Content Marketing Processes: Everything You Need To Know

While 98% of businesses utilize written content as a part of their marketing strategy, far fewer manage to publish content on a regular, consistent schedule. Unfortunately, erratically published content—the result of the lack of formal content marketing processes—is unlikely to yield the results you’re hoping for.

Consistent brands are the ones who succeed, and what’s the secret to consistency? Establishing strong content marketing processes.

Unsure how to break your content marketing strategy into concrete steps and create an effective content marketing process? This guide will cover everything you need to know about content marketing processes to get started, whether you’re a total beginner or a veteran looking to take your content to the next level.

What we’ll cover in this guide on content marketing processes

Content marketing 101: What you need to know
Step-by-step content marketing workflow
Content marketing FAQs
No time for content marketing?

The Content marketing process 101: What you need to know

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is focused on promoting a business to a particular audience by creating, publishing, and distributing content. “Content” has become a catch-all word because of the various forms it’s taken over the years, and we should expect to see it continue to evolve.

Common digital mediums used by content marketers today include:

Articles/blog posts
Social media posts
White papers/e-books
Newsletters
Images
Videos
Infographics
Webinars
Podcasts
Interactive content (forms, quizzes, etc.)

The most appropriate medium(s) will vary depending on the goals, industry, budget, and target market of your business. However, they all share the same purpose: to stimulate interest in a product or service. Plus, the different types often work great with one another; adding visual content to body text helps a lot with engagement.

The Content Marketing Institute highlights three key characteristics of strong content: valuable, reliable, and consistent. These are crucial criteria your content must meet, meaning you need more than an improvised approach—you’re going to need to invest in content processes.

What does content marketing include?

Content marketing processes are the strategic steps we take to plan, create, publish, and review your content. They’re not the same as a content strategy (the who and why of your content) or content plan (the what, how, and when of your content), although they will overlap!

An ideal content marketing workflow contains the following processes:

Planning: Decide what will be produced, for whom, and by who
Production: Outline and create the first draft of your content
Optimization: Review, edit, and improve your content
Distribution: Publish, distribute, and share your content with your audience
Analysis: Analyze the performance of your content over time
Maintenance: Update and optimize your existing content

We’ll take a detailed look at each of these steps in turn in our step-by-step content marketing workflow.

Why is content marketing important?

Content marketing is vital if you want to drive traffic to your website, acquire new clients, convert new customers, and build authority in your industry. 96% of marketing decision-makers state that content marketing has been an effective marketing strategy for their brand or business.

Consistently publishing high-quality content can afford a business several key benefits related to its online presence, including:

Boosting brand awareness
Improving visibility through search engine rankings
Communicating expertise, quality, and reliability
Building trust with your customers

Also, when you create your own content, or have an agency create content for you, you’re adding to your repertoire of owned media. This is valuable, as you have the most control over it and can repurpose as needed.

What do I need to create a content marketing process?

If you’re new to content marketing, here’s what you’re going to need to get your content marketing processes in place:

Clear goals: What do you want your content to accomplish?
A content management system (CMS)
A project management system (PMS)
An audit of your existing website content

With these in hand, you’ll be able to start crafting a long-term content strategy—an essential overview of the objectives and audience profiles you’re targetting.

Why does this matter? Without a strategy, you’ll likely struggle to build out standardized content marketing processes, which will prevent you from hitting those crucial characteristics and scale up your content.

The ultimate content marketing process: 6 steps

Step 1: Content marketing components for planning and strategy

You might be keen to launch straight into creating your first piece of content—that’s great! But let’s pump the brakes a little.

As we said, it’s essential to take the time to develop a content marketing process—at least for the first few months—to make sure you produce content that will have the best chance of helping you achieve your marketing goals. If you haven’t built and documented your content strategy yet, make sure to check out our guide to building a content strategy.

Once you know who you’re creating for, why you’re doing so, and what you’re hoping to achieve, it’s time to consider what you’re going to create and how.

Ultimately, your target audience will inform the topics, format, and marketing channels you choose. It’s crucial to consider at all stages of the content production process who it is that you are creating content for, as this will help ensure that the tone, style, and delivery will hit home.

At this stage, you’ll want to answer the following questions:

What mediums do I want to use for my content?
What channels do I want to use to distribute my content?
How often do I want to publish new content?
What time and/or budget does our team have for creating content?
What metrics will I use to measure the success of my content?
Who will be responsible for the creation, editing, and publishing of my content?

The answers to these questions will form the foundation of your content plan, which will be a crucial touchstone to come back to as you embark on your content marketing journey.

Step 2: Content production workflow

Often, content production is the first thing that comes to mind when folks start content marketing. With our strategy squared away, we can start creating the content, whether that means writing a blog, recording a podcast, or designing an infographic, and so on.

Content production is an extremely important process, so it’s a good thing we have our plan on hand. Taking the time to outline standards for content creation goes a long way to reduce the time you spend editing—or completely redoing—your content. Avoid vague briefs and get specific about who will be doing what, when, and how.

Decide who will create your content

When it comes to producing your content, you’ve essentially got two options: in-house or outsourcing. When weighing up the right method for your business, consider:

Your content marketing budget
The time and resources you can allocate
The skills of your team (writing, SEO, graphic design, etc.)
How hands-on you want your content marketing process to be

Depending on your answers to the above, you can opt to dedicate internal resources to crafting your content or to outsource your content creation to a specialist.

Build comprehensive content briefs

A content brief offers a writer, designer, or other creator a concrete idea of what to create and how. This step is especially important if you’re bringing on a content service, as you’ll need to communicate your expectations around content type, topic, style, tone, and more.

Offering detailed instructions can help:

Save time/money and increase your efficiency
Reduce misunderstandings around expectations
Ensure your branding is consistent across all your content
Avoid the need for extensive editing, rewrites, or reworks
Consistently produce and publish high-quality content on time

For a piece of written content, a good content brief should include:

The type of content (blog, whitepaper, social post, etc.)
Word count range
The focus keyword
Secondary or tertiary keywords
Clearly defined target audience
Key headings with header tags (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
Notes on branding, language, style, and tone
Notes on internal and external linking requirements

Once your briefs are completed, you’re ready to assign your content. Your content production workflow should outline expectations around turnaround times, deadlines, and submission processes.

Step 3: Content optimization process

Once your content is produced, take a pause. Immediately publishing content after creation wastes a vital opportunity to improve it, and that’s the content optimization stage. Content optimization is all about ensuring your content has the best chance of succeeding, and this step should reflect your content goals.

For example, if you’re chasing a first-page ranking on Google, your optimization processes should reflect this by cross-referencing Google’s guidelines for imagery, video content, and written content. Similarly, if you‘re aiming to offer your audience high-quality educational content, aim to include processes for fact-checking.

It bears mention that for written content, optimization should start during the keyword research phase of content planning for the best SEO results. You’ll want to select keywords with a matched user intent, suitable traffic potential, and low difficulty. For more tips on this process, check out our handy guide to SEO keyword research.

Regardless of the type of content you’re producing, you should perform a quick quality check on any new content. Ask yourself the following questions:

Does the content meet the brief or outline?
Does the content fit branding guidelines (style, tone, language, etc.)?
Is the written content of appropriate length?
Does visual content meet the necessary standards?

Once you’re confident that your content is the best it can be, it’s time to start sharing!

Step 4: Content distribution

Next up, we’ll want to outline how your content will be published, distributed, and promoted. The details will, once again, largely depend on your content strategy, target audience, and content types.

For example, blog content might be published on your business’s website, then shared and promoted via social media. A whitepaper might be linked in your monthly newsletter as a downloadable PDF and distributed to your email marketing list. An infographic and its accompanying copy might be shared on your company’s LinkedIn and other social channels.

Regardless of how and where you choose to share your content, your distribution workflow should outline:

The frequency of publishing and sharing
When content should go live
Who will be responsible for publishing and/or distributing
Guidelines around sharing and/or redistributing content

Creating an editorial calendar to visualize your content schedule is an easy way to keep track of the status of your content.

Step 5: Reporting and analysis

Performance tracking, analysis, and reporting are key components of all content marketing processes. Once your content is live, it’s time to wait and see how it performs! There are a variety of ways to track the performance of your content, so you’ll want to select those that best reflect the goals you outlined in your content strategy.

Content marketing metrics tend to fall into a few key categories: engagement, user behavior, SEO outcome, and company revenue. Popular metrics to track and analyze include:

Website traffic (organic or paid)
Time spent on-page
Return visitors
Likes, upvotes, shares, and comments
Conversion rate
Number of backlinks
Leads generated

For web-hosted content, Google Analytics is a great way to start analyzing your performance. If your content is largely social-based, internal platform metrics also offer a solid starting place. As you expand your content marketing offerings, though, investing in comprehensive reporting and analytics tools can offer more detailed analysis.

Over time, you’ll gain some key insights into what you’re doing well and where you can improve, which will play an invaluable role in informing your future content strategies.

Step 6: Content maintenance

Content maintenance refers to the processes of storing, updating, optimizing, or removing item(s) in your library of content. Aim to audit your content a minimum of once a year, and ideally more often if your business undergoes any major shifts or product updates within that timeframe.

As a part of the audit, take inventory of existing content, analyze key performance indicators, evaluate on-page SEO factors, and prioritize items for optimization. Make a note of the last time the content was updated, keeping this up to date as you work through outstanding optimizations.

Having a visual representation of your content—ideally in a CMS—can help to quickly identify areas for improvement, optimization, or removal.

FAQs about content marketing processes

Will my business benefit from content marketing?

When nurtured, content marketing becomes a flexible, scalable, and long-term strategy that can significantly benefit customer acquisition and retention.

How?

First, content marketing can enhance other marketing channels your business is using. The content you create can be shared on company socials, added to a newsletter, or doubled up as content for your paid ads.

Second, content can educate potential customers. Top-of-funnel content can educate potential customers on topics relating to their search queries, building authority in your brand and leading them closer to a potential purchase or conversion. Similarly, informed customers are likely to extract greater value from your product or service and show higher levels of customer satisfaction.

Third, publishing content is one of the best ways your business can increase its organic search traffic. Search engines place a high value on content that is helpful, engaging, and solves a problem. Focus your efforts on keyword-optimized content that hits these points and you’re off to a great start.

So, is content marketing worth it for your business? If you’re looking to take advantage of its numerous benefits with very little risk, then yes.

How can I come up with relevant content marketing ideas?

If you find yourself lacking inspiration for new content, don’t panic. Consistently delivering high-quality content can leave even the most experienced digital marketers with a bad case of writer’s block.

The fix? Get inspired by content that’s already out there.

You probably have plenty of scope for insightful content, but it can be tough to feel creative without fresh ideas coming in. Regularly engage with other people’s content, whether through social media, blogs, podcasts, or otherwise. Once you’ve got your creative juices flowing, select 4-5 topic ideas.

Then, craft a content cluster around each topic in turn. A cluster involves breaking a larger topic down into several smaller pieces that make use of different angles and mediums. This strategy amplifies a single idea into a month or two’s worth of content. There’s a reason why topic clusters are such a major component of the Ranq content strategy—it works!

How can I create a content calendar?

Committing to a long-term content strategy can be overwhelming, we know. That’s why we recommend building a content calendar to maintain your carefully built content processes.

A content calendar outlines your past and upcoming content in a single, accessible location. Once built out, a content calendar allows you to visualize your strategy, allocate tasks to creators, and update the status of each content item—all essential to ensuring that your whole team is on the same page.

You can create a simple content calendar with a spreadsheet or digital calendar tool. If you want to include automation for statuses and assignments, you should look into a project management tool like Monday or Asana.

How much does content marketing cost?

Content marketing costs will depend on a bunch of different factors: the size of your business, your industry, the nature of your content strategy, and many more. The good news is that content marketing is a very scalable strategy—feel free to start small and build up. Plus, the content you produce will pay you back for years to come.

If you opt for working with a marketing agency instead of in-house, you should expect to pay either a monthly retainer, hourly fee, or project-based fees, which will be outlined by the agency you work with. Specifically, SEO services pricing can vary widely, so it’s worth considering the cost of content throughout your SEO ranking journey.

What if I can’t do effective content marketing on my own?

Content marketing is a tremendous endeavor on your own. The time commitment and expertise required are enough for many businesses to opt for a full-service content marketing agency.

If that sounds like something that your business would benefit from, then you’re in luck—there are a range of accessible options for outsourcing content planning, creation, and even publishing. While we have you, we’d like to offer Ranq as your solution!

No time for content marketing? Ranq will do it for you!

Are content marketing processes getting the better of you? No worries, Ranq can help! From a comprehensive SEO audit of your website to a custom-built content strategy, Ranq is here to help your business gain the visibility it needs to expand. Better than that, our world-class team is at your beck and call whenever you need it—and we’ve been told we’re pretty nice folks to work with.

Ranq will build your content marketing processes for you. To find out more about our end-to-end SEO services, reach out to Ranq today!