A content development plan is a must to publish great content consistently. Here are steps you can take to elevate your content marketing strategy.

A content development plan should be the cornerstone of your content marketing strategy. Failing to have the right plan in place leaves you vulnerable to falling short of producing engaging content and missing out on key marketing opportunities altogether. The good news is that content development is a science!

Say goodbye to the days of blindly shouting into the void and hello to data-backed content and measurable results.

Implementing the right content development strategy early on is pivotal to getting your brand seen in the digital sphere.

Here’s how you can create an effective content development plan that will engage your target audiences and keep them coming back for more.

What is Content Development?

Content is without a doubt the best way to reach your target audiences in the digital space.

Content development is the process of conceptualizing, creating, publishing, and evaluating pieces of content to see if they’re aligned with your business goals.

And in an increasingly competitive marketplace, it’s no longer enough to simply create and post images. The pieces of content you choose to represent your brand must be well worth their weight.

• Do they steer your brand closer to its objectives?
• Are they resonating with your target audience?
• Is that engagement translating to tangible sales?

The answers to these questions will dictate your brand’s online success, and that is precisely why you need a stellar content development plan on day one.

A content development plan is essential to optimization because it helps marketers and brands alike see how they can best reach their customers. Here are some of the benefits of creating a content development plan for your brand.

Better Monitoring of Your Progress

A winning content development plan enables you to monitor how well your content is performing in the digital space.

The process of creating a plan entails you knowing your target customer from the inside out. By doing so, you can create content that is more likely to deeply resonate with them and give you the results you desire.

Conversely, you can also see what isn’t working (in real-time, too). You’re only as strong as your weakest link, after all—so look for areas that could benefit from further optimization and funnel what you’ve learned from the winners to them.

There is success in failure if you know where to look.

Better Collaboration with Your Marketing and Sales Teams

A content development plan keeps your marketing and sales teams aligned.

You can use it to share your overall goals and objectives, making it easier for both teams to work together.

You would also be able to craft content that suits the objectives of both teams, making your content more effective and efficient.

Better Chances of Reaching Your Brand Goals

With a plan in place, you have a roadmap toward reaching your brand goals.

It is fairly easy to get lost or overwhelmed when it comes to developing content, so having a content development plan will help you stay the course.

It can also serve as your overall guide for the brand goals you set, as your content development plan will work in conjunction with your marketing strategy.

Steps to Developing Effective Content

Content development is a science and effective content must be strategically planned with goals in mind.

You need to understand what your target audience’s wants, needs, and the why’s behind them—all while standing out from the competition. That’s a tall order in itself. And because there are tons of pieces of content across the digital space to sift through, standing out can pose its own set of challenges. This is where research and strategy development comes in.

A content development plan that works utilizes all of your research and experience to help you refine your overall content strategy.

Here are some steps you should take when developing your brand’s content.

Identify Target Goals and Research The Audience

• What are your company’s content goals?
• What does your audience need to solve a problem?
• What do they want or need to learn to be successful?

These two questions must be answered before you start creating your content development plan. One key tip would be to create SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely) goals that help your brand grow.

Now, growth can be achieved in a variety of ways, and focusing on one aspect does not mean totally forsaking the others. On the contrary, you will eventually find your team developing content to accommodate all the other growth aspects of your brand. However, zeroing in on one goal at a time will help you achieve them more efficiently.

When establishing your content goals, you also need to determine how you will be measuring your content marketing strategy’s progress. Success can look differently for each brand, so identifying key metrics to look out for is essential to see how well your content is performing. The content development plan will also help align your content goals with your content marketing strategy, ensuring that all efforts are working towards the same shared goals.

Have a Content Strategy That Will Engage

It might sound far-fetched, but your ideas absolutely have the ability to go viral. You just need a content strategy that will help you reach the right people. A content strategy is essential to your content creation because this will help you keep your ideas organized. It also serves as the blueprint for your content development plan, so you can keep creating winning content.

Having a content strategy in place enables you to get data on the types of content that work best with your target audience. Knowing how to best reach your audience will give you a better idea of what kind of content to create. This will help you grow even more in the digital space and provide your audiences with consistently relevant and valuable content.

Additionally, remember that your content strategy must be designed to favor the platforms you will be using to distribute your content. Some brands publish directly to their websites while others leverage social media platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook. This will entirely depend on where your target audience is most active. So, figure out where your target market is and meet them there.

Ideate, Outline, and Start

After making sure that all members of your team are aligned and working towards the same goal, set a schedule for your team to collaborate and share ideas. Close collaboration is essential for getting your content development plan off the ground and makes it that much easier to stay on track.

Brainstorming sessions stand to greatly benefit your team. Each team member will be given the opportunity to share their thoughts and ideas, which could very well lead you to your next viral piece of content. You can also gather feedback from your stakeholders and audiences to get more in-depth insight into your content’s performance. This will help you have a more holistic view of what type of content is most likely to resonate with your target audiences.

Once you have a general idea of what you need to accomplish for your brand’s content strategy, begin planning out content. Audiences now prioritize consuming content of value, so make sure your content is high quality, informative, engaging, and thought-provoking. This is how you can reel in more audiences and create a better customer experience.

Working with an A-List content team will help you develop a bar-none content marketing strategy for your brand. WriteForMe’s content management and development services can help you reach your brand goals with tailor-fit, data-backed approaches.

Optimize Content, Publish, and Analyze

After conceptualizing and creating content, it’s time to optimize it and then publish it.

Publishing means you are sharing it on your selected digital platforms for public consumption. Once it’s live on your website, you will be able to gather data insights to measure just how well it’s performing.

Content analysis is a crucial part of your content development plan because it shows you where your content is doing well and where you can improve moving forward.

Despite your best efforts, there may still be times when your content underperforms and doesn’t help you reach your marketing goals. Content analysis will help you understand why it happened and give you actionable ways to improve the next round of content. Once you have made the necessary adjustments and optimized your content, publish it on your chosen digital platforms and remeasure its performance. You should be able to see a notable improvement.

Here are some of the steps to take when analyzing content.

Pick Out Content Pieces to Analyze

If you have a wide variety of content pieces available, choose specific pieces of content to analyze. Learning to group specific content formats together will make analysis a breeze. For example, you can put together all the short-form videos you published in a given year. By doing this, you can draw more accurate conclusions about their performance.

Examine The Content Pieces You Have On Hand

With the pieces of content you have selected, examine them and look for key metrics that stand out. The metrics you examine will vary based on your main content objectives, so be sure to establish this before doing your content analysis. Monitoring key metrics provides you with a numerical, black-and-white view of your content’s performance.

Compare Information and Evaluate

Once you have all the information organized, you can begin drawing conclusions. Some content pieces will naturally perform better than others. This can be due to different factors and finding the factors that make your content click will help you create more effective content.

A content development plan is essential for your content marketing strategy’s long-term success. You can use it to set milestones for your marketing strategy, keep your team aligned with the overall brand goals, and reproduce successful content cases for your audiences.

Review, Rinse, and Repeat

After going through all the steps of your content development plan, you will have data and information to sift through on producing quality, engaging content. You can use this information to plan out your next pieces of content and fill up your content calendar. You can also apply your learnings and optimize your content accordingly.

By altering your content to be received optimally, you can make it more high-quality, engaging, and relevant for your target audience. Once your audiences engage with such content, they are more likely to share it with others. This will expand your reach and boost your brand’s presence in the digital space.

As with all things in life, the more you learn what works versus what doesn’t, the easier it will be to replicate. Soon enough, you’ll have a unique blueprint for successful content that you can apply to your overall content marketing strategy for years to come.

Strengthen Your Content Marketing Strategy with a Content Development Plan

Content development is an art, a science, and a must for a successful content marketing strategy.

Knowing how to best reach your audience is crucial to helping your brand grow. Working with a savvy content team will ensure that you’ve got all of your bases covered in content planning and creation.

WriteForMe won’t just help you develop an unparalleled content marketing plan—we’ll help you to put it to work, too.

Contact us to get started and learn how to elevate your content marketing strategy.

Irene Yeh, Afarose Marketing Director and Co-Founder shares her experience in partnering with WriteForMe and how our blog writing services have helped Afarose reach more customers by increasing their website traffic and online presence.

She appreciates the collaborative nature of our team and process, as well as the high quality of the content we produce.

We LOVE partnering with clients like Afarose! Huge thanks to Irene!

If you're looking for a reliable and professional writing agency, check out WriteForMe today!