What do you do when a project seems too complicated or overwhelming to manage? You break it down into a sequence of easier steps. Content marketing works the same way. Whether you have access to a single freelance writer or hundreds of writers to pull from, it can be difficult to ensure that your content always maintains the same tone and consistently achieves the same standards. Creating a content marketing checklist will help to ensure that your content is appropriately optimized every time.
Style and Form: Your Company’s Voice
It can be difficult to maintain a company’s voice over disparate pieces of content, especially as the company’s content grows and is passed through many hands. Is your brand quirky and fun? Professional and polished? Either way, lock down your branding early and remain consistent. Ideally, your readership should be able to form an immediate connection between your content’s style and your company.
Example questions:
- Does our content display our company’s personality, passion and drive?
- Are we proving our expertise and authority through our content?
- Does our content trigger emotions within the reader?
Content: Offering Your Customer Value
Content marketing is a way of showing your customer that you value and can meet their needs. Content developed should always offer your customer some form of value, whether it is purely informational or for the purposes of entertainment. Content marketing that is overly promotional may alienate the reader and content that is too generic will fail to excite. Every piece of content should have a clearly expressed purpose and should provide the reader with something to take away.
Example questions:
- Does this content present information that is not otherwise or easily available?
- Is our content overly promotional or could it be perceived solely as marketing?
- Will our content pique our reader’s curiosity and inspire them to learn more?
Technical Features: Search Engine Optimization and Social Targeting
Great content is useless content if it’s never seen. Search engine optimization and social targeting are the best methods of building traffic. Be certain that your content is properly optimized and targeted to increase the value of each piece. SEO and social media strategies change frequently, but you should always make sure that each item of content is in line with your current marketing strategies.
Example questions:
- Is this content optimized — but not over-optimized — towards the right keywords?
- Would our audience be inclined to share this content with their friends?
- Have we targeted the demographic most likely to share our content socially?
Every company will have a content marketing checklist that is as unique as its brand. Improve your content marketing checklist over time by analyzing the performance of your content and testing out new methods of reaching out to your audience. A checklist makes it easy to compare content changes in a reliable way, allowing you to improve and optimize your content strategy with precision. More importantly, a checklist will ensure that you can maintain quality standards across your entire content inventory.
Jenna I is a freelance writer, gamer and digital marketing enthusiast, specializing in the areas of technology and finance. In her spare time she specializes in niche pixel art for cats.
