It's oftentimes a freelance writer or professional marketer's biggest question about generating effective content: "What should I write?"

Do you struggle with content production? As you engage in content planning, do you find it difficult to identify topics to write about? Does your team toil over what type of website content or which content type will have the greatest impact on your target audience? Do you agonize over which content piece will attract your target audience? Do your marketing activities ever grind to a halt at this point?

You're certainly not alone.

Content writing can be challenging. Highly visual content and building a strong content calendar present their own unique challenges, too. This is true whether you're engaged in influencer marketing or building a B2B content marketing strategy. Producing engaging, effective content is the top challenge for most content marketers. More than one digital marketing strategy has stalled out at this critical juncture of the customer journey.

Regardless of the content format you select, this roadmap will help you navigate the path to achieve both engaging and effective content — and more importantly, a marketing roadmap will help you answer the question: "What should I write?"

An effective content marketing plan can help your company create consistently good content and write its own success story. Because we all know it doesn't feel good to spend a lot of time and effort writing effective content that nobody reads, or worse, that they do read and think was a waste of time.

Step 1: Start with business strategy and audience needs.

Cascade business strategy and context.

Without a set of defined business goals to achieve, your growth marketing strategy is flying blind. A marketing roadmap brings both vision and clarity to your content plan.

A successful content marketing strategy starts with the set of business goals you're out to accomplish — brand awareness, lead generation, sales, etc. These goals must cascade down from your overall business and department objectives to your written content and ultimately to your potential customers. OKRs — used by Google's search engine and Intel — can give you a simple framework to think about how your marketing roadmap strategy can cascade if your organization doesn't already have a formal process.

Even if you've been doing content marketing for years, go back to this step and really understand what your business goals are for your content marketing strategy. You may find that those goals and your current execution are not in alignment with a successful content marketing effort.

Don't gloss over this step.

Before any talk of content creation occurs, write out your business goals and make sure your entire content team is in alignment with them. Everyone needs to know what the finish line looks like for providing valuable content. Your marketing roadmap must make this clear.

Understand your audience's needs and preferences.

While you are developing your foundational understanding of a successful inbound marketing business strategy and context, you should also be doing some parallel research to identify your audience's needs and preferences, right down to the social media channels they tend to prefer.

Don't let the organization's product launch objectives interfere with how you approach this step. This can influence the results, creating an understanding of your company's ideal customers, instead of your real customers. Aim to understand your real audience and develop content that addresses their current need, not your company's "want."

There are many ways to do this research prior to developing your marketing campaign. Start your information-gathering initiative with the development of buyer personas. An effective content marketing strategy for your campaign should answer questions such as:

• What is your audience's goal?
• Is there a common problem your audience is trying to solve?
• What is your audience's motivation to achieve that goal or solve that problem?
• Where are your audience's biggest pain points?
• Will your content promotion campaign effectively address them?

Get your hands on website analytics for recent posts and competitive intelligence. These will help you better understand what is engaging your audience on your website, the websites of your competitors, and on social media. Your marketing strategy roadmap should answer questions such as:

• Where is your audience going for information?
• What behaviors or actions are you looking for your audiences to perform?
• Where and why are they taking an action?
• What topics and terms are your competitors using to address your audience's needs?
• Where do you currently have topic gaps in comparison to your industry?

Step 2: Identify key metrics.

After you've defined your business goals and have an understanding of your audience, you must determine how your marketing roadmap will measure the progress of your strategy.

It is vital that you establish these metrics before launching the strategy. All too often, measurement is an afterthought, and marketers simply measure whatever is easily available — which usually takes the form of soft metrics like social media shares and page views — things that don't report well to the C-Suite.

Without establishing metrics that align with the overall goals of the strategy, marketers will have no idea if their marketing roadmap is succeeding or failing. The point of measurement is to determine the true trajectory of your marketing roadmap. You manifest what you measure.

Effective reporting begins with the basics.

Identify to whom you will be reporting these metrics. Just the product manager? Or do they report up to the C-Suite? The Board of Directors?

If you're not sure, you might check with human resources to make sure you're following established company protocol. Understanding to whom you're accountable will help target the metrics that will most effectively measure and communicate your content marketing success.

For example, a COO may value sales and revenue metrics over online marketing consumption metrics. Email marketing figures matter more to content creators than business administration types. Social media numbers matter to your brand awareness types. Adjust your metrics accordingly.

In order to have a true understanding of whether your content program is working, Jay Baer suggests that you "create an array of metrics that are selected from four primary buckets: consumption metrics, social media sharing metrics, lead generation metrics, sales metrics."

Which goals will show the success or failure of your strategy and give you insights into whether to adjust it? What metrics will give you the best pulse on your strategy?

Also, understand how you will get to these metrics. Google Analytics, social media statistics, and your company's CRM are great places to start.

New content intelligence tools are utilizing big data and predictive marketing to give you more insight into individual metrics by diving deep into your existing content and understanding what's resonating with your current audience. These insights not only help you create great content moving forward. They also help you optimize existing content you've already created.

With a solid foundation of business goals, audience understanding, and metrics, we can now begin the task of diving into the creative guts of your content marketing strategy.

Step 3: Develop content marketing editorial mission statement.

At the beginning of any marketing initiative, Joe Pulizzi suggests content marketers get clear on this key part of editorial planning, which can then serve as a guidepost for all content creation and social media campaigns. The mission statement answers the question, "Why do you exist?"

Pulizzi recommends answering three basic questions to create your initial mission statement:

1. Who is your core target audience?
2. What will be delivered to the audience?
3. What is the desired outcome for the audience?

Because you have your business goals and understanding of your audience already in place, this section should come together rather quickly.

When creating your editorial mission statement, keep in mind your own differentiators you discovered from your competitive intelligence gathering. What unique attributes does your company bring to the market when solving your audience's problems?

Step 4: Create an editorial calendar.

Go back to your audience preferences and identify the content types/forms that will work best to address their needs. As you develop your marketing road map, ask yourself:

• What (if anything) would be more effective than a blog post?
• Does it need to be more visual?
• Would video be more effective than the written word?
• Do we need to reach our audience through online, print, broadcast, social media, and other mediums?
• Where is our audience currently getting content for this issue?
• What resources are needed to create content in the forms that will be most effective?

Do a gut check. Check that the types/forms of content you selected lend themselves to the metrics you identified in Step Two.

If not, you may need to establish better metrics to show success. This may be an evolution of an existing metric. For example, if you have video content, and one of your goals is sales instead of just "views," you can use links within the video descriptions to get people back to your site where they can buy your product.

Within your editorial calendar, you will also identify the appropriate promotion channels. Once content types/forms are selected, you'll have a better idea of what channels will work best to promote them.

Step 5: Adopt a data collection and reporting schedule.

It's important to discuss and agree on when and how you will report the progress of your marketing plan and content marketing efforts — not only to your team but to the relevant organizational leadership.

With the right metrics and marketing analytics, you should be able to quickly shift your roadmap strategies depending on their initial effectiveness. Keep an eye on the end goal, and if the strategy is veering off, correct it.

This is why constant monitoring and reporting is your best friend. It may help to have more frequent meetings with your content marketing team to have these discussions — the most effective teams meet daily or weekly, as reported by CMI .

Step 6: Write, edit, publish, and listen.

At this point, you should have amazing clarity around how to answer the question, "What should I write?" Not only that, but you should also be able to answer the question, "Why did you write that?"

So, do what you do best — write, edit, and publish effective content that will engage your audiences and deliver the business results your organization needs to be successful. To help make the creative process even smoother, the Content Marketing Institute offers 10 ways you can write like a pro.

Then, be sure to listen. (This is one place social media can become one of your best friends.)

Listen to how your audiences are responding to your marketing effort. Nurture the product roadmap connection you've established with them. Feedback what you hear into the understanding of your audience in Step One, and see how that new information trickles down the rest of the marketing roadmap. This will all help later on as you seek to build a marketing roadmap template with a proven track record.

Step 7: Establish a continuous feedback loop and make adjustments to your approach.

Anything in your digital content marketing strategy can change. Your marketing roadmap template is just that, a template that will require adjustment and course correction.

Executive leadership might launch a new strategy or invest in a different market, which would completely alter your content strategy. Your audience's needs and preferences might evolve over time or drastically shift overnight after a major event. Competitors could enter the marketplace or change their own content marketing strategy.

Commit to constantly monitoring Google Analytics, collecting your digital marketing metrics, and keeping a pulse on your audience via social media. That way, you'll be able to pivot as changes occur. You can then feed the new information back into the top of the content strategy. Revising your marketing roadmap template is a sign of progress, not failure.

This is a strong win-win tactic. By doing this quickly and effectively, you'll be able to create the content your new audiences need before your competition and gain a competitive edge. That competitive edge will make you a content strategy hero in your organization. Don't you want to be a hero?

Conclusion

Without the solid foundations of a digital content marketing strategy, any small business will struggle to come up with a great content idea and deliver engaging, quality content to its target audience.

Your content marketing strategy must open your sales funnel to increased traffic in a way that both helps audiences solve a problem and helps you achieve your business goals.

No matter where you are in your company's content marketing strategy, revisit your goals and understanding of your audience to see if they are still in alignment with where you are currently spending your time and resources. If they're not, it may be a sign that your digital marketing program needs to change — for the better. Much of what we call marketing management is merely tweaking an underperforming marketing tactic to deliver more consistent results.

What will you do to be a better content marketer today? How will you incorporate social media monitoring into your marketing plan? Do you need help building or modifying a content marketing roadmap to meet your company's marketing goal? If so, consider contacting a Relevance strategist today to help you build out your digital marketing roadmap.

Being visible online is now crucial for every business. No matter if you only work locally or sell goods worldwide, you need to stand out in the crowd of competitors. You need to reap the beneficial results of content marketing. For this reason, many companies invest in effective SEO services performed by experienced and skillful professionals for their marketing efforts.

A skilled marketer or PR agency uses many techniques when building a marketing strategy. Some strategies are applied to the website itself. These typically involve combing through Google Analytics, conducting a content audit, overhauling blog posts, and optimizing all existing content for crawling by a search engine.

Others are performed off-site to achieve the impressive results of content marketing in the digital age. Among the off-site methods, there are two that are usually considered to be the most significant: digital PR and content marketing. Thanks to them, you can improve brand awareness, reach a wider audience through enhanced content distribution, and appeal to a potential customer by providing more engaging content that addresses the felt needs of your target audience.

Most companies profit considerably from a combination of social media marketing, PR efforts, media placements, publishing a white paper, media placements, journalist relationships, and more.

Additionally, those strategies can have both short-term and long-term effects on your business. Read on if you'd like to find out more about creating B2B content, how B2C marketers leverage relevant content as part of a comprehensive content marketing campaign, and why inbound marketing is beginning to eclipse more traditional marketing practices.

Digital PR

As the Digital Marketing Institute explains, "Digital PR includes a wide variety of marketing possibilities such as being interviewed by online publications, increasing your online presence, and using the interactive power of social media for further growth and recognition."

Digital PR is similar to traditional PR, focused on networking with journalists. The big idea in the content marketing world is to encourage them to feature a particular brand in magazines, newspapers, radio, and television. Consequently, digital public relations specialists search for coverage with articles on online news sources and websites or on social media and blog posts.

Digital PR Tactics

Nowadays, many digital PR tactics are used to improve a company's visibility on the internet. These include:

• business profiling via sharing B2B content;
• developing relationships with bloggers, B2B content marketers, B2C marketers, and online journalists to get press coverage;
• creating online press releases and soliciting other forms of media coverage;
• arranging online reviews and interviews on a targeted media outlet;
• blogger outreach and influencer marketing aimed at being more visible on blogs and social media profiles;
• posting online content to improve reputation, brand mentions, and receive valuable backlinks; and
• ensuring that press releases are well-optimized with high-quality links leading to your website to boost your search rankings.

Short-Term and Long-Term Benefits of Digital PR

Digital PR provides a business with many short-term and long-term benefits. However, to track its performance, an expert content marketer or full-fledged PR firm will recommend you set the goals for your campaign before you start it.

Some results that can help inform your goals and content marketing efforts might be as follows.

Improving Website Traffic

If many people read about your company as you share your branded content on Facebook, Twitter, or other social media, you are likely to get more visitors to your website. As a result, every point of contact with valuable content represents a chance to enhance your company's brand awareness (and profits) through content promotion.

Enhancing SEO and Rankings

As your business engages in content creation and gets mentioned on high-authority websites and in other B2B content marketing, it allows you to receive valuable links that work excellently for SEO. Consequently, when Google rates your site higher, it can rank higher for keywords associated with your industry. As a result, the savvy B2B marketer knows that you will get more traffic in this way as well.

Boosting Sales

One of the most significant benefits of any public relations practice is increasing sales. Therefore, when a company sees ROI from their online marketing investment, they know it is a crucial sign. It shows that all the marketing efforts were worth it and eventually paid off. Keep this in mind as you establish your marketing budget!

Generating Leads

Thanks to an excellent digital PR strategy, your great content will reach a relevant audience that's interested in your services or products. As a result, the more people that read about your offer and click through to your website, the more potentially valuable leads you will get.

Building a Trustworthy Brand

Similar to traditional PR, this digital counterpart aims at gaining your client's trust. Thanks to a lot of positive references online, your brand will definitely grow its reputation. Additionally, if your content creation efforts consistently yield an excellent blog post adapted to SEO standards, search engines perceive your website as a reliable source of information.

Content Marketing

You may think that content marketing is an on-page SEO tactic, focused on creating and publishing content on your company's website. However, in fact, this term is much broader. Instead, it involves both on-page and off-page methods. The successful marketing team typically uses a combination of email marketing, blog content, Google Ads, video content, and more to help boost their content marketing ROI.

Obviously, these days content creation means a lot more than firing off a random blog post every now and then. Yes, it's vital to create quality content on your site to increase your brand awareness. However, you should also remember to provide excellent, engaging assets to maximize the results of content marketing. (Seek to publish these authoritative resources elsewhere, too.)

Content Marketing Strategies

The most common practices used by content marketers are as follows:

• infographics;
• guest blog posts;
• eBooks;
• whitepapers;
• research papers;
• surveys; and
• case studies.

Experienced B2C marketers closely associate any content marketing effort with PR, link-building, and social media. As a result, these all become part of a successful content strategy and contribute powerfully to the process of building a reliable brand. Consequently, content creation and a healthy marketing budget represent twin necessities for taking your business to the next level.

Short-Term and Long-Term Benefits of Content Marketing

Social media is quite ubiquitous nowadays. Consumers are starting to expect unique and interesting content on various channels from every company. Consequently, any PR pro will tell you that it's worth following this trend as part of your overall content strategy and marketing efforts.

Whether you work with an agency or have your own in-house PR person, great content marketing can provide you with many short-term and long-term benefits.

Increased Reach

With content marketing, you can be wherever your customers are likely to appear. Your PR content can answer comments on social media, point them to a blog post or press release, or respond to questions on forums. You do not have to limit yourself to creating content for your website only.

Higher Authority and Credibility

Creating a lot of reliable content shows your company's expertise in the industry. In this way, you can appear as a credible provider who really knows a lot in their field. You can do it through publishing, for example, case studies, webinars, downloadable resources, or blog posts. This is what many PR professionals mean when they use the term inbound marketing.

Boosted Website Traffic

Similar to digital PR, content marketing sources can significantly improve your website traffic. This is because relevant and useful content (among other PR activities) will encourage your audience to come back to your website for compelling content and more.

Retargeted Audience

When you analyze your content's performance, you will gain the data necessary to retarget your audience. Content marketing success means providing them with the information they need. After taking a look at the users who viewed your content, you will know which display ads to retain in your content strategy to maximize the chances of making a profit.

Wrapping Up

Both digital PR and content marketing can provide your business with a lot of benefits. The obvious results of PR and content marketing are both obvious and quantifiable. Consequently, it's well worth combining them as part of your content marketing strategy. And yet, according to the Content Marketing Institute, more than half of businesses reported that their company had yet to put together an integrated digital marketing strategy.

Don't let your business become a content marketing statistic! Taking care of public relations and building a positive brand image has never been more crucial. As a result, numerous companies are fighting for the same audience, employing content marketers to help grab eyeballs online. You should do your utmost to stand out and attract them to your product or service. If you haven't done so already, start putting together a marketing budget and a content marketing strategy.

Thanks to content marketing and digital PR, your website will rank higher in search results. As a result, you will get more website traffic as just one of many results of content marketing. Additionally, your business will appear more relevant and trustworthy.

A content marketing strategy is vital as many people nowadays are exceedingly wary of online fraud. Therefore, investing your resources in PR and content marketing and leveraging off-site SEO techniques can really pay off.