Content production planning can help you develop a process that ensures you create high quality content and deliver it on time. An effective content production process helps your content team work together smoothly. Your content production process keeps every team member on the same page. In this article, you will learn what content production planning is and how to plan content production. You will learn all about the content production process, how to create an overall content strategy, the best content production system to use, and how to get your entire creative team on board.
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What is Content Production?
Content production is a type of system or process that you take to create information in a visual or text format. For example, you can choose to output information through videos, books, blogs, or infographics. The content production process includes what message or information you want people to understand and what you want them to do with that new knowledge. Before moving along in the content production process, you must determine what kind of content you want to publish.
There are three main types of content. Of course, there are many other types of content; but, in this article, you will learn about these three types of content that are relevant to content production.
Cornerstone Content
Cornerstone content is content which purpose is to increase website traffic and brand awareness by showing viewers what your company has to offer them. This type of content needs to be very relevant to your business goals. Essentially, you want to make a memorable first impression on people. Show people that you are an expert in your industry and that you know what you are doing. The main goal of cornerstone content is to make a positive first impression. Therefore, this type of content should be free and easily accessed by people. If you want to create amazing cornerstone content, you can follow an easy 7-step guide to assist you in your goals
Or, if you are not sure where to begin, you can always turn to a business, like SEO Design Chicago, that specializes in helping businesses create interesting and effective content creation.
Gated Content
Gated content is content that requires users to complete a form in exchange for access to the information. This is where the name “gated content” gets its name from. Essentially, the content or blog post is locked up behind a gate, the gate being the form you must fill out. Forms might ask you to fill in your contact information, or subscribe to the website. Examples of gated content include articles, videos, and white papers. Content is only defined as being gated content if you can only access the information after filling out a form.
There is another type of content called, ungated content, that has a form available to fill out; but, filling out the form is not mandatory to access the content. People often get confused between the two types of content because they both have forms involved. Businesses often choose to publish gated content so that they gain user information to reach out to them in the future. However, David Meerman Scott, content marketing expert, found that ungated content is downloaded much more than gated content. The reason behind this fact is most likely because people find that filling out forms is a hassle and they do not want to give out their own information.
Evolving Content
Evolving content is content that is regularly produced and published. Basically, evolving content is any type of content that you publish on a routine basis, like a series. Examples include a series of blog posts that are all related in some way, routine news reports, or a video series with multiple episodes. You choose to produce evolving in addition to other types of content because you want to stay relevant to your viewers. If you just produce one or two blog posts about a certain topic that is extremely relevant to your business, you will not have much of an impact on your target audience. However, if you produce a blog post series that contains several different blogs on your topic, you will always stay fresh in your audience’s minds.
Content Production Planning: Content Production Process
No matter which type of content you are creating, this is a streamlined process to create workflows. Planning your content production will make creating and uploading content easy to do. Content production planning helps you establish a strong, effective workflow, which will help you manage all of the different content you intend to publish. If you create a plan with solid goals, you are ten times more likely to succeed over those who skip the planning stage. You can plan every aspect of your content strategy, from your content ideas to your video content and social media.
If you want to grow your business, follow these tips for content production planning.
Make the Content Your Top Priority
This point might seem like a no-brainer; but, it is the key to creating successful content. For something as important as the content for your business, you do not want to make it a last priority. If you treat your content as an afterthought, you will start to see negative effects on your business. For example, you will fall behind on projects, blow your budget, create poor, subpar content, and not meet your business goals. If you don’t want those things to happen, make the content your top priority.
Create a Content Workflow
A content workflow outlines and establishes the steps that you and your team must complete in order to efficiently create good content. A typical content workflow has these steps: research, write, review, revise, approve, upload to CMS, review the web page, and publish. You will get a more in depth description of each step of the content workflow in the next section. Make sure all the tasks are assigned to relevant team members. Each person responsible for a particular stage should meet deadlines consistently.
Create a Style Guide
A style guide provides guidelines for how you want your brand to be represented. Basically, a style guide outlines how you want people to perceive your business through the written and visual content that you decide to publish. This point is similar to the first tip. You must have a clear guideline to state what you want your content to be and how you will create the desired content.
A style guide will help your content be consistent no matter who created that particular blog or website page. Brand consistency is very important because you want your business to appear well thought out and cohesive. When people look at your business page or social media, you want them to be able to tell that everything belongs together. You want to create and maintain a strong brand reputation. As a result, people will respect your company and listen to what you have to say.
Although every business is different so there might be some minor discrepancies, the following steps are typical in the content production planning workflow.
Research
Research is always a good place to start creating written content or other content assets. You want to be highly informed on the topic before forming a plan. In this stage, you will want to find out and discuss the goals for that specific page or content. Ask yourself, “What do I want people to be able to take away from this new information?” A simple way to stay organized is to put all of your research together. The information that you find out will consist of various facts, quotes, statistics, any other kinds of information that will prove useful to you in the future. When you do the research first, you will have a better idea on how to approach achieving your goals.
Write
After the research stage is complete, you can actually start producing content. Just remember that you might not all of a sudden know what direction you want to go towards. It might take you some time to develop creative ideas. Creating content with interesting titles and headings, informative descriptions and links, and enticing calls to actions will take some time. But, don’t worry. This is why you create a content production planning workflow. Establishing a solid workflow gives you a solid place to start. If you create a strong content production planning workflow, you will make the content creation process much easier.
Review
No matter what you are doing, always review your work. You never want to send something for publishing without looking over your work, making sure it is just how you envisioned it to be. It’s not enough for you to just check your content that you created. Show your work off to other people too. Everyone has different opinions and pieces of advice. The more people that review your work, the more feedback you will receive.
Revise
This step is pretty self-explanatory. Once you and other people have reviewed the content, you need to make adjustments based on the feedback. During this stage, you might have to go back to those who gave you product feedback and ask for clarification. A helpful tip is to write down the feedback during the review process so you can solely focus on revising the content. As stated before, you will most likely need to review the revised content again before moving on to the approval step.
Approve
After you are finished with the review and revision processes, it’s time to send your content off to be approved by your superiors.
Upload to CMS
Now, upload the content to your content management system. Here, you will add any links, photos, files, or metadata that go with the content.
Review the Web Page
After uploading the content to the web page, you want to review the content yet again. Make sure the format is the way that you intended it to be, check if the links work, and look over anything else that might have gotten messed up in the upload process.
Publish Your Blog Post
Finally it is time to publish the content onto your live website.
Create a Content Marketing Strategy with SEO Design Chicago
Now that you know all the various steps that go into the content production planning workflow, you have two choices: you can either choose to tackle content creation on your own, or you can turn to content creation services, like SEO Design Chicago, for assistance on creating unique, enticing, and creative content that will keep your customers coming back for more. We are a full-service digital marketing agency. Our content team can help you with everything from creating a content calendar to posting your completed content on social media. We make the entire process easier.
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