When marketers begin to plan their content marketing strategy, they often stop and think – “Where do I even begin?”. Creating a content strategy may sound like a complex and time-consuming thing to do. But in reality, a good content strategy is an actionable plan for all the things you want to tell your audience about.
But most people often do not fail on the "what to post" but more on the how-to ensure consistency and how to manage it part. Without the right processes and tools in place, your content marketing will be completely disorganized, and you won't get your content to the relevant target group fast enough. Finding the right process and tools to help you plan and manage your content marketing is essential when you want to achieve good results for your business.
The importance of publishing consistently
If you want to attract returning readers, you need to be consistent with your output. Consistency is one of the least celebrated yet most important aspects of growing a successful content strategy.
There are a couple of reasons why consistency is key. Writing consistently:
- Sets expectations with your readers: People know when to come back to your information and regularly check for new content.
- Sets expectations with yourself: Publishing regularly is hard when you are involved in many other tasks. If you decide on and commit to a schedule, you know when you have to publish.
Publishing consistently also helps you to test and understand what types of content work with your readers. Also, the more often you publish on your blog, the better the odds of one post going viral.
Decide on your core content pillars
When it comes to actually deciding what you’re going to write about, it’s good to have a few guiding topics that you refer back to. These are called content pillars and are the foundation on which your blog is built.
Having a few set pillars like this helps keep your content focused. It also gives you a lens and a voice that you can write from.
Each of these pillars can have 10s or even 100s of articles that can be written under them. But they also all work together to show that you’re a thought leader in your industry.
Create a clear content roadmap
Before launching a new content campaign, you may want to have a bit of content already geared up and ready to publish. For this reason, you should think about what and how often you want to post and in which content pillars you are going to post early on.
Once you decided on your major content pillars, you can start planning your articles and blog posts. You’ll learn more about your audience, your process, and what works well as you write and publish more.
Confluence as your content marketing planning software
When it comes to actually planning out your content strategy and what you are going to post about, software to store your drafts and collaborate with your team is as important as the content itself. Confluence is a clear choice as it is one of the most used wiki software in the world and a workspace that supports collaboration and planning.
Build your content marketing planning in confluence with the help of blueprints and overview pages
To build up a content calendar, you can use overview pages built using the "page properties," and the "page properties report" macro in Confluence. With the help of these macros, you can turn every Confluence page into an overview page. In this way, you can start to organize content.
For example, you could create an overview page for all content efforts or individual tables that only show the posts on social media or on your blog.
Filling your content calendar
When it comes to filling your content calendar, you want to be as effective as possible. To ensure that your content drafts have all the information your team needs to quickly create outstanding content, you can use templates.
These templates are basically predefined Confluence pages that can be filled with content in the editor. As a "more powerful" variant, Atlassian developed the blueprints a few years ago, which, among other things, make it possible to quickly and easily query content when creating pages. It is also possible to set prefixes for page titles, automatically provide pages with keywords, and much more.
With the Blueprint Creator for Confluence, it is possible to easily create blueprints for your blog posts in an intuitive editor and make them available to the teams. Placeholders can be set in predefined templates, which are simply queried via a form when a new page is created.
Try out the Blueprint Creator for free - and see how your content marketing can change.
Update the status and publish your posts
Once you compile your content for the next couple of weeks, you can start working on your drafts. To update your draft status, you can easily go to the confluence page and change the properties you had filled in. Once the status of your draft is updated, you can see the changes on your overview page.
Of course, you can sort your content using properties like status or publishing date. This way, you can make your content marketing more efficient in one fell swoop.
Further Information
Want to learn more about the Blueprint Creator for Confluence? Are you interested in testing out the app commitment-free? You can find the Blueprint Creator on the Atlassian Marketplace. If you have further questions or would like to arrange a demo appointment, our development team would be happy to talk to you. Get in touch with us today!
The Blueprint Creator website for Confluence
Blueprint Creator: How to use blueprints for uniform blog posts in Confluence
Blueprint Creator for Confluence – blueprints for spaces now available
Templates and blueprints in Confluence
Learn more about Creative Commons licensing and //Seibert/Media
