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Is your content development process scalable? Find out as we walk through an 8-step content development process and grab our tips for scaling your efforts!
Content is the backbone of marketing—traditional and digital. As such, it takes a fair bit of work and resources to create content that isn’t just “well-written” but that drives measurable business outcomes. Enter content development.
Content development is content marketing. It’s the whole process of creating and distributing content. That includes:
As a marketer, this probably isn’t news to you. But the question is: How solid is your content development process or strategy? Do you find yourself:
If you answered “yes” to any of these, it’s worth looking into ways to tighten up your process, especially if you’re trying to scale content production.
We’re going to look at the eight steps a successful content development process includes. As we do, see how many boxes you’re ticking with your current process and look for areas where you could improve.
To start, confirm what you know about your goals, performance, and audience. And research what you don’t know. Outline:
And notice that we didn’t say “compile what you know about your audience.” Even if you’ve done some customer research and have a general idea of the outcomes you want to achieve, it’s smart to start from square one.
Challenge what you think you know about your audience and competitors to make sure it’s accurate. Gather some more recent data and intel. Revisit your goals and readjust them if necessary. This will set you up for success in the following steps.
Next, decide what topics your content marketing will center on. Or re-evaluate and readjust your focus if you have an existing content marketing strategy. Some top-notch sources for idea gen are:
With a general idea of the core topics you want to be known for, you can (finally!) put together your official content development strategy.
Pull in the info you gathered in step one. It needs to be clear what your content marketing strategy is looking to accomplish, who you’re creating content for, and who you’re up against.
Beyond that, you’ll need to lay out a plan for reaching your objectives. That includes defining:
But that’s a lot of info, so how do you make it usable for everyone collaborating on content development? Your main strategy doc should be comprehensive but concise; it shouldn’t take an hour to sift through the info every time it's needed. However, you and your content team should have easy access to supplementary info such as a catch-all research doc from step one. That way, additional context is available if needed.
With your strategy in mind, begin drafting the content. Emphasis on “with your strategy in mind,” since it can be easy to stray from your plans if you don’t revisit them often. Make sure to give the content creators you‘re collaborating with (e.g. content writers) enough visibility into the strategy.
Your strategy is research-based; it’s set up to help you achieve your goals with as few road bumps and as little trial and error as possible. Forgetting about it (or convincing yourself that you remember it “well enough”) is like trying to drive cross country with no map. You may get to where you wanted to go but it’ll probably take you longer than necessary. And cause you some frustration along the way.
And, in the case of content, you also risk frustrating your audience. Not surprisingly, that can directly impact your conversion rates and ability to generate the kind of ROI you need from content marketing.
Next, take a step back from being “in the weeds” of creating your piece, and look at it with a critical, strategic eye. Some essential questions to ask include:
After working your way through these and similar questions, you can also do an optimization check on pieces that require it. For example, if you use a tool like Surfer, you can pop your content into the Content Editor to see how well you’ve covered closely related topics and how yours stacks up to existing content.
P.S. If you’re in the market for a killer content optimization tool, we’ve got a great deal for you. Thanks to our partnership with Surfer, you can get your first month for just $1. It’s a no-risk way to try out the software and observe early improvements in your outcomes from SEO.
If the written content is easy-to-read and packed with value, that’s good enough, right? Not always. You’ve got to remember:
So, even if you don’t have a design team at your fingertips, add images, infographics, videos, and other visual assets to your content wherever possible. These assets don’t have to be anything fancy, but they should be meaningful (i.e. reinforce key points) and branded (i.e. not the same 10 stock photos everyone in your industry uses).
At this stage, you can press publish. But just remember that’s not where the process ends. It’s all too common for content marketers to publish a piece, send out a single email newsletter with a link, schedule a few social media posts, and call distribution done.
But content development is a huge investment on the part of your business. And your content has the potential to be a huge asset to your target audience. Milk your content for all it’s worth, and make it as widely available to your audience as possible.
Build ongoing distribution into your editorial calendar. Don’t just schedule all-new content. At a regular cadence, plan to re-distribute content you’ve already poured your blood, sweat, and tears into. And especially your best content—the pieces your audience responded well to, previously.
You’d be surprised at how many marketers don’t keep a close eye on how their content performs. Or on how their performance metrics change over time. As recently as 2020, CMOs who responded to one survey said only 37.7% of their projects use marketing analytics to make decisions.
Who knows how much time and resources they would save—and how much money they would make—if that percentage were closer to 100? But that’s unimportant. What’s important is that you have the opportunity to:
But, again, this all starts with being interested in content performance. And improving pieces that could be performing better and driving more meaningful results for your business. That means learning how to use and make the most of tools like Google Analytics.
Creating and marketing even one piece of high-quality content using the method above takes a fair amount of time, effort, and other resources. Now, multiply that several times over and you’ve got a lot of work on your hands. Content development at scale can be a handful. Thankfully, artificial intelligence can help you handle it (without burning yourself out).
For instance, our AI content generator can help with four of the eight steps we covered: topic generation, writing, optimization, and promotion. Want to see how?
Jasper has more than 50 content-related templates, many of which are great for generating topic ideas. Engaging Questions, Poll Questions & Multiple Choice Answers, and Marketing Angles are all good options. And so is the Blog Post Topic Ideas template.
To use any of these templates, just fill them out—usually with your company name, topic, and a brief description—and click “Generate AI Content.” Jasper will take care of the idea gen; all you have to do is pick out the ideas you like. You can easily generate dozens of ideas in minutes…literally!
As for writing, Jasper’s templates come in handy there too. One of the most popular is the Paragraph Generator, which makes it easy to write focused paragraphs that incorporate relevant keywords for SEO.
All you have to do is give a brief description of your talking points for a paragraph, provide your target keyword(s), and fill in a tone of voice. Jasper will generate a few paragraphs for you to choose from based on those inputs. You can then combine paragraphs you like, make edits as needed, fact-check Jasper’s work, and quickly move on to the next section.
As you saw with Paragraph Generator, some Jasper templates allow you to input keywords, which is helpful when writing SEO content. But to make optimization even easier, Jasper also integrates with Surfer.
Right within Jasper, you can see how well optimized your content is and what on-page elements you should add or remove to improve it. While Surfer requires a separate subscription, it’s worth the cost if search engine optimization is a core part of your content marketing strategy.
Last but not least, Jasper can help with promoting the content you’ve work so hard on. For example, you can use the Paragraph Generator to write an email to your subscribers and then use the Email Subject Lines template to ensure a good open rate. Or a template like Quora Answers to summarize a longer piece of content.
You could then link back to the original content to drive traffic and even generate leads. And these are just a handful of the features in Jasper that can help with content development. To check them out for yourself, sign up for a 5-day free trial. Your first 10,000 words are on us!
Austin Distel is the Sr. Director of Marketing at Jasper, your AI creative assistant. He's also an Airbnb superhost in Austin, Texas. You can follow Austin's adventures around the internet and the world at distel.com.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s.