When executed properly, a content marketing campaign raises awareness, shows thought leadership, increases web traffic, generates leads, and helps turn those leads into customers. For a campaign to be a success, you have to make sure your website, SEO, keywords, content, and promotion plan are on-point, and target the right prospects, on the right channels, with messages that resonate.

For any organization that’s a heavy lift, many marketing teams don't know where to start, and there are a lot of places you can get stuck.

We use a 9-step process that we call an Inbound Growth Plan to prepare for any content campaign we run for ourselves or our customers. In this article we’ve summarize the process and the steps, see our SEO Analysis for Lead Generation page to for the full process or to download the ebook guide for tis process.

1. Website Audit

Use a tool like SEMRush to audit your website to find anything that might be wrong with it, and to identify potential improvements. Website audits look at the following:

• Missing pages.

• Missing meta descriptions.

• Broken links.

• Issues with content.

• Issues with images.

• Speed and other performance issues.

• Security of the site.

Pro Tip: We also take a look at keyword usage on the site to inform the keyword research step later in this process. We look for which keywords are used and if they're used consistently in headers, content, and meta descriptions.

Once you’ve audited your website, you'll likely have a list of problems to fix and optimizations to try. These might be simple fixes such as adding header text to pages, or more complex performance-related issues that require more time, analysis, and effort. Your website is your public face to the world, so invest the time and fix any problems. In the end, your site should be clean, uncluttered, and deliver a focused message that will drive visitors to become leads, and assist in turning them into customers.

Pro Tip: Get those fixes done, but, be aware, you're not done with your website. The other steps in this process may guide additional restructuring and SEO optimizations!

2. Content Audit

Use tools like BuzzSumo or Social Animal to review the content published on your site pages, blog, and social media channels. Identify your primary content topics and categories and see how your audience has responded. This will help you see if the content you've already published is effective. This audit should examine the following:

• Messaging consistency about your brand, products, and services.

• Topics covered in relation to marketing and sales initiatives and other business goals.

• Keywords and hashtags use and consistency.

• Social engagement, mentions, and other metrics.

• Traffic, leads, and customers generated.

Figure out which topics your target audience is most interested in, and what type of content (blog posts, videos, infographics, etc) they engage with the most. Then take it a step further and see what content has generated the most leads and customers. That’s the content you want to make more of! 

Pro Tip: This is a great time to locate and fix problems on your social media channels like profiles incompletely or inconsistently filled out, issues with cross-channel promotion of content, and inconsistent keyword use in profiles and posts. The data you collect should also tell you which days and times you get the most engagement on each social platform so you can optimize posting schedules.

3. Keyword Research

SEO is always evolving, but keywords are still essential for driving traffic to your content and website. Keywords are how people find companies, products, and services. Use a tool like SEMRush to research the keywords you’ll use for your campaign.

Focus on two things:

• Discovering the best keywords for your business and campaign.

• Making sure they are used correctly on your website, social channels, and in content.

Identify keywords you use now, as well as keywords commonly used in your industry, local area, and by competitors. From this list, select the best keywords for your campaign. 

Find keywords that have a good monthly search volume and that illuminate the unique value a business offers. Once you’ve determined the best keywords, you can start using them on your website, social profiles, and content. 

Pro Tip: We also look at content organization during this step. SEO has evolved and content clusters designed around pillar pages are a good way to boost SEO rank for the products and services you offer. An audit is a great time to optimize your content for SEO and to make sure the site design works well for marketing campaigns.

4. Competitor Research

Use tools like SEMRush or Fan Page Karma to research your competitors so that you can learn from what they’re doing and differentiate your brand.

Look at your competitor’s:

• Keywords (there are even articles written about how to steal your competitor's keywords)!

• Social channels and promotion strategies.

• Content topics, posting time, and online engagement with their audience.

• Positioning and messaging.

Looking at how your competitors are positioning their products and services, can help refine your positioning and campaign strategy. 

Pro Tip: Use the tools mentioned above to discover what promotional channels your competitors are using when they're posting online, and what engagement they're getting. This can give you a big advantage when starting, or jump-starting a campaign. Steal strategies that are working well, avoid strategies that aren't, and identify potential under-served channels or audiences that may present opportunities.

5. Define Your Goals 

Now it’s time to apply everything you’ve learned to create a strategy with goals attached and key performance indicators (KPIs) you can measure. Remember that marketing activities should help achieve your brand goals such as growing revenue, or penetrating a new market segment. Your goals and KPI should reflect that. 

The goals should also be SMART goals. That is to say, they should be:

• Specific because discrete goals are easier to understand and focus on.

• Measurable so that you can track KPIs to see if you're on track and adjust course if need be to hit the goals.

• Attainable so that your team has a realistic chance of hitting the goals.

• Relevant to those business goals so that your digital marketing efforts are meaningful to your business.

• Time-bound so that there's a defined period that you have to achieve the goal.

These types of goals are more meaningful to your business and will help your team focus on execution, and make tracking performance easier. You can even download a template to make SMART goal setting easier.

6. Create or Refine Your Buyer Personas

Take everything you’re learned about your customers and create or refine your buyer personas. These are detailed portraits of your ideal customer or customers that can be used by marketing team members to create relevant content for prospects at all stages of their buyer's journey. Buyer personas can also be used by salespeople to personalize outreach.

We're not going to cover the fundamentals of creating buyer personas here. Suffice it to say that having buyer persona's is a must because it gets your marketing and sales teams on the same page, and focuses content, engagement, and outreach so that your messages reach and resonate with the people most likely to buy your products and services.  

7. Develop a Traditional or Pillar Page Content Plan

Remember that content marketing campaigns are about getting results. Your content should not only drive traffic to your website, but help your SEO, generate leads and sales. 

To boost SEO, your content should focus on a pillar topic related to the products and services you offer. The content you create can then become your pillar content, and, through back-linking and content distribution, can boost SEO for those topics.

Whether running a traditional content campaign or creating a pillar page, start by defining content offers such as ebooks, whitepapers, strategy guides, checklists, and so forth that your audience wants. This is your gated content. Content offers should be deep and detailed, going beyond what you'd normally publish on your blog, and valuable enough to your target audience that they're willing to share their contact information to get it. 

Once you've defined your content offers, plan blog posts and other content with topics related to each offer. To bring visitors in, publish your content to your blog, and surround that content with calls-to-action that lead to landing pages where visitors can opt-in to your content offers.

Pro Tip: To develop content offers and content, think of questions your target audience has, and use your content to answer those questions. Take each different stage of the buyer's journey into consideration so that your content helps visitors define their problem, consider different solutions, and finally make the decision to buy. We recommend creating two content offers per quarter at a minimum, a large one such as an ebook or whitepaper, and one smaller like a checklist, or how-to guide. Depending on your target audience, plan to create one or two pieces of content each week for the quarter to drive awareness of the issues related to your content offer. 

8. Define Your Promotion Strategy

By now you should have a good idea of where your ideal customers are hanging out online. Those are the social networks, forums, and other online locations where you need to publish and promote your content. Plan to promote your content across all those channels. More than that, you need to promote each piece of content several times.

Mix your content with content curated from other sources. That will attract more prospects to your social channels as they will start seeing your company as a thought leader in the industry, and will see your online channels as a valuable resource for awareness and education. They'll keep coming back for more, and begin sharing your content, and content you curate.

Pro Tip: When a piece of content is first published, promote it frequently on all channels for the first few days, then put it into your content mix so that it gets promoted again on each channel a few times a month. If you're creating clusters of content around specific topics, find opportunities in the content you create to link to other content you've created in a context-appropriate way. For any piece of content of yours that receives a high number of likes or shares, consider using paid promotion on your social channels to increase reach.

9: Create an Editorial Calendar and Stick To It

An editorial calendar puts your content promotion strategy down on paper (digitally speaking). It documents what content is being created, when it's due, what channels it will be published on, and when. Editorial calendars are essential for keeping the content strategy portion of your inbound marketing on track.

Pro Tip: There are lots of fee-based editorial calendars out there from CoSchedule to DivvyHQ. We use Asana for project management and our editorial calendar. There are a lot of benefits to these paid editorial calendar tools, but if you don't want to pay for one, a spreadsheet will get you started. Download editorial calendar templates for free here.  

Don't Wait - Get Started Now!

If you want to start, want to restart, or improve how your website is generating leads, acquiring customers, and engaging clients using inbound marketing, this nine-step process is where you should begin. This process and the follow-on work take time, so the sooner you begin, the sooner you'll see results. For more step-by-step details, see our SEO Analysis for Lead Generation page.