Content creation is unarguably one of the most essential components of content marketing. In this section, we’ll examine how to build a thorough plan for content creation and the steps involved in developing compelling content.

Building a Plan for Content Creation

Building a content creation plan relies heavily on your overall content marketing strategy and business objectives. This workflow enables you to breakdown the insights you’ve highlighted in your content marketing strategy into actionable items that will help you create content that works.

Highlight Broad Topics

Broad topics are typically extensive subjects that pique your audience’s interest. Audience and competition research are the activities that can bring such topics to light.

Your aim is to define the broad topics you’d like to cover with your content. In doing this, you can choose to narrow down your focus as you deem fit or as your industry or business type permits.

The key is to look for topics that are not too broad or too narrow, so that you can break them down into a series of sub-topics.

Develop Topic Clusters

Topic clusters are subtopics under broad concepts. You create them after identifying the key subjects you would like to cover.

To do this, you would need to conduct research to find out relevant branches of your broad topics. Your research will include digging up information about the main topics and discovering long-tail keywords you should be targeting.

The point of developing topic clusters is to break down the aspects of your broad subject into digestible chunks. It helps to engage your audience who may have different questions about that specific interest.

It’s also a strategy that enables you to create a web of inbound links within these pages for search optimization purposes. No matter how you look at it, the topic cluster strategy allows you to build strategic short, medium-length, and long-form content around an extensive subject that can improve the online visibility of your brand.

Content Mapping

A content map is a guide that helps you develop content for each stage of your audience’s buyer’s journey. It illustrates the information you need to guide people towards a buying decision.

You begin to create a content map by first examining your buyer’s personas. Next, you select the audience segments you’ll be targeting then identify the buyer’s journey of each one.

What activities do your prospects go through when they discover a problem right up to when they solve it? What information do they need to successfully perform each action and move to the next one? How can you speed up their journey from one stage to the next?

These are some of the questions that need answering as you try to find out topics relevant to each phase of your audience’s buyer’s journey.

As earlier mentioned, it is important to note that you need to answer these questions for every buyer persona you’re targeting. The reason is you’d be creating content to cater to the varying needs of each of your personas at different stages in their buyer’s journey.

Develop Pillar Pages

As their name suggests, pillar pages are comprehensive content pages that hold together all the content on your blog.

A pillar page contains content that examines a broad topic and its many parts. Hence, it houses several subtopics. The general topics and subtopics pillar pages address are concepts you’ve identified as relevant to your target audience.

The essence of building pillar pages is to create a central focus for your content creation process and to offer in-depth information on selected topics on one web page. They also serve as link carriers that point to your subtopic pages.

This will aid your audience’s navigation of your site and improve your SEO growth. If you haven’t realized already, what you are currently reading is an example of a pillar page on the topic of content marketing.

Note that it is important to regularly review and update your pillar post to include any new stand-alone articles on that particular topic. That way, you will ensure that you are fully utilizing your resources.

Conduct Content Gap Analysis Often

A content gap analysis involves examining available content for deficiencies. It should be a mainstay of your content creation strategy for several reasons. For one, it shows you what needs to be done to create something better than what your competitor has.

There are two ways to conduct a content gap analysis. You can either scrutinize your portfolio or your competitor’s for loopholes.

It’s advisable to do both periodically since they expose you to different opportunities to improve the overall quality of your content.

As you go about your analysis, keep your audience’s goals and needs in mind. After all, the point of this analysis is to figure out how to create better materials for your audience.

The Content Creation Process – A Step By Step Guide

The content creation process is a system involving reliable steps you can follow to create quality content.

Keep in mind that the results for each content piece will vary. Some will be hits, some misses and others somewhere in between.

Such variation in results can stem from several factors, some of which may be totally out of your control. However, having more hits than duds is down to following a process that ensures you effectively harness factors within your control that make for excellent content.

Following a predefined process will allow you a better chance to consistently create content that wins.

SEO Research

SEO research is vital to validating the worth of content topics you identified when creating your buyer’s persona and coming up with your content marketing strategy. For instance, when you outlined these targeted subjects, you may have based them on the perceived goals and needs of your audience.

But that’s just your perception; it doesn’t always see the full picture. Some of these topics may, in fact, rank low on your audience’s hierarchy of needs and goals.

As such, creating content for these topics would mean that you may not get the results you are hoping for.

At other times, the problem could be that your audience is running searches using keywords different from the ones you are targeting.

However, by running simple keyword research, you can find out the volume of people searching for your outlined terms. This way, you’ll identify the keywords that are worth your efforts.

Also, keyword research will enable you to strategically choose topics to rank for. Some keywords are highly competitive. You have tons of websites writing about them, including those with high domain authority.

Choosing such keywords, especially if you’re just starting out, might be unproductive. Your content will likely be buried beneath the pile of similar works published on high authority websites.

But by looking for less competitive keywords, preferably those with lower search volume, you have a better chance of ranking for them and building your domain authority from there.

SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush will give you in-depth keyword analysis, such as monthly search volume.

Ideation

In the ideation stage, you brainstorm ideas on how to develop your content based on the chosen keywords. Although this process can seem daunting, it can be significantly simplified by content marketing and content creation strategies.

This is because both plans contain vital factors that will influence the stories you choose to tell and, to no small extent, how you tell them. Such factors include knowledge about your target audience and its content preferences, a description of your brand voice, etc.

Once you get the recurring factors out of the way, you can focus on locking down your content’s creative angle. This would include your plan on how to present a specific content piece.

The idea here is to determine the most effective means to communicate your message and achieve your set objectives.

You’ll be concerned with surgical details like the look of your article’s intro, the storytelling techniques you’ll apply, the structure and flow of your outline, etc. You’re looking to tie all these details together to create a predefined experience for your audience when it interacts with your content.

Creation and Editing

Here’s the part many are eager to delve into, but few actually get right.

The creation stage isn’t where you throw out all relevant data and focus squarely on writing about your topic. On the contrary, it’s the point you apply insights from all your research to create something deserving your audience’s attention.

The first step is keeping in mind an image of who you’re writing to. Have your target buyer’s persona in mind. Give this fictional character a name if you want, then write with the aim to genuinely help this person.

This will ensure you pay more attention to every part of the content and its contribution to your goal to provide value to your audience.

As you write, stick to your brand voice. Don’t forget that you aren’t just trying to pique your audience’s interest.

You’re also attempting to build brand recognition, and that requires consistency in tonality. You don’t want to sound unlike yourself.

As such, stick to the language that you feel would represent your brand well.

It is also important to account for little details such as clarity, simplicity, and conciseness because they matter. Pay attention to these factors when you are drafting and editing your message.

Also watch out for your grammar, sentence length, punctuations, etc. Don’t fret; you can always enlist the help of editing tools like Grammarly and Hemingway Editor.

Publishing

Now you are ready to let your audience see what you’ve made. All you need to do at this stage is to give your work another once-over, tie up any loose ends, and click “publish.”

It is recommended that you stick to a publishing schedule by outlining days and times you’ll post new content. It’s one way of building a community of loyal content followers and introducing structure to your content creation efforts.

With a Content Management System, adhering to a structured publishing timetable is even easier since you can schedule posts and have them drop on the right platform at the desired time.