Planning website content is a commonly overlooked process when doing digital marketing. Many website owners define their business goals and perform basic research but never implement a content strategy that would yield maximum results. For example, entrepreneurs rarely use a content calendar and barely explore the functionalities of their content management system.
If you’re serious about your web business, you should streamline content marketing efforts so all your pieces provide an immersive experience. Every blog post you create should serve some purpose for your brand, turning random visitors into long-time fans while achieving maximum conversions.
In this article, the MiroMind team will share some awesome tips for planning, organizing, and streamlining your content marketing strategy. Check it out!
-
Define content goals
When companies create content, their priority is to drive as much traffic as possible and to make major sales. However, this shouldn’t necessarily be considered a content or business goal, as it’s something that all brands are trying to achieve.
Instead, you should define content goals as maximizing the number of published articles or creating numerous marketing funnels. In other words, they should be much more tangible and easier to execute. Otherwise, you might fall into the trap of doing everything yet doing nothing. Here are a few best examples of well-defined content goals:
In a nutshell, website content planning should be a meticulous process that considers all relevant elements. While having quality written content should always be the focus, we also need to consider how different posts affect readers over time. With content governance, website owners need to ensure that all articles have similar forms so that users wouldn’t have a different experience every time.
-
Implement editorial calendar
While calendars might not be that important for smaller teams, they’re vital for bigger news blogs featuring dozens of authors. As you can guess by the name, these calendars are essential for managing content during a week, month, or year. They streamline future content creation, tracking related keywords and topics, designated authors, channels, and content formats.
A content calendar is a public document that authors can access online or in the form of downloadable files. With it, they can plan content production, which is critical for authors that freelance for other companies. Most notably, calendars prevent overlapping between writers and ensure they don’t breach deadliness.
Among others, a calendar provides information about formats so that an author can perform the necessary research before creating a more complex piece or coordinating with a graphic designer. Lastly, this tool provides information about social media channels and where you should promote your web post.
For this purpose, you can use a simple spreadsheet, although it’s much better to use collaboration tools such as Trello.
-
Categorize pieces into clusters
One of the best techniques for pushing pieces higher in search results is using content clusters. With this method, you boost the power of individual articles by connecting them with other, less relevant pieces. That way, your main article, also referred to as the pillar page, will gain authority from ancillary pieces.
So, what can clusters do for my blog?
Internal link strategy is the backbone of every good website content plan. Not only does it help with clustering and sales, but it’s also crucial for improving your authority and site-wide click-through rate. In other words, it provides numerous direct and indirect SEO and operational benefits.
-
Focus on consistency
In an ideal world, you would only have one writer who would tackle the posts for the entire blog. However, as companies are forced to get fast results, they need to pump out dozens of pieces in a single week.
This can be a major problem for consistency. Not only will your team work around the clock, often leading to human error, but they’ll also have significantly different styles and tones. There also might be issues with sub headings, bullets, tables, links, and other article elements. Luckily for you, this is something that you can resolve quite easily.
Your company should create a company-wide Google Doc document outlying the optimal content structure. That way, all your employees will follow the same procedure, creating articles that are quite similar to each other. As a result, your visitors will have the same experience each time they land on the blog, which is vital for retention.
-
Get the right tools
Similar to other marketing processes, a content marketing plan is heavily dependent on various software. Content planning tools are a difference maker as they streamline various processes, simplify complex tasks, allow communication and collaboration within a team, perform optimization, and rely on actionable real-time data.
Here are a few platforms the MiroMind team recommends for your content planning process:
Basic Google tools
These are your basic, free platforms that provide information about things like user behavior, ranking keywords, traffic, and click-through rates. However, you can also use them for content creation and data sharing. As they are made by Google, they have the most relevant data, and third-party tools often extrapolate this data for their platforms.
Content writing
Before you start creating articles, it’s important to determine your go-to content writing platform. Unfortunately, as this software category is only geared toward writing, authors nowadays use content optimization tools that allow them to write and simultaneously optimize articles.
Collaboration tools
Collaboration platforms are useful for all teams regardless of their size. They allow editors to delegate tasks to writers, set deadlines and requirements, and share articles online.
Miscellaneous
Lastly, you have numerous other specialized apps that help you with specific tasks.
- Grammarly
- Copyscape
-
Provide content briefs
To tie everything together, an editor should provide briefs to its writers. That way, there won’t be confusion as to what needs to be done, for example, which keywords and links to prioritize.
The briefs can be significantly different from company to company, as every brand has its unique workflow. Ideally, you should streamline the briefing process by having internal documents that outline style, tone, and goals for different formats and article types. As previously mentioned, this small trick is essential for consistency and relieves the burden from editors’ backs.
As the entire process has become automatic over the years, it’s common for editors to simply provide a link to Frase or SurferSEO. There, authors can write their pieces while also adding relevant keywords and introducing other improvements for search engines. That way, the entire writing and editing process is executed on one page, with team members collaborating by sharing the link.
-
Create a social media plan
Social media has become an integral part of our lives, and it’s hard to imagine any marketing strategy that doesn’t include these platforms.
First, you should decide which channels are the best for your business. Facebook is seen as a good catch-all channel that can provide results for any type of company. Instagram and TikTok have gained steam in the last few years and are more popular among young people, while LinkedIn is ideal for “stiff” industries.
Similar to your blogs, you should decide on textual and visual style when sharing social media posts to maintain consistency. As you’ll already have an outline of articles you wish to create in the following month or so, you can create social media content independently from your blogs.