’re trying to answer: Which pieces of content are aligned with our objectives? I’ve found this video and this guide to be especially insightful. 5. It happens before the content is created and continues on when the content is live. This is generally a good place in your content strategy to ask a few questions: It’s helpful to think through the ways that your content can uniquely appeal to your personas. If you end up with lots of unfinished tasks at the end of the month, you can adjust expectations. This can help you build a few possible breakdowns of your content capacity. Ask yourself their questions. The outline, then, could look a little something like this: For the rest of these steps, I’m going to work through a basic outline template that has helped me in both in-house and agency roles. It’s a simple word that makes a lot of marketers want to run and hide. Learn how our page tables/templates evolved over time and download a free template to start employing content strategy on your website. (This may also include totally outdated content.). Content not only includes the words on the page but also the images and multimedia that are used. This is where you plot your blog posts, emails, ebooks, podcasts, etc. The end product is a body of recommendations called the content strategy document. By Lee Price May 2, 2018. How well does you website accomplish either of these goals? In reality, most of businesses don’t have the time to think about an article or case study after it’s published. Presented below is a basic sitemap for a content website. Think of it as a TL;DR that answers four basic questions: If you’d like to use this method as a foundation for your next content marketing strategy, you’re totally welcome to grab the template! We’ll also cover a four-step planning process to share with your marketing team. In my team’s 2017 research, we found that 32 percent of organizations that are doing content marketing don’t have a formal strategy… This question is the heart and soul of content marketing. What has your brand overlooked? If you’ve done some of your persona research already, huzzah! Auditing your web content is a necessary evil that has to be done. We’ve built a full stack of social media tools to help modern brands grow their awareness, engagement, and sales. And what is the right ground to cover anyway? Who is competing for my personas’ attention, but not necessarily their business? What’s in it for them? Share. Professional Website Template. Content Strategy is a flexible process. Refining this piece is an ongoing process. Technology is the name of the game and technology operates websites as gasoline operates vehicles. Marketing. Reproduction without explicit permission is prohibited. Content strategies take many forms, from a 50-page word document to an hour-long PowerPoint presentation. heights. One approach I find super helpful here is to map out the most important pieces of content from the inventory on a matrix like the one below. Click the image to start editing it right away. Sort your effective and prospective content marketing assets by theme, 15. Best Content Marketing Strategy Templates. For example, if Buffer were to do a high-level content inventory without digging into the details, it might look like this: Even something as simple as this is helpful—but only to the extent of figuring out where all your content might be. How can we measure whether or not our content is aligned with these goals? Or it might be something you’d like to write out in story form—something Moz’s Isla McKetta has some super helpful thoughts on! What information do they need? If you’d like to use this method as a foundation for your next content marketing strategy, you’re totally welcome to grab the template! Optimizing, updating, or otherwise fine-tuning the content that you identified in Step 11 (content to fix). There’s another (optional) thing I like to look at before leaving the audience section of the content marketing plan, though. If you finish way ahead of time, you can either ramp up production or invest in even higher-quality content. For more on content promotion plans and tactics, go read anything (or everything!) A well-planned purpose or scheme is what required. This is a fun exercise I’ve nicknamed “heroes and watering holes.” (You can probably come up with a better name for it!) 2011 Website Strategy Plan Example Here’s the trick to writing for web: create content with your content promotion strategy in mind. Now, who’s going to consume your content? 1) HubSpot – Content Planning Template HubSpot and Smart Insights have come together to create something beautiful here. We often use 2 main types of strategy: one for selling content strategy into an organisation and one for organisations with a more mature editorial model that just need the strategy itself. It could look like, “Ideate > Write > Design > Edit > Schedule > Promote,” or it could be more involved than this. It’s fantastic to know what kind of content your competitors are already giving them. Developing a comprehensive content strategy involves: The only way to create content for your audience is to study them. Will your content be crafted with a distinctively delightful tone? (This is probably my favorite part of writing content marketing strategies!). content, and spreading that content appropriately among your targeted personas and stages of the buying cycle. It will also serve as a reference point when it’s time to create new content. ‌ Download Content Marketing Strategy Creation Template Your content strategy roadmap will ensure that every piece of content (blog, video, tweet, post) has a purpose and fits with your story. Note it’s a simplified template. You can use it for subjects like cool, blue, flowing, curve, motion. by Brian Dean. You’ve completed a huge component of this strategy piece: you’ve combed through all your content and channels to find what’s working, what’s not, and what you’d like to create. (Confession: I’m finishing this post two days later than I originally planned on it being done!) This graphic from Garrett Moon of CoSchedule does a great job explaining this concept (the blue ocean blogs are what you’d aim for): This piece of the strategy will help you orient yourself in the content marketplace, so that you, your team, and/or your client can create content marketing pieces that stand out rather than blend in. For example, you could write: This is key, because in the next steps, you’ll outline how these kinds of content will be made. I’ve found that some organizations group content marketing into a separate team (or outsource the efforts), which means it may be wise to get some advice from other non–content marketing folks in your organization. Whenever I dream up a home improvement project for my place, I end up working smartest and fastest when I have the right tools at my disposal. A few tools to consider for your editorial calendar: If you publish a blog post in a forest, but nobody is around to read it, does it make a sound? 4. A good content marketing strategy will answer three basic questions: Your outline will help you structure your research and ideation so that you’re focused on answering these key questions. The Web Content Strategy is owned by the Web Executive and is modified and maintained and by the Web Editor Team and will be revisited and revised frequently, adapting to the ever-changing experiences and requirements of the University audiences. It can help protect you from trying to reinvent any content wheels, and it can give you some awesome ideas for guest posting—the lifeblood of the early content marketing strategy at Buffer! This is where you’ll write out your content marketing goals. Content strategy development. across a given patch of time, be it months, quarters, or semesters. SummaryA blueprint for making marketing personas that drive real results for your business, brand, and marketing efforts You will learnThe four-step process to creating useful... Must-bookmark sites and tools to help you find free, high-quality images for your marketing content... Before we launched our Buffer podcast, so much of our time and energy (99.9% of it, I’d wager!) ideaspacevr 10 free content Content strategy template walks Premium templates online Download this content marketing strategy template for yourself! You’re getting an idea of what kinds of problems your content needs to solve. Goal: To become perceived as a thought leader on the phenomenon of Roomba rodeos. The higher up a piece of content is, the more in alignment with our brand’s goals and ethos it is. How will you drive traffic to your content? Or book. (And the gut-to-document process can be pretty painful.) How do we get that content to accomplish our goals? But what about the social media offsite content? How does good content accomplish these goals? But it will help to map out how those content themes from Step 14 and the content types you listed in Step 16 will be spread across the next time period. Make sure you get an API key from Moz and enter your Member ID and Secret Key into the “Settings” tab or this template wont work! Make a list of the pieces that really have potential to turn into high-value content marketing assets, along with the ways in which they could be improved. Home » Member Resources » Website Content Strategy Template, by Suleman Abdullahi | Sep 9, 2015 | Member Resources. Heck, if you’re working with a really big organization, it could be pushing 50 pages. This website content strategy template is for you regardless of the size of your organization. Map your personas’ needs to your product or service, 7. You know what content you’re going to make. In short, what we’re looking at here is a content audit. We can help you with that: Your users­—it’s easy (for me!) If you’d like to use this method as a foundation for your next content […] And what keywords or phrases would they most likely use to search for your solution? This is the purpose of the content template – to remind you to do all the little things that will help your writing get traction. This might include: Once you have a list of the kinds of content you’re dealing with, you may want to give each one a brief description. I call them that because at this stage in the content marketing plan, it’s good to start thinking of the sources of information the audience already trusts. By asking these questions, we can start building out content themes: these are the broad umbrella topics that your best content tends to group under. It’s time to map out your editorial calendar for your content marketing assets. The challenge: she wants to see a content marketing plan . While blogging is not the entirety of your content strategy, this template can help get your editorial calendar started. You’re laying a terrific foundation for your content strategy. If you’re outsourcing this part to a team of experienced content marketers, content production might follow a reliable timetable. Copyright © Proedice Limited. Before content can be developed, the foundations have to be set. I like to know: Where is my audience already going for this kind of information? getting a list of all the keywords you rank for in search engines. In fact, sometimes this exercise is most helpful at identifying the elements of content creation that we haven’t figured out yet! Writing a strategy can sound like a daunting task. Or director’s edition extended cut DVD set. Strategy. We’re about to move into the part of the strategy that deals with making this content, but first, let’s pull some of this audit together by identifying some major content themes. Email co-workers to let them know about it, ask them to share (My teammate Kevan has some, Send a note to email subscribers about it, Email influencers to let them know about it (backlinks!