Content marketing encourages organic traffic and boosts search rankings, making it an important part of any digital strategy. However, creating content that provides value to visitors and attracts your target audience can be a challenge without a well-defined content development process in place.
In this piece, I’ll show you the best practices top bloggers, content creators, and marketers of all types use to create an effective content development process that turns business goals into reality.
Whether you want to optimize your current content development process or build one from scratch, you’ll learn the steps to plan and create content, from coming up with topic ideas and writing to posting on your website and social media platforms.
What you will learn
- What a content development plan is and why it’s important
- 9 steps for effectively developing your own content
- How to build your content team
- Building and maintaining an effective content workflow
What is content development?
The content development process involves researching, creating, publishing, and optimizing content that will attract your target audience and help you meet your digital marketing objectives.
Sometimes referred to as your content strategy, your plan for content marketing will typically involve the following:
- Strategizing and planning
- Audience and topic research
- Writing and creation of visuals
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Publishing content
- Content promotion
- Performance tracking
Why is developing content important?
Developing content is important because it provides value to your target audience, establishes your brand, and enhances your SEO rankings. This can lead to higher organic traffic and business growth.
Understanding the characteristics, needs, and behavior of your target audience through audience research is crucial for effective content development.
For example, Zapier applied a meticulous content development strategy that saw its organic traffic quadruple in just three years, growing from 1.19 million visitors in November 2020 to 4.8 million in November 2023.
They saw a huge impact by changing the strategy behind content development and speaking directly to users’ needs.
This goes to show the importance of an effective content development process.
In addition to improved SEO results and an increase in organic traffic, a strategic content development process provides several other benefits, including:
Creating a streamlined content marketing workflow
A content development plan makes creating and optimizing content much more manageable by eliminating redundancies and automating processes.
It lays out the goals, strategies, and tactics of each item to be created, including who will produce it and the timeline.
Additionally, your content development plan will create a well-defined workflow that will ensure consistency in quality and regular output. It is crucial to have the team on the same page to maintain consistency and efficiency in the workflow.
Reducing costs and increasing ROI
A good content development plan can save time on content creation and reduce production costs by minimizing waste, more efficiently allocating resources, and leveraging cost-saving tools.
It ensures each piece of content is utilized on the channels that will maximize its return on investment (ROI) while ensuring time and money aren’t wasted on inefficiencies.
A content development process will also contribute significantly to your long-term financial goals by driving sustained organic traffic growth and improving your brand's reputation.
Scaling content production
Your content development plan will also make scaling easier, as it will include clearly defined processes for identifying gaps in your existing website content, and for planning, developing, and implementing new content.
In much the same way an assembly line facilitates quicker manufacturing, creating and using templates, guidelines, and automation will help you create content efficiently without sacrificing quality.
9 steps for building an effective content development process
Once you understand the basics of content development – and why it’s important to have a clearly defined plan, it’s time to get into the nuts and bolts of creating your own.
To help with this, we’ve created a simple 9-step plan you can follow to create your own content development plan.
1. Set content goals
To maximize the impact of your digital content, you need to have measurable goals you’re trying to achieve.
Start by asking the following questions.
Are you looking to increase your site visitors or generate more leads? Do you want social shares and other engagement, or do you want to establish your site as an authority in your field?
From here, you’ll want to set SMART goals. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, all necessary for accurately defining what you’re hoping to accomplish and by when.
For example, if your goal is to increase non-paid visitors to your website, you’ll want to use organic traffic numbers as a measuring stick.
Here are three examples of SMART goals in content marketing:
- Increase monthly blog traffic by 25% within six months.
- Gain 1,000 new email subscribers in three months.
- Improve social media engagement by 30% over the next four months.
2. Create buyer personas
Before you start creating content, you should clearly know who you’re targeting. This starts with a buyer persona, which is a representation of your target based on market research and data.
You will probably have more than one persona to target.
This is a critical step in any content development plan, as it helps you understand the people you’re going after.
Begin by analyzing your existing customer base. Find out as much as you can about them. Go beyond basic demographic information like age and job title and find as much as you can about their:
- Online behavior
- Content and communication preferences
- Pain points and challenges
- Goals, needs, and interests
There are a number of ways you can gather customer-related data, including via social media, surveys, or other forms of market research. You can also use analytics tools like Google Analytics or your CRM data.
Once your research is completed, look for commonalities and break your audience into segments.
There are many persona templates online that can help you organize this information, such as Hubspot's persona-building tool.
3. Map out your content funnel
A content funnel is a strategic plan that aligns specific marketing content with each stage of the buyer’s journey, guiding potential customers from initial awareness to final conversion.
It is generally broken down into three stages:
Top of Funnel, or ToFu—In this stage, your content seeks to attract new leads and potential customers. Content types useful for ToFu targets include blog posts, social media, online ads, infographics, and how-to guides.
Middle of Funnel, or MoFu—This is where you educate your targets about your offering and demonstrate how it solves their pain points. By this point, the target has moved past the awareness stage and wants more information. Consider using whitepapers, checklists, data breakdowns, and long-form videos here.
Bottom of Funnel, or BoFu—This is the conversion stage in which your content seeks to encourage sales or other conversions. The customer retention process or anything post-sale also falls into this stage. Use content like case studies, reviews, testimonials, competitor comparisons, and use cases to maximize conversions.
4. Build a content calendar
A content calendar is a detailed schedule that outlines what content will be produced, who will create it, and when it will be published.
It helps maintain consistency, overcome writer's block, and track performance.
Perhaps the most important reason to use an editorial calendar is to ensure your team stays organized about deadlines and content production.
With a content calendar, there will never be any question of when something is due or who is responsible for what. Workloads will be more predictable, and you’ll be able to spot and address logjams before they disrupt your process.
Specialized content calendar software like Trello exists, but many people find it just as easy to maintain in Google Sheets calendar.
5. Create a content plan
Next, it's time to build your content plan.
An effective way to plan your content is by using topic clusters.
88.6% of Surfer users consider topic clusters a very important part of their SEO content strategy.
Creating topic clusters involves generating core topics and related subtopics that interlink to demonstrate comprehensive coverage.
Generating creative and relevant content ideas is essential for achieving these content goals. This includes methods such as brainstorming sessions, leveraging team insights, and analyzing existing search results to develop content that aligns with user search intent and serves the target keyword.
Start by gathering your team to brainstorm broad topics relevant to your industry. These should be significant themes that align with your business goals and audience interests.
You can also use Google autocomplete, the people also ask section, and related searches to identify further topics.
Next, break down your core topics into smaller, related subtopics.
You can do this manually or use a content research tool such as Surfer's Topic Explorer.
For instance, Surfer has identified 24 topics related to "time management". These topics are further broken down into subtopics.
Surfer also shows important topic data, such as the average keyword difficulty and search volume. This helps you prioritize clusters and keywords.
As a general rule of thumb, prioritize clusters with a decent search volume and low-to-moderate ranking difficulty.
Now that you have planned your content clusters, it's time to get to writing the content.
6. Write your content
“Content is king.” That’s an old marketing adage that should be updated for the 21st century to read “Quality content is king.”
Google is trying to find the webpages that best answer a user’s query. So, it values helpful, reliable, people-first content, rather than sneaky attempts to game the algorithm.
To create great content, you should write every article to provide value to the end user.
That starts with identifying the keyword's search intent. To do this, look at the SERPs of your target keyword.
If we look at the SERPs for "time management tips", we'll see that the top ranking articles are informative listicles.
To rank for such a keyword, you should also create an informative "Top X tips" article.
Alternatively, you can easily identify the search intent for any given keyword using Surfer's keyword research tool.
Content writing takes time and skills. Good news is you can rely on AI content writing tools to help with that.
Search engines like Google don't care whether your content is produced by humans or AI—as long as it is helpful to users.
With an AI writing tool like Surfer AI you can write an article draft in just a few steps.
All that's left to do is humanize the AI content by adding your personal insights and tone of voice.
7. Optimize for search engines
When crafting your article, including related keywords throughout the content is essential.
This helps search engines understand the intent and context of your page, ensuring it matches relevant search queries.
By strategically placing these keywords, you enhance your content's visibility and ranking potential.
You must include your keywords in four main areas for SEO purposes:
- URLs—Use concise, descriptive URLs that incorporate your main keyword.
- Page title—Including your primary keyword in the title can help Google crawlers and human visitors quickly determine the page's contents.
- Header tags—Using header tags, you can prioritize the importance of each keyword in your content. H1 tags should include the primary keyword, while h2s, h3s, etc., should use secondary keywords.
- Body content—Including relevant keywords naturally throughout your content's body helps search engines understand the context and intent of your page, improving its chances of ranking higher for those terms.
You can easily find relevant keywords on Surfer's Content Editor.
The Auto-optimize feature allows you to add these keywords throughout your content's body and header tags with just one click.
8. Promote your content
Once you have finished creating your content, optimized it for Google, and hit "publish," it’s time to tie it into the goals you established in step one.
You can take various approaches to promotion, including paid promotion like PPC advertising, commercial promotion on websites like Reddit or YouTube, or influencer marketing.
You can also share it for free on your social media channels and as answers on community forums like Quora.
What works best for each type of content will depend on the goal you’re trying to accomplish with it.
Analyze each piece to determine its optimal distribution strategy. You may have a specific platform for which the content is intended.
Still, it’s always a good idea to use an omnichannel approach, in which you use social media, blogs and emails to amplify your message's spread.
It’s also a good idea to build relationships with industry experts who can share your content with their audiences, increasing its reach and generating important backlinks that will help your search engine ranking.
9. Monitor your content's performance
Your content is now live, you can relax and forget all about it, right? Absolutely not.
It’s time to focus on tracking performance using the KPIs you established in step one.
Try to identify what is causing your content to perfom well or not and adjust accordingly.
You can utilize tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics to monitor key metrics such as:
- Organic traffic
- Click-through rate
- Impressions
- Bounce rate
- Key search queries
- Audience demographics
You can then leverage tools like Surfer's SEO Audit to identify areas of improvement.
You should regularly perform content audits to ensure you’re not missing on any opportunities.
Building your content development team
Successful content development is an intensive process that requires strategy. It also requires several roles to be fulfilled.
Larger companies often have entire teams dedicated to content, with each person responsible for specific duties. In a smaller business, a single person may be responsible for all of them.
Whether you’re operating solo or as part of a team, there are vital roles that need to be filled, including:
- Content strategist—This person plans, builds, and optimizes the strategy for targeting an audience and achieving SEO goals.
- Content/project manager—This role executes the strategy by assigning tasks to the correct creator. It also monitors workloads and progress to ensure projects are completed on time.
- Content creator (writer, designer, etc.)—This includes writers who create blog posts, designers who create infographics or other images, video production staff, and anyone else who creates content.
- Content editor – This role is responsible for assigning briefs, proofreading, fact-checking, and publishing content after it has been created.
There is often overlap between these positions, with individuals contributing to several aspects of the development process. If your team is larger than one, it is important to hire people with complementary skill sets and allow them to focus on what they do best.
Aligning team members with the documented process is crucial to ensuring effective collaboration and seamless execution.
When everyone understands their roles and responsibilities within the workflow, misunderstandings are minimized, and productivity is enhanced.
Enhancing your content development workflow
Your content development process should not be set in stone. It’s important to revisit it from time to time to ensure its effectiveness.
Start by mapping out each step of your current content development process, from brainstorming ideas to publishing and promotion—document who is responsible for each task and the tools used.
Next, analyze the workflow to identify any bottlenecks or inefficiencies. Look for stages where delays frequently occur or where team members have overlapping responsibilities.
Use this analysis to streamline the process, ensuring clear roles, deadlines, and communication channels.
As part of this process, it’s a good idea to also evaluate your business goals and metrics to identify content gaps and areas where you can improve.
Continuously refining your content marketing strategy will further enhance your content development workflow.
Key Takeaways
- Content is essential for attracting your target audience, enhancing SEO rankings, and driving organic traffic.
- Define clear, SMART goals to ensure your content aligns with your business objectives.
- Create detailed buyer personas to tailor your content to your audience's needs and preferences.
- Align your content with the buyer's journey stages—Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).
- Maintain consistency and organization by scheduling content creation and publishing.
- Focus on providing value and meeting the search intent of your audience.
- Use relevant keywords strategically in URLs, titles, header tags, and body content.
- Utilize various promotion strategies, including social media, PPC, and influencer marketing.
- Regularly track key performance indicators (KPIs) and adjust your strategy based on data insights.
- Ensure you have the right roles filled, from strategists to content creators and editors, to execute your content plan effectively.
- Revisit and refine your content development process to address inefficiencies and align with evolving business goals.
Conclusion
Creating a robust content development process is crucial for any business aiming to achieve its digital marketing goals.
By setting clear objectives, understanding your audience, and maintaining a consistent workflow, you can produce high-quality content that drives organic traffic and enhances your brand.
Remember to continually monitor and refine your strategy to stay ahead in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
With the right team and tools, your content can become a powerful asset in achieving sustained business growth.
