With content marketing becoming more and more of an essential part of modern SEO (though there are some that consider it separate), it’s important to ensure that you plan your strategy well: a poorly thought out content marketing services will hurt your website as much as it helps! That’s why we’ve put together this piece on the stages of planning
Plan like an editor. Although SEO don’t exactly have the same set of resources as a magazine editor, there are now a lot of crossovers in the respective skill sets, with the need to plan a genuine editorial calendar now a big part of a content marketer’s job. Before you get the campaign going, you’ll need to ask yourself (and anyone else in the department) these key questions: what are the key topics you’ll be writing about (the key is to break it down into three main topics, ie a men’s magazine editor will focus on three areas: health, wealth and sex), what balance will you set between the three, and what are your main priorities? Essentially, which areas of your content plan are going to earn you the most money?
Develop your content. Once you’ve built up a good plan, you can now put it into effect and get it developed. A good way to get this done is to break down your content into individual areas: IE, into categories such as info-graphics, videos, webinars and the like. Another alternative is to break it down into two main areas: content that you’ll be creating yourself, and content that’s curated, ie, other people’s content that you’ll be analysing and putting your own spin on. Typical examples of this include news items, expert interviews and reports from your industry. Creating the content will also need to be created to a strict schedule to ensure that it all gets done accurately and on-time.
Distribute the content. The final stage is actually getting that content out into the world – essentially, it is the marketing side of the content market. As with the other stages of this process, you need to plan exactly where you’re going to be sending this content. The main areas of distribution are all quite well known: email, social media, your own blog, video networks such as YouTube and then other websites within the industry. Where possible, it’s important to ensure that you already have it planned where the content will go before it’s even been created – the ideal way to do this is to build relationships with other sites to ensure they’re ready to accept the content as soon as it’s complete.
