Using different marketing styles is essential for businesses and freelancers alike. For example, you can build your social media presence, improve your email marketing, or partner with affiliates. What’s clear is that the quality and quantity of your marketing matters.
With content marketing, you can introduce customers to your brand while offering help, opinions, and expertise.
Creating marketing content to publish on your website and as guest posts can be more challenging than it looks. It requires more than just throwing together a couple of relevant bullet points. Content publishers have to consider a host of different elements. They need to review the copy to guarantee it has the essentials to make it stand out to readers.
A content publishing strategy will help make editing and publishing as efficient as possible.
This article will look at what makes a great content publishing strategy and how you can create one to make your workflow more efficient.
Effortlessly export your Google Docs to WordPress with just 1-click.
Get Started Today
Before you post any content, there are specific steps to producing top-notch material. These steps can vary depending on the platform or target audience; thus, you must build a content publishing strategy so that all the necessary steps become second nature. Afterward, then, and only then, should you begin searching for an appropriate data warehouse solution.
Although there is yet to be a set order of content publishing tasks to complete, you want to develop an efficient and streamlined process. Additionally, it reduces delays in your publishing process from repeating the same things multiple times.
Your content publishing strategy may take time and feedback to discover how to create the best flow. Test different strategies to find out what works with your teams and the resources you have available. But you’ll never look back once you’ve found what works for you.
You can use several techniques to create an efficient publishing flow for your content. See the advice below to see how to optimize your content for success.
Without careful editing, no content should reach your blog, social media, or anywhere else. You can get help from online tools to check grammar, spelling, and punctuation errors in your content. These often have integrations for online browsers, proposal creation software, and other files. You should also edit your content to include calls to action. Directing your readers to your products, other blog content, or email newsletter subscription page is essential.
You can even pay for a professional English editing service company like Wordvice to ensure the highest quality of your written piece. They can help you polish your content by checking for grammar and punctuation errors, improving sentence structure, and ensuring overall clarity and coherence.
Be consistent with your use of English. For example, if you write your post using American spelling, stick to this and don’t use British or Australian variants.
You can improve SEO and integrate your WordPress blog into your website by including links within your content. It’ll also maintain the interest of your readers. Internal links should highlight your product and services or direct readers to related content.
Link to reports and research if you include facts or statistics to show your expertise. Make sure these are as current as possible. Avoid linking to outdated research, as it could harm your credibility. Also, if you collaborate with a partner on your content, you may want external links to their pages.
In particular, for blog posts or research reports, adding images can make your content more appealing and help readers interact with your content. Additionally, use images to break up your content, making it more readable and visualizing the points you make. When adding images to your content, it’s important to pay attention to their size, as it can significantly impact both user experience and accessibility. Proper image sizes not only ensure your content looks visually appealing but also improve page loading speed and overall optimization. All these elements are critical for retaining readers and boosting your website’s performance.
Images can include infographics or graphs to back up any facts you include, as well as diagrams or screenshots that illustrate your explanations. You could even create targeted images using software such as Canva.
Use titles throughout your content to structure your copy and lead readers through the content. These should be eye-catching and relevant to the topic, using keywords to state what each section covers.
For skim-readers, these titles help them find what they’re looking for and set out what the content covers. Titles can also impact the SEO of your content. They allow people browsing the internet to find your posts easily.
You need to provide metadata to help search engines classify your content. It’ll display your pages when users search for related topics or keywords, thus directing the right people to the right content. You can create a meta description or title using programming languages such as PySpark data types.
Double-check the length of your meta title and description to ensure the whole thing appears on the search engine results page.
Your audience can react differently to your content depending on when they see it. For example, readers may miss the notification and not engage with it if you send your content at night. So, its important to select the best times to post on Instagram or any social platform. Alternatively, if you publish content during typical break times in the day or the evenings, your readers can interact with it.
So, when working on your content planning and content calendar, it’s worthwhile to factor in timings. Of course, it’ll require testing to find your target audience’s best time of day, but the result will be worth it.
Knowing more about your target audience and which platforms they use can help you promote your content in the right places. For example, using a social media post to direct followers to your written content or sharing audio and video content.
For others, it may be better to include links to a blog post in your email newsletter or send a regular text update. Your target readers are then aware of your content, gaining their interest and introducing them to your brand.
You can use software or apps, such as a Facebook comment moderation tool, to help you moderate comments on social media when sharing content on these platforms.
Setting and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) can show the effectiveness of your current strategy. It can help you learn from your content publishing and make improvements in the future. It may also help to look at more general content marketing surveys to notice the trends and adapt your content accordingly. Another option is to tap into Google analytics to support your content marketing strategy.
Publishing content is an ongoing cycle. While your KPIs may show quantitative data on your content, you should also look at qualitative data. For example, you may know where your target audience likes to interact with you, but are you on board with what they want? Reviewing feedback on any content you create is essential to a long-term efficient flow. Listening to what your customers like – and don’t like – means you can constantly improve your content production.
Good content isn’t just about what you create and how you present it. If you publish regular content, particularly on your website, you should look at A/B testing (also called split testing). A/B testing can show you what works best with your content. You can focus on details such as font type, color, image size, layout, and formatting. It can help you see what your readers prefer and allow you to make any required changes. You can also use it to identify the optimal time to send content, such as emails.
There are two main parts to A/B testing: user experience (UX) testing and design testing. UX testing can cover different aspects of your content. When testing a new campaign for TV packages, for instance, where you place web forms or CTA buttons can help you learn more about user preferences. But, using tools for UX research, such as heatmaps or user session recordings, can provide valuable insights into how users interact with your content and which areas drive engagement. For example, where you place web forms or CTA buttons can help you identify what users prefer. Design testing covers those elements mentioned, such as the placement of images, etc.
So, you now know all the elements involved in creating a good content publishing strategy and an efficient content workflow. How do you move forward and incorporate those ideas and features into your existing plan and content?
You may be keen to change everything with these new ideas. But, the hard fact is that there may be some of your current workflow that works well. So, before making any changes, analyze your existing content’s performance and identify its strengths and weaknesses. Where something works, you may not need to change it at all.
As the old saying goes, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” so either do it manually or use task management to highlight the areas that don’t need fixing and leave them alone. It’s far better and more conducive to building an efficient workflow. So instead, focus on the things that need changing – the easily identifiable weaknesses in your current strategy.
Listen and collaborate with every member of your content team. They’ll be able to help you alter your existing strategy or workflow. Every business is different.
You may have a small or large team. You may have remote workers, and you may use freelancers. However, every member is integral to making your plan successful, regardless of team size.
They’re also the people who can help you identify your strengths and weaknesses. They can also help you plan a more efficient content strategy roadmap. Of course, an opinion shouldn’t exist in a vacuum. The data from every step of your content publishing strategy should inform any roadmap. This way, you get a well-rounded view of what you need to change.
Let’s assume you can salvage your current strategy. But, it would help to focus on areas you and your team can improve on. For example, you may have noticed that your editing stage is falling short, with typos and other errors making it to the final content. This signals a need for improvement in your content optimization process to enhance quality.
Focus on the areas that are ‘worst’ regarding quality and performance. By doing so, you can improve the overall content creation and publishing strategy. Of course, there may be other areas that need slight improvements. But, it would be best if you focused first on those parts of your strategy that are most at fault and need more work.
Now that you know what you want to change (and not change), it’s time to roll up your sleeves and start working. You should now have data from several touchpoints, input from your team, and an idea of what your competitors are doing. You can combine all that information and start executing plans and adjusting your editorial strategy.
It’s about more than simply changing strategy. It can also be about changing the tools and processes you use when creating and publishing content. Be prepared for a trial and error phase, too. What looks good on paper may not work well when applied to your workflow. You should again take feedback from team members on how changes work and be ready to make more changes in the future.
You should also see what parts of your workflow might benefit from automation. For example, automating repetitive tasks, such as scheduling postings, frees up time for your team members. They can then focus on more ‘important’ jobs, such as creation or editing.
There are numerous automation tools that you can apply to different stages of your workflow. For example, implementing a content management system (CMS) within your organization could help. It can make managing all your content more accessible and lets contributors easily create, edit, or publish.
You should adopt a content publishing strategy for your business that suits your style of content and the people that interact with it. So, for example, you’ll create different content for customers than for industry professionals.
Be ready to experiment with various strategies, adapting and learning as you publish more content and gauge your customers’ reactions to it. Also, you may find a flow that works best with your task management, enabling you to maximize your time. If you need to correct something, feel free to change it or remove it if it’s unnecessary. With a strong content publishing strategy, your target audience will be more engaged and interested in your content.
So what are you waiting for? Get started and create your own content publishing strategy.