Steps to successful content development

You might have many skills, but each type of writing requires different approaches and strategies.

Content development is not as simple as sitting down and putting words on a page. Rather, it’s a series of steps that allow you to write a piece that engages the exact audience you’re targeting. Content development combines marketing, research, and writing to produce pieces that stand out in a world overflowing with written information. 

A quality content development strategy comprises all the steps of content creation, from planning and research to promotion, optimization, and performance tracking. It ensures that every interaction your potential customer has with your brand becomes a positive experience and lays the foundation for trust.

What is content development?

Content development is the process of creating content for a website from start to finish. You may have also heard of content developers. The term “content developer” is also used to refer to web developers, but in this article, we’re concentrating solely on the development of content – not design or programming. Content development includes:

• Strategizing and planning
• Audience and topic research
• Writing and creation of visuals
• Search engine optimization
• Publishing
• Promotion
• Performance tracking

All these processes are closely connected and work together to help you build a connection with your target audience and facilitate growth.

Why is content development vital for your business?

The main reason you need a content development strategy is that it can save you:

• Time. Planning lets you meet deadlines and avoid frustration and overwork.
• Effort. You will only create content based on thorough research, and which is tailored to contribute to your business goal.
• Money. You will optimize your content, carefully choose promotional channels, and monitor each piece’s performance to make sure it hits the mark and generates ROI.

To put it simply, a content development strategy is about having an organized process in place. Next, let’s talk about how you can keep it up and running.

Key elements of an effective content development strategy

1. Breaking down the silos

Apart from boosting organizational effectiveness, content development is about teamwork. When you start collaborating with other relevant teams, you’ll be surprised by how many useful ideas, insights and contributions you’ll be able to get. After all, who knows your target audience’s pain points better than customer support or account managers? Who understands purchase blocks better than sales? Draw them into ideation, optimization, or promotion to give your strategy a free boost.

2. Setting measurable goals

You will never get any results from your content without clearly defining what you want to achieve. Knowing your goals (e.g., traffic, backlinks, conversions, or mentions) will set the KPIs for every content piece and help you choose the right style and format for each one.

3. Bringing in discipline

Now let’s get back to the organizational element. When you overlook editorial calendars, content audits, topic clusters, and customer journey mapping, you are essentially just creating content for the sake of it. Stop chaotically publishing content, and design a system that makes your whole team aware of your plans and expectations, their roles and responsibilities, and the time allotted to accomplish your mutual goals.

4. Researching Your Audience

All content development stages from keyword and topic research to external content placement decisions center around an abstract depiction of your potential client and their journey. From first engagement with the brand to conversion into a paying customer. As a result, the more you learn about their demographics, psychographics, interests, and needs, the more high-quality, relevant content you’ll be able to create.

5. Embracing Your Expertise and Identity

Whatever the initial goal is of the content you create, consider that there’s always a second one by default: proving that your business is an authority in its field. People only listen to brands that they trust. If you make false promises or twist statistics, you’ll lose these prospects and your reputation forever. The easiest way to demonstrate your knowledge is by sticking to the areas and topics you know inside out, and supporting your arguments with factual data.

6. Maintaining Consistency

A clearly defined value proposition is the foundation for both your tone of voice and your positioning across all content marketing channels. Therefore, each piece of content you plan should be aligned with these long before it’s created. In addition, from your audience’s point of view, interaction with content is a form of communication. And it’s much more pleasant to talk with someone who is confident and coherent than someone who jumps from one topic to another.

7. Focusing on maximizing impact

2020 has further enhanced the crucial role companies play in creating a positive impact on society and the planet. A Kantar study found that 68% of US consumers expect brands to be clear about their values. This means that it’s getting more and more important for companies to strive to do good, even beyond helping their customers and selling their products. Think about your brand’s overall mission and how you can support and inspire your customers while making our world a little better. Be careful, though; being inauthentic in this area will alienate your prospects forever.

Steps to successful content development

1. Goal setting

To move away from empty phrases, you need to match each of your content ideas to measurable values.

Start by asking yourself some simple questions. For example, ‘what value does this content add?’ If the answer is ‘educates’ or ‘solves a problem’, you may be looking at a potential content piece that introduces your product as a possible solution, or encourages readers to start interacting with it. Other helpful questions to ask yourself include:

• Where will you publish this piece?
• What is the level of expertise of your target audience?
• What will make this content different from the competition?

Tips for goal-setting:

• Set measurable and realistic goals so you can tell whether you’ve achieved them.
• Choose individual goals for each piece based on the content funnel stages, promotional channels, and audience specifics.
• Align your content goals with your overall marketing strategy to make sure content contributes to bigger business objectives and pays off in the end.

2. Audience Research

The easiest way to bring the information about your prospects together is to create a buyer persona profile. To avoid wasting resources, it’s advisable to draw up a template of this profile before you start collecting the data. This will let you focus on the most meaningful characteristics.

These are some of the key pieces of information to include in your buyer persona profile. Here are some of them:

• Demographics (age/gender, location, professional/family status, etc.).
• Psychographics (values, standpoints, and goals).
• Professional/personal goals (beliefs and values).
• Pain points and challenges (obstacles and fears). 
• Impactful factors and information sources (favorite events, influencers, and media).
• Purchasing process anatomy (purchase frequency, decision-making process, etc.)

Audience research tips:

• Your content audience is bigger than just your customer base. Some of them can become your brand advocates, helping you to spread the word and generate more impact with your story.
• Use both qualitative and quantitative data, and gain insights from customer-facing teams such as focus groups, social media, and reviews.
• Utilize all available sources, including unorthodox ones such as your competitors.
• Focus on a particular buyer persona and their specific needs: don’t try to cover all needs and problems with one content piece.

3. Story telling

Study your brand story and figure out what makes you unique. Integrating this in your content will help you to stand out from the clutter. The story is what makes a prospect want to find out what’s next, and become motivated to build a lasting relationship.

Tips for storytelling:

• Stay true to your identity: the internet is full of indistinguishable texts and websites, and people are looking for something special.
• Strive to create a positive impact: stay nice while staying honest.
• Don’t oversell, and focus on value: if you only create content to sell, you risk losing your customers as soon (or even before) they buy.

4. Funnel Analysis

Each piece of content is created not just with a goal, but also for a specific funnel stage. Why so? Because people behave very differently depending on how familiar they are with your brand and how ready they are to buy.

As a result, a product Call To Action (CTA) placed on an educational Top of the Funnel (TOFU) blog post won’t work the same as a CTA on a Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) product landing page. Formats that work for each stage also differ. For example, detailed ‘how-to’ guides can drive a lot of traffic, while videos can generate a lot of engagement.

Funnel analysis tips:

• Make sure all buyer journey stages are covered: break your content down or plan it by funnel stages.
• Look for content performance gaps: introduce ongoing monitoring to make sure your content performance won’t change over time.
• Run A/B tests to find the perfect candidate for each stage.
• Create conversion paths for user acquisition: choose promotional channels in advance to avoid leading people unfamiliar with your brand to a page with a product Call To Action (CTA).

5. Planning

Smart content planning lets you keep all the parties involved in content development on the same page. To streamline your planning process, you can use a visualization tool. It will show the time period you’ve already covered, how many pieces of each format you have pending, and how much effort will be needed to produce them.

Content planning tips:

• Create shared content calendars and plan across topic clusters.
• Link each piece to a marketing campaign, and assign stakeholders and responsibilities for each task.
• Diversify content formats to cater to the needs of different funnel stages and audiences.
• Set realistic deadlines to make provisions for unforeseen issues.

6. Ideation

According to our recent Twitter poll, finding content ideas remains one of the key content development challenges.Finding topics and keywords is a common content creation routine. There are dozens of ways to do this, including, but not limited to:

• Brainstorming with your cross-functional teams.
• Researching your competitors (direct and indirect), as well as popular media in your industry.
• Surveying your customers, analyzing their customer support/sales questions, and working with them directly (think UGC and inviting customers to webinars).
• Looking at popular Google queries.
• Researching top bloggers in your niche and collaborating with influencers.
• Tracking social media conversations.
• Newsjacking.
• Using advanced tools such as Topic Research and SEO Content Template (which we’ll discuss further below).

The main point here is to validate and prioritize your research results. This ensures that you truly understand the user search intent or have a solution to the problem. It’s also about evaluating your ability to create content that’s better than what your competition has to offer.

Content ideation tips:

• Start with your prospects’ real pain points, and focus on long-tail and related keywords that reflect the specifics of the topic.
• Repurpose your own and your rivals’ ideas. Check the performance of the content that already exists and broaden or narrow the topic. In many cases, you will also want to recycle a high-performing topic into a new format; for example, turning a webinar into a blog post.
• Involve departments from across your entire company in your brainstorming sessions.

7. Briefing

Briefing your internal writers seems easier than briefing the external ones, as they can reach out to you for information at any time. However, writers can’t read minds. The more detailed the brief you create, the better the outcome you can expect.

Content briefing tips:

• Include all your goals and metrics. Most writers conduct their own deeper keyword and topic research, hence, they need to understand in which direction they should be heading.
• Offer references and benchmarks. If you are aware of any high-performing (or simply interesting) content on the same topic, don’t hesitate to add the link to the brief. It will help the writer understand the topic and avoid duplication.
• Make sure your writers understand and have access to your brand values, tone of voice, and buyer personas. Also, share your PR and communication policies if needed.

8. Writing

Writing is another routine process that should be approached with respect. There are many well-known best practices, such as checking grammar, analyzing keyword density, and working on improving your content performance.

The latter can be done by using descriptive headlines, adding lists, and leveraging visuals. However, the main point you need to remember about writing is that it is a multistep process.

Start with building the text structure, planning the word count, and defining the tone of voice — and stick to this framework while you write. Tools like SEO Writing Assistant can help streamline this process, as well as assess your content’s readability and SEO-friendliness.

Writing also includes initial editing (performed after the text is finished), as well as one or more rounds of revisions based on the comments of the stakeholders or professional editors.

Content writing tips:

• Make sure your texts are easy to read: check whether your readability score matches your audience’s education level. You should also use H1, H2, and H3 headings to clarify the text’s structure.
• Be stylistically and grammatically correct: use spell-checkers and proofreading tools.
• Maintain a consistent tone of voice: for instance, avoid jumping between the casual and formal styles, as it might make the reader feel uncomfortable.

9. Optimization

Optimization is not only done for SEO purposes. The main goal of Google is to provide users with the most relevant, high-quality results based on their search queries. This should be your goal, too.

Content optimization tips:

• Optimize for people and search engines. Refer to your long-tail and question keywords (and related searches) to make sure that your post both ranks and covers all the questions your readers may possibly have on this topic.
• Ensure that you also truly understand the search intent. Don’t forget visuals and rich media. Try out other unconventional formats to keep your audience engaged.
• Structure your content and improve logic: benchmark your structure, length, headings, and keywords against your top-ranking competitors and find areas for improvement.

10. Promotion

Content promotion should correlate with the goals you set at the beginning. In many cases, promotion is also a paid activity. To distribute your budget wisely, you should align your content piece with a selected promotion channel, and the step of the conversion path it covers.

Content promotion tips:

• Build a content distribution strategy where each piece works as one gear within a well-oiled machine.
• Opt for an omnichannel experience and repurpose content to save recreating it from scratch.
• Nurture relationships with industry experts to gain free placements and authoritative backlinks.

11. Tracking

Tracking your content’s performance requires more effort than just reaping the benefits of the goals you’ve achieved, and reconsidering the ones you haven’t. Tracking should consist of these two intersecting cycles:

1. auditing and updating your existing content;
2. and performance analytics and forecasting.

Our recent LinkedIn poll demonstrated somewhat different results from the Twitter one, indicating that getting leads and generating ROI with content can be even a bigger challenge for some content marketers.

Content tracking tips:

• Track internal and external publications to find out which distribution channels are more efficient.
• Never stop monitoring and auditing your content, as the digital marketing world is volatile. You can easily lose your rankings or miss changes in the search volume of your target keywords. Try out advanced content analytics tools.
• Go beyond Google Analytics with solutions such as Post Tracking, ImpactHero, and Content Audit.

Improving your existing content development process

The perfect content development process has many variables. The question is how to bring your existing process into line with it.

If you have no process at all, then you can build one from scratch following the instructions above. If you already have a well-developed process that needs some improvement, start from the top by looking for the weakest points in your strategy. Usually, these lie in the interconnections. For example, you could be creating content without a clear goal, or promoting every single piece through the same channels.

To illustrate all of these points, here’s some advice based on the key elements of the content development strategy we considered at the beginning:

1. Document your existing process and strategy, analyze the possible bottlenecks, and suggest improvements. For example, do you think your SEO and Content Marketing teams work together, or do they move in parallel, or even in opposite directions?
2. Bring your team together and introduce them to the documented content development process. Add them to the editorial calendar, arrange regular brainstorming sessions, and find a way to marry customer-related data and topic ideas between them. You should also evaluate your content team; maybe you need more people, for instance?
3. Make a list of your business goals and metrics, break them down for each content marketing campaign goal, and increase their granularity. Payments will not be the only metric to look at. Customer engagement, leads, mentions, and referrals are among other goals that can be achieved with content.
4. Sort through your existing and planned content. Audit it and split it by funnel stage to make the gaps more visible. Do you have enough user acquisition techniques in place? At this stage, think about gated content and various list-growing instruments (such as newsletter subscription forms).
5. Redo your in-market audience research and compare the results with your buyer persona profile. You might be creating content for the wrong people, or perhaps their reality has simply changed, which is true for many in the post-Covid world.
6. Build connections with industry experts and influencers to increase your authority and streamline content production and promotion.
7. Return to your audit results and make sure that all the pieces are up to date and aligned in terms of brand tone and messaging. Consider updating those that aren’t if you think they might bring your company (and your customers) value. In some cases, you may want to recreate the content completely and redirect your traffic. Finally, identify your top-performing texts and repurpose them for new formats such as podcasts or live streams.

Assembling your content team

To make sure your content creation runs smoothly, you need a team where each member has a clear role and a transparent scope of responsibilities. Your team may be big or small, but ideally, it should include the following:

• Content Strategist: A professional who manages the content strategy and editorial calendar, and tracks performance. They align content marketing with the overall business goals.
• Content Creators: Writers, designers, and occasionally photographers and video operators. Editors: Content experts who check your content’s grammar, facts, and message, and polish each piece to perfection.
• Community Managers and Influencer Experts: PR experts who monitor your audience engagement and respond to comments. You will need help with reaching out to the media, building relations with influencers, and generating backlinks.

Of course, this is not a definitive list of the people involved in content development. You’ll also need content promoters (who usually belong to marketing teams) and analysts to supply you with content performance metrics.

Content development tools

1. Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator

It is a popular tool which helps you to generate compelling titles for your blog posts and at the same time, you can use it to generate new topic ideas on your niche.

Features:

• You just need to put your keyword in the text field and it will show you various titles and topics which you can choose as per your customers’ needs and preferences.
• You can enter up to 5 words which are related to your blog topic and just click the “Give me Blog Ideas” and it will generate some interesting blog ideas for you for the upcoming 7 days. However, you can unlock the 1 year of service by filling up a few details about you to avail some other powerful features.
• The best part of this tool is that they never share or disclose the blog ideas generated for you with others. Hence, you need not to worry about the originality and uniqueness of your blog posts.

2. Hemingway Editor

It’s one of the essential proofreading tools for writers. This tool helps you write in a simple, clear and meaningful manner by detecting complex sentence structure, the presence of adverbs, difficult words or phrases, overuse of passive voice etc.

Features:

• Improves Writing Style – With the help of Hemingway editor you can construct clear and concise sentence structure, remove complex words or phrases, adverbs, punctuation errors etc. and ensure that the sentence flow is natural and readable that will engage your readers.
• Color-Coded Writing Errors – Hemingway editor highlights the errors in writings by using different color-codes that helps you address the writing issues easily and quickly. For example, if you use any lengthy or complex sentence it will highlight those in yellow color, and if the color is red it indicates you to simplify the sentence structure.
• Publishes Writing – With Hemingway editor you can publish your writings as a draft or live-post on platforms like Medium or WordPress. Additionally, you can import text as HTML code to publish them on any blogging platform.

3. Grammarly

Grammarly is the world’s most popular online grammar checking tool that comes with advanced grammar checking features. It points out grammar mistakes in your sentences by highlighting misspelled words, the wrong context of the words, better vocabulary options to ensure error-free writing.

Features:

• Critical grammar and spelling error checking
• Punctuation, grammar, context, and sentence structure checking
• Better vocabulary suggestion
• Topic-specific writing style checking
• Plagiarism detector which checks more than 16 billion webpages

4. Portent’s Content Idea Generator

Portent’s content idea generator is another powerful tool to generate various compelling content ideas to use in your blog posts and overall content marketing strategy.

 Features:

• You just need to add the keyword in the text box and hit the enter button and it will generate some awesome content titles within seconds.
• If you don’t like the suggested title you can refresh until you find your preferred title and you can get up to 20+ title ideas by doing this.
• Apart from giving you content ideas it also gives some tips to improve your content.

5. Duplichecker

Duplichecker is a free online plagiarism checking tool that checks the uniqueness of the content by analyzing other existing contents on the web. At the same time, it provides a detailed report of whether your content is copied from other online resources or is it 100% plagiarism free.

Features:

• Duplichecker is very easy to use the tool and you can check your text by uploading any .doc or .txt file or you can paste up to 1000 words in the search box and just click on the check plagiarism button to find out a detailed report.
• If you want to check longer contents of more than 1000 words at a time, you need to register yourself.
• With the free membership, you can verify up to 50 documents a day.

6. Google Trends

Google Trends is one of Google’s very useful tools to find out the search volume and popularity of any particular search term over a certain period of time.

Features:

• It provides information about the most trending topics on Google search engine and the geographical information of visitors.
• Using Google Trends you can see what the people of your target market are searching for and write on those trending matters to drive more visitors to your website.

7. Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo is a simple yet powerful tool for content writers to generate content ideas for their upcoming contents. You need to search with a topic and it will show you a list of popular contents around that subject to shape the idea of your next unique content.

Features:

• You will get content alerts for your related keywords whenever new content is published on the web.
• You can analyze your competitor’s content performance and make comparisons.
• Find out the most popular and shared content on various social media platforms and get a detailed analysis report.

8. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer

This tool is essential to create a catchy headline or title for your content that attracts a wide audience to click through it.

Features:

• This tool provides a rating to your title on the basis of sentence structure, grammar, punctuation, spelling, readability, and emotional value which is very powerful to connect with your audience.
• This tool also measures the word count of your title, keywords position etc. It gives you a clear idea of whether your title will create an impact on your audience or not.
• Additionally, Coschedule offers various marketing strategies like social media marketing, email marketing etc. at one place.

9. Calmly Writer

Calmly writer is a professional text editor and tool that lets you focus on your writing by providing a distraction-free and user-friendly interface.

Features:

• Cloud Backup – It provides you cloud backup system that saves your writings whenever you make any changes.
• Import and Export – You can easily import and export various file formats such as HTML, word file, PDF etc.
• Focus Mode – It highlights the paragraph when you edit your content.

Some other helpful tools

• ImpactHero is an automated tool that maps your content to customer journey stages, providing actionable insights and recommendations on improving your content performance. It’s also useful for choosing the right format for each stage or goal.
• Keyword Magic Tool helps you to discover thousands of keyword ideas, and sorts them by search volume, difficulty, available SERP features, and other metrics. 
• Power Thesaurus is an app that helps you find antonyms and synonyms to use in your texts.
• Grammarly is an online proofreading add-on that checks grammar and spelling, and offers advice on improving sentence structure.
• Weava is a Chrome extension highlighter that helps you organize the wealth of information and quotes you may find on websites and PDF files at the ideation stage.

Conclusion

As you monitor the successes, failures, and feedback from content development efforts, you can start to modify your overall strategy. Making iterative changes will help you fuel your distribution strategy with high quality content that always meets the audience’s needs.

Content development is a process, but when done well, it can be an effective tool for businesses. Take the time to go through the proper content development steps.