Learn how to create content that converts with the content marketing lifecycle.
Even though an increasing number of businesses are using content marketing to reach their target audiences, many struggle to reap the benefits of it. This is owing to the inability to understand the dynamic pieces of how a content marketing strategy works – the steps that play a key role in researching, creating, optimising, and distributing content.
This is where understanding the content marketing lifecycle comes into play.
If this sounds overwhelming, here is a simple visual to explain what a content marketing lifecycle is:
What is the content marketing lifecycle?
A content marketing lifecycle represents a series of steps that goes into managing and executing your content marketing strategy. The cycle showcases the entire marketing process, from the initial research to creation and distribution of content, up until the analysis of the strategy’s performance. In all, there are five steps in the content marketing lifecycle:
- Research
- Ideation and Planning
- Creation and Optimization
- Distribution
- Analysis
Let’s look into each in a little detail.
Stages of the content marketing lifecycle
1. Research
Analyze your market and identify your target audience
The first step of the content marketing lifecycle consists of the research phase. You need to understand your target audience, find their pain points and needs and wants.
To understand your target audience, check out the places where they hang out the most and try to dig deeper into the challenge they’re facing and the kind of solution they’re currently trying. Alternatively, you can interview them to understand their requirements better.
You will need to figure out what your competitors are doing, look for new trends and identify the gap you can fill through your expertise. Using social listening and competitor analysis at this very stage can help you uncover business critical insights.
2. Ideation and Planning
Set your strategic objectives and plan your actions.
The second step is dedicated to setting your goals and creating a plan to help achieve those goals.
Before creating an action plan, you need first to decide what goal you want to achieve through your content marketing effort.
Do you want more subscribers for your youtube channel? More traffic on your website? Once you decide on your one big goal, divide it into small achievable goals, establish a timeline, and work toward achieving them by creating a strategy.
3. Creation & Optimization
Create your content and optimize it before publication.
It’s now time to dig into your content strategy and dive into creating content pieces your audience needs.
Create content putting your reader’s best interest in mind and then later move forward to optimize those pieces for search engines – adding backlinks, updating content, including internal links, and following all the SEO best practices.
4. Distribution
Distribute your content through the right channels.
Just publishing content will get you nowhere. You need to serve it on a platter to your audience via the channels and platforms they are most likely to discover it on.
This means you need to figure out how to optimise the content with the right keywords for the search engines to crawl, using social media platforms and online communities to share it, or leveraging owned and paid media for the same. .
5. Analysis
Analyze your performance to improve your strategy.
The last step is to measure your performance, identify areas to improve and double down on steps that work for you.
Depending on your goals, the key metrics for your content strategy can differ from others. Select 3-4 key metrics to measure your content performance to get started. Then, find out what’s working for your brand, stick to it and keep improving.
Following this content marketing lifecycle process will help you reach your goals in a strategic and methodical way, which is also very effective when you’re in the early stages of creating your brand.
Need help implementing the content marketing lifecycle? Contact us today.
