Having a thoughtful and consistent output of content will help you succeed with content marketing. However, these types of efforts are unsustainable without a framework that lets you create high-quality content at scale. Content is a long-term strategy, and a content strategy framework will ensure your content marketing efforts can continue driving results for years.
There are 5 steps to building a content strategy framework:
- Develop a content strategy
- Identify content roles
- Have a content creation process
- Dedicate time to content amplification
- Optimize your content
Follow these steps and you’ll achieve your content goals. Here’s why a content strategy framework is an essential part of every successful content marketing program.
What is a content strategy framework?
A content strategy framework is a system you build to support your ongoing content marketing efforts. A content strategy framework covers your overall content strategy, roles, processes, amplification, and optimization tactics.
Each step leads to the next one. Skip a step and you’ll fall to the ground; your content is stepped on by competitors or your target audience shuffles by without noticing. Don’t let it happen to your brand.
Here’s how you can get started building a content strategy framework today:
5 Steps to Building a Successful Content Strategy Framework
1. Develop a content strategy
Before you write a piece of content, you need a content marketing strategy. Having a strategy in place will let you focus your efforts, measure your impact, and quantify your content’s value.
Make sure to document your content strategy, too. Put it into a deck, document, or spreadsheet. It doesn’t matter where it’s stored, it just needs to exist. Only 69% of B2B content marketers document their content strategy. Don’t be part of the group that overlooks this essential step of building a content strategy framework, or your team will create content without a clear purpose. In my experience, using a slide deck to document a content strategy is best. It’s visual, engaging, and lets you tell a story.
Once you have your content strategy, you’re ready for the next step.
2. Identify content roles
Creating high-quality content that delivers measurable results is a team sport. Multiple stakeholders need to share their unique perspectives, apply their individual expertise, and collaborate to create something special.
Who’s going to be on your team? Set those expectations early and make the role assignments clear to all stakeholders.
Here are the most important content roles when building your framework:
- Subject matter expert: this is the person that’s sharing their unique insights and expertise on the topic. It’s important to note: this person probably isn’t the content creator. They’re the expert. Expert content creators collaborate with the subject matter experts and use their expertise to produce expert content.
- Content creator: this is the person or persons that are responsible for creating the content. The content creator is the writer. Pen down to paper, headphones on, typing away at the keyboard. Make it clear who’s the content creator in your content program or you risk letting too many cooks into the kitchen.
- Content reviewer: who’s going to actually review the content? List those stakeholders and make it clear who the authority during the review process is. If you have too many content reviewers, you’ll never finish a piece of content. If you don’t have any, there’s nobody to catch any red flags, like grammar or spelling errors.
- Content support: everybody else is bundled under content support. They’re there to ensure your efforts are successful and hold others accountable.
Complex programs require additional content roles, but these roles are essential to every successful content marketing framework.
3. Have a content creation process
The most important part of a content strategy framework is your process. Without one, your ideas won’t ever make it to a reader’s computer screen. You need to have a series of steps that stakeholders can follow for every piece of content.
There isn’t a content creation process that’s right for everybody. Teams have unique needs, quirks, and preferences that the process needs to support. Come up with your own process but make sure it’s built for scale.
Blocking off time on your CEO’s calendar to sit down and write about cloud technology isn’t going to work. You might get one great piece of content from this process, but one every week for years? Good luck!
Here’s a tried-and-true content creation process that you can use in your content strategy framework:
- Topic ideation
- Knowledge sharing
- Content creation
- Content review
- Distribution
Adjust these stages based on what works best for your team. But this is something you can follow for every piece of content, and it will get your content to the finish line, every time.
4. Dedicate time to content amplification
Content doesn’t exist in a vacuum. You need to promote your content across different channels, distribute it using various methods, and maximize the value of your content. This is what’s known as content amplification, and it is an essential part of any content marketing framework. It’s easy to overlook but also the best way to make sure your content marketing efforts are successful.
Here are some top ways to distribute and amplify your content:
- Post it! Sometimes, people will hold onto content like it’s a treasure. They don’t want you to see it, know about it, talk about it, and especially not read it. You should publish your content on every owned channel.
- Email newsletters. If you aren’t already using email to reach and engage your audience, start today. I’ve spoken to many e-commerce brands that were surprised to discover that email was driving the most traffic, highest engagement, and sales. It works! Your content is the pathway from email to your site.
- Native advertising. When our clients put spend into native advertising to promote their content, it receives some of the highest engagement across all campaigns. This makes sense since the content is inherently adding value. But in our experience, we’ve found that native advertising also helps content index more quickly so that it ranks for more keywords in a shorter period of time.
Also, promote your content on social again and again until your brand has the last Tweet. Lean on your team to promote content across their networks, too.
Identify the tactics that work best for your brand and repeat them. Experiment with new tactics, methods, and channels. Finding a way to achieve a high level of success that you can consistently duplicate is what will ultimately set your program apart from competitors.
There’s just one more thing you need to do.
5. Optimize your content
Content optimization is the last piece of the puzzle. You need to optimize your content for search engines at the onset, then keep coming back to it. This is what will deliver ongoing success and help you scale your efforts as you grow.
While you’re performing your SEO analysis, take note of blogs that have opportunities for content optimization. These are blogs that:
- Performed well in the past but lost traffic share from competitors
- Never picked up steam (few keyword rankings, very low organic visitors, etc.)
- Have keywords within striking distance
- Rank for less competitive long-tail keywords
Identify your content unicorns and implement content optimizations that will help you improve performance. Sometimes, you just need to change the title tag and meta description to reap the benefits. We’d recommend doing a lot more, but it’s a compelling place to start.
Here’s an example:
Here’s a tip: You can use a Chrome plug-in called Keyword Explorer to quickly identify other possible keywords to target. See more of our favorite keyword research tools.
Scale High-Quality Content Creation With This Content Strategy Framework
Follow these 5 steps and you’ll have an impactful content strategy you can use to produce high-quality content at scale that achieves your content goals. Review the framework every quarter, make updates to your strategy, find what works best, and keep doing it.
For all your content marketing questions, get in touch with Booyah’s team of experts today.