8 Steps to Developing an Effective Content Strategy Workflow

You won’t reap the full benefits of your digital marketing strategy without having exceptionally high-quality content to draw and retain prospects on your website or social media channels. You should aim to build a comprehensive content strategy that boosts your overall SEO strategy and, ultimately, elevates your bottom line.

Building this type of content requires time, cooperative thought, and proper management, and that’s where the content strategy workflow comes into play. In essence, content strategy workflow is an established procedure by which content is researched, built, reviewed, and executed. This sort of workflow can help you develop new content that fulfills the needs of your business and utilizes the content you have built fully.

In this step-by-step guide, we will discuss how you can develop an effective content strategy workflow.

What Is a Content Strategy Workflow?

A content strategy workflow defines the roles and responsibilities of the team members instead of just providing a repeated template for how good-quality content moves from request to return briskly. Plus, it also specifies every step in the entire content creation process. At the end of the day, your content quality will only be as good as your content creation team’s collaborative understanding of how it should be made. Since creating content is a recurrent affair, every member must know how to fuel ideas into results.

Bringing great ideas to the table during a brainstorming session doesn’t really matter to SEO gains if they never manage to turn into feasible content. This can occur easily if there is no established system in place to lead those great ideas to fruition. From ideation and research to the execution stage, your content strategy workflow lines up every team member with their individual roles in each project. It provides a straightforward and repeatable process through which every great future idea can reach the implementation stage.

So, without wasting any time, let’s dive into the steps of developing an effective content strategy workflow.

Step 1: Determine Your Goals

It is crucial to have a goal before getting started with anything, whether in business or life. Without knowing where you have to go, how will you find out the best way to reach there? So first things first – you must set clear-cut goals for your team before you start working on crafting your content strategy workflow.

It is also essential to bear in mind that goals are variables, and so are the ways your team might adopt to accomplish them. Different businesses have a different idea of success, and not every project will aim at achieving the same results. For example, you might begin with a primary goal of building brand awareness, and later that goal might smoothly transform into boosting conversions.

Now the method you employ to build content around both these goals will change with the shifting goal. Therefore, it is always a good idea to prepare your team for versatility from the very beginning. Here are some very common content strategy goals that businesses typically start with:

• Generate brand awareness
• Boost conversions
• Increase followers and connections on social media platforms
• Build brand loyalty
• Educate the target audience on their products or services

Maybe currently, your business’s focus is on the marketing funnel, and you want to define content goals around the different stages of the funnel. Now, this can look like anything from building personalized tutorial videos and how-to posts to publishing case studies. The point here is that the more specific your goals are, the more clear your path to achieving them will be, and therefore, the more unique and effective your content will be.

Step 2: Conduct a Content Audit

As you define the goals of your team, you will have to find out what you have in terms of content that may help you in achieving them. Conducting a qualitative content audit every year can impart valuable insights on where you need to pay more attention, and what’s working perfectly fine. 

Businesses must understand that content is never concluded, never apart from susceptible changes, and never a fixed unit. Even the best of the best content which drives the most traffic to your website should be regularly reviewed, improved, and assessed. You should make it an inbuilt part of your content strategy workflow to visit your content to evaluate its strengths and weaknesses routinely.

Moreover, running a content audit will help you determine places where you can potentially reuse your existing content to target new goals. You can also use traffic analytic tools to shape your KPIs (key performance indicators) and refine your content better.

Step 3: Research and Ideate Content

Brainstorming new ideas isn’t that easy and fun always as it might sound. Your content strategy workflow’s research and ideation stage should be customized to the type of creativity that is flexible and involves incorporating imagery, strategies, and technologies. The countless ways in which you can ideate content topics should be a constantly growing list of possibilities that all the team members are happy to contribute to, modify, or suggest changes.

Here are some ways you can generate engaging topics for your content strategy workflow:

• Implement creative thinking to approach old topics in new ways.
• Use a keyword gap analysis tool to find out what’s working for your competitors.
• Brainstorm with parameters to make sure that no great ideas are pulled back or scared out of the room due to criticism.
• Use a bit of newsjacking and see which piece of content might perform better at a particular time because of its connection with the latest happenings in the world.
• Transform curiosities and questions regarding your industry into distinct ideas.

Step 4: Outline Content

Once you have prepared a list of content ideas and have buy-in from your team, the next thing you need to do is have a guideline in your content strategy workflow that deals with how those great ideas get appropriately elaborated. It is of utmost importance that your content ideas appear in a format that suits their characteristics best. However, if you are starting afresh or want to save time on acquiring high readability scores, you can use content templates available online.

It might be essential to test a few possible outlining methods to find out the kind of content you need to create. You can also build an editorial calendar that tells what needs to be made and when.

Another approach is to make a bullet list of the various types of content available to build so that the potential fits can be concluded more clearly. You might want to consider some of these:

• Blogs
• Webinars
• Ebooks
• Interactive elements
• Infographics

Step 5: Build and Optimize Your Content

Once you are done with the outlining phase of your content strategy workflow, it’s time to identify ways to optimize the content styles you have chosen. Optimizing your content is, if not more, just as crucial as its original and on-time production because it will determine the amount of profit that a particular piece of content will serve to your business. In addition to this, remember that this step goes for the existing content on your website too. Think of it as a ‘content refresh’ activity. Any tactics you employ in producing new content must be succeedingly manipulated into what’s working on your site already.

Utilizing one of the popular content optimization tools can take the tedium off your shoulders and also save a great deal of time. However, there are some proven tips that can help you fine-tune your content to maximize its potential and get better results:

• Adding keywords in the opening paragraphs – Ideally, you must include your keyword term or phrase within the initial 100 words of your piece of content. But make sure that it blends in naturally without using any cleverish self-promotion.
• Take up a mobile-first attitude – Since Google’s, as well as other search engine’s main interest, is providing the best possible service to mobile users, pay attention to how your content will shift across various mobile devices.
• Utilize imagery and videos – Using something as simple as a graph, timeline, or infographic can make your piece of content easy-to-digest and hence improve its effectiveness.

Step 6: Publish and Promote Your Content

Even the best content piece in the world won’t matter if it fails to reach the right audience.

Targeting your audience should be a built-in goal in the foundational structure of your content strategy workflow, irrespective of what project you are working on currently. However, based on your industry, goals, age of your business, and organization culture, the distribution, and promotion of your content might vary from project to project.

Here are some practical examples of how to publish and promote your freshly made content:

• Tap your readers by providing easy repost options.
• Share your content on social media platforms more than once.
• Share your new content with your business’s email list.
• Form partnerships as much as possible.

Step 7: Evaluate Your Results

Keeping an eye actively on the progress of your content should become your second nature. You would want your content strategy workflow to deal with the direct and round-the-clock tracking of your newly created pieces of content. Content marketing ROI lets you imagine how much you have spent on the content and how much revenue it has produced in return.

Beginning with a clear picture of what comprises success lets you know whether or not you have achieved your goals for this particular content piece and what needs to be improved.

Your content marketing ROI will evaluate the following common metrics:

• Organic traffic
• Conversions
• Leads
• Shares on social media
• Audience engagement
• Time on-page
• Return on investment
• Backlinks

Step 8: Hone the Process and Start Again

The best part about a solid content strategy workflow is that if you are mindful of what you learn every time you use it, it will improve itself. When implementing the steps to different content, write down precise notes. The idea is to learn from what worked and what did not and apply it in your next project.

Did you discover content that generates more conversions as compared to others in a particular format or get an idea from another business that may help you in acquiring more backlinks? When you sit down to work on your next project, be sure to implement everything you have learned earlier. Think of the content strategy workflow as somewhat a “pick your own adventure.” Every time the results will be different based on what, when, and how you chose the paths during the journey.

Conclusion

Whether your business has just started adjusting to this new digital marketplace or is an established entity trying to outshine a competitor, investing in compelling content has become more vital now than ever. In order to make your business stay at the top of the game, it is crucial to have a content strategy workflow in place that learns from itself and keeps refining.