Content marketing can often be a complex strategy that requires plenty of time and investment, but doesn’t always deliver the desired results. That is exactly where the content marketing roadmap comes in.
Ensuring your content is carefully targeted and well-planned for reaching your main marketing objectives, a roadmap can help to save you some valuable time, money, and energy by streamlining the entire process. With that in mind, here are some important guidelines you should follow when developing your own content marketing roadmap to accelerate success:
Perform content research
Start by inspecting your current content – make a list of existing content and categorize it according to the topic. This is a great starting point that allows you to identify any gaps in your catalog.
Then, consider your content’s strong and weak points, paying special attention to pages that deliver the best results. Try to pinpoint the strengths of those pages and aim to increase your chances of success by focusing on closely related topics and combining high-performing content with relevant new posts.
Underperforming content can also highlight some important issues, whether it’s an irrelevance or the need for optimization.
Create a keyword portfolio
The next step would be to develop a keyword strategy. Your objective will be to create a list of great keywords that are relevant to your company and likely to encourage organic traffic among your target audience.
You can do this yourself, by brainstorming potential keywords and then narrowing your list down to the best possible candidates.
Consider both the obvious keywords as well as other related topics that might interest your target market. You can leverage helpful keyword research tools as well.
These solutions will give you the most suitable and relevant keyword options, but they will also provide important information such as the competitiveness and performance of keywords.
Develop a content strategy
Your chosen keywords will ultimately have to be implemented into content in order to deliver optimal results. But before the content can be created, you will have to develop a strategy for this aspect as well.
This often involves considering the needs of your target audience, your unique selling points, the problems you can solve, the formats you will choose, the channels you will publish on, etc.
As this can be quite a complex process, hiring a professional content strategy agency may be the best course of action. These experts will be able to connect your business with your target audience through high-quality and engaging content tailored to your needs.
Ideate and prioritize topics
If you don’t have a content strategy developed, shift your focus towards potential topics that can be used for generating great content and implementing high-performing keywords.
Brainstorm several topics for each keyword, and then create a list of related subtopics for every topic area. You can do this by making a mind map or simply googling your chosen keywords and seeing which topics come up. Once you’ve come up with enough topics, prioritize them to see which ones you should address first.
Calculate the effectiveness of topics by focusing on difficulty scores, search volume, and competitor positioning.
Consider the taxonomies
Taxonomies are classification systems used for organizing content. They allow you to group content together so it can be used and found easily, starting with broader themes before getting more specific.
Think of your taxonomies as organizational charts with a couple of primary content themes at the top.
Every theme will have several topics, and every topic will have several subtopics. While your topic ideas might have come from keywords, try not to organize your taxonomy around them. Instead, prioritize the needs of your readership to increase your chances of success.
Create content briefs
Content briefs will be the final step in your content roadmap creation. They represent summaries of individual pieces of content you plan on creating, including titles, topic areas, keywords, target audiences, tones, and formats.
Briefs are the main tools you will be using when communicating with content creators and editors, helping to ensure everyone is on the same page regarding content goals.
To create an effective content brief, begin with a working title and a summary of the main points. Then, determine the primary keywords and the target audience, before finally suggesting a preferred format and tone.
Content marketing can be a challenging field to navigate. In order to turn your vision into reality, follow the guidelines above and create an effective content roadmap that will lead you to success.
