A content roadmap is used for leading your content strategy in the right direction and keeping your efforts and teams on track.
Content roadmaps can serve as brilliant guides, but their creation is often difficult, considering the high number of moving parts they entail.
Timelines, funnel stages, content types and ideas, team roles, and workflow guidelines are just some of the many aspects you have to consider.
With that in mind, here are some ways you could simplify this process and create a strategic roadmap that will set you up for success:
Table of Contents
Create a marketing mix
A content marketing mix represents creating and distributing relevant content that fulfills the specific needs of your customers at every stage of their buyer journeys.
Ensuring you have content for every funnel stage and customer persona is vital for increasing content effectiveness and avoiding any gaps that competitors may fill.
But to create a good content marketing mix, you have to lay a solid foundation first. This can be done by creating buyer personas for each customer type, detailing the journey from having a need to making a purchasing decision, mapping out marketing funnels, etc.
Conduct an audit
The next step would be to inspect your existing content marketing strategy and pinpoint any gaps that you may fill with future content.
For a thorough assessment, examine your content critically and add the necessary information to every piece of content, such as topics, publication dates, marketing funnel placements, originality and quality grades, degrees of value, and difficulty levels in terms of required resources and research.
After that, conduct an analysis of your competitors’ content to gain further insights.
Brainstorm new ideas
Thinking of new content ideas can often seem like a complicated task, but there are actually a number of different ways you could find some inspiration.
For example, you could ask internal customer service and sales teams for recommendations based on their experience, or even ask your audience directly to improve your customer success.
Websites such as Reddit and Quora can also give you insights into common consumer questions, as well as Google’s “People also ask” section.
Similarly, you can search through your competitors’ content for any potential gaps, or simply follow the latest news and trending topics.
Hire professional help
Whether you can’t seem to come up with the right ideas or you simply need some additional help throughout the process, working with industry professionals can always be a good idea.
For instance, you can hire content strategy experts to streamline the roadmap procedure for you. These industry professionals will be able to connect your target audience with your brand through excellent content.
From content roadmap strategy and creation to training and performance tracking, the right services will help your brand fulfill all the necessary needs and objectives.
Design your workflow
When the time comes for posting your content, you should have a specific content workflow established to follow the content as it moves between stages. This can be of great help for streamlining your operations and optimizing your content strategy.
To create the right workflow, consider common actions such as selecting a topic, doing research, outlining, writing, reviewing, editing, approving, publishing, promoting, optimizing, and updating.
Customize this workflow according to the needs of your business, and then assign critical roles to specific teams. An editorial calendar can also be of help for content production.
Set specific goals
Before you can finally begin creating content, ask yourself what you want to achieve with each piece.
Is your objective to attract new customers and drive site traffic? If so, that piece of content should be part of the awareness stage, covering more general topics.
In case your marketing mix requires more content in the decision stage and you want to close sales, it may be better to develop more detailed, product-specific content that answers the final questions your consumers might have when making their purchasing decisions.
Optimize your content
Once your content has been created and published, the final step will be to optimize it. This could mean different things depending on what you want to optimize for, such as user-friendliness, search, or social media engagement.
A couple of ways you could improve your content include trying different distribution channels according to buyer personas, recycling successful content in various media, trying new content types and promotion methods, developing a content series to break down larger topics into smaller pieces, leveraging A/B testing tools, including SEO tactics into your content strategy, and more.
Use analytics to see what is working, and shape future content accordingly.
Wrapping up
Prioritizing content is a great way to enhance your organic efforts and supplement the paid ones, which is why creating a detailed road map is so important for the long term. Use the guide above to make better decisions, improve ROI, and reach success with your content.
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Brainstorming new ideas definitely gives you a glimpse into new, fresh strategies Mike. I am always keeping my ear to the cyber street through Google, Twitter and your mentioned Quora and Reddit for content ideas.
Clients and customers bring bloggers ideas but people outside of your readership also supply open-minded content creators with an endless stream of ideas, via their questions, concerns and comments. Learn to be where they are, listen closely and you will run a successful content creation campaign.
It’s amazing how much content inspiration you can find by reading through comments, forums, and other digital spaces. So many questions seeking answers. Why not answer them within your content strategy and score major points with your target audience?