Understanding the stages of the content marketing process

Content marketing is a great way to reach a wider audience and valuable, relevant information for website users. But what is the content marketing process, and how can this influence the outcome and results? Well, here at Pumpkin Web Design, we are Preston’s leading web design and content marketing professionals. We provide valuable web design, SEO, and marketing solutions to a range of clients, across the North West, including Southport and Wigan, as well as Manchester. As a result, we have produced this guide to everything you need to know about the different stages of the content marketing process.

What are the different stages of the content marketing process?

For your content marketing to be truly successful, there are a number of stages and steps within the process. These include:

• Developing a content strategy
• Content ideation
• Content creation
• Content distribution
• Content evaluation

Developing a content strategy

A content strategy specific to your company aims and goals is imperative for success with content marketing. This strategy will help to:

• Define the aim of the content- whether you want to increase sales, increase brand recognition, or improve SEO, there needs to be an end goal for your content marketing
• The topic of the content- the content strategy will help you understand which topics to cover and most importantly the type of content to create.
• Understand the measurements for success-  you can only effectively evaluate and analyse the content performance if you know which measurements to use and compare
• The budget- any content strategy needs a budget determined by your company situation. It can be important to prevent costs spiraling, and to section off money for different parts of the process.

Content ideation

Once you have defined the aims of your content and developed a good strategy, you can start to consider content ideas. This stage of the process involves searching for key words and search terms relevant to the type of content you need to create, and deciding on an angle for the content.

Content creation

This stage involves actually creating the content in line with your content marketing strategy. This content will need to be unique and original, as well as informative and relevant for the website users, and potential customers and clients. Creating content that meet these standards, as well as other aspects the search engine algorithm is looking for, can help to increase the organic traffic to your website, by increasing the rank of the content on the search engine result page. However, the most important part of creating content, is creating something that your website users will actually read, to find information they are interested in.

Content distribution

If part of your content strategy is to increase brand awareness, you will need to consider sharing and distributing your content as far as possible. This can include your social media platforms, but it’s important to share this in a format that will attract the most attention.

Content evaluation

Knowing whether or not your content has been successful is an important part of any content marketing process. And effectively evaluating the success of your content can help you to identify successful techniques and tips that can be applied to future pieces. At the same time, this will also indicate the aspects that were unsuccessful so that you can alter your strategy to see positive changes, and ultimately improved results that promote business growth.

For more information or advice about content marketing, web marketing, or professional web design, get in touch with the experts here at Pumpkin Web Design.