Content is the bread and butter of many a marketing campaign, whether it comes in the form of engrossing guides, punchy link-building creative, informative landing pages or any of the other countless types of content out there. If you want yours to be an engagement-driving, hit-propelling, sales-boosting success though, you need to plan and produce it the right way, or you can potentially be hit by time overruns, increased costs, or end up with a terrible end product.
There’s a certain chemistry to creating content – here’s a step-by-step guide to our process.
Context
Discover, immerse, understand.
Explore the brief
We become one with the brief, understanding the content’s specific requirements, the overall business objectives and the metrics that will be used to measure the performance of the project.
Understand technical limitations
We go about understanding the opportunities and limitations of the platforms and content management systems that will be handling the content.
Gather information
We collect and review all the client’s existing resources related to the brief, completely getting to terms with the content topics.
Client call
Before we start strategising and planning, we organise a chat with the client, talking through the brief to ensure we’re completely on the same page.
Strategy
Analyse, plan, hone.
Keyword research
Using a range of tools, we find the keywords and phrases that matter to the topics to hand, creating lots of very long, interesting lists of search volumes, competition rankings and other metrics.
Competitor research
We peruse the web to find similar content examples from key competitors, undertaking quantitative and qualitative analysis to understand what hits and misses the mark.
Content audit
We undertake a thorough audit of the client’s existing content surrounding the content topic, exploring what performs well, what could be improved and where there are gaps in the content offering.
Content strategy creation
Using all the information gleaned through keyword, competitor and existing content research, we create an in-depth content strategy. This includes the what the content pieces will be, their themes, focus keywords and, if hosted onsite, a diagram of their location on the site map.
Client call
Once the client has had time to digest the strategy, we sit down and chat about it, agreeing on the strategy, time frames and deadlines.
Client approval
High fives all round!
Production
Create, refine, release.
Develop the copy
Our content creators get to work crafting engaging, informative and insightful copy, passing the drafts on to the client. If amends are required, a short client call is organised to ensure everyone is in complete agreement regarding the problems with the content and the solutions required.
Develop graphics and images
Working alongside the writers, our designers create rich and interesting graphics for the content. These are supplied to the client and if amends are required, we set up a call – we prefer to talk!
Client approval of all content
More high fives!
Handover to build
We send the completed content to be brought to life by expert developers. This step contains many others, which we’ll focus on in a post very soon.
Testing
We make sure the content is thoroughly tested to ensure it works perfectly for every user, and generally looks and feels ace on-site.
Site goes live
We do a little cheer as our palms are pretty red by this point…
Performance monitoring
We track all manner of performance metrics related to the content, reporting back on how it’s doing and taking notes to help us improve our future efforts. There’s lots more to this step, which we’ll also cover in the near future.
Like the look of our content process? Contact our experts and see how we can use it to boost your brand online today.