September 22nd, 2014

The Answers to Your 18 Biggest Content Marketing Questions

Here at Contently, we geek out harder on content marketing than a Batman nut at ComicCon. For us, the only thing better than content marketing is talking about content marketing. In that spirit, earlier this month we asked our Twitter followers if they had any pressing questions, and they responded in droves. Here are our answers, with some added context, examples, and love.

1. WHAT IS “NATIVE” AND WHAT IS “OWNED”? WHICH ONE IS BETTER?

2. WHY WOULD WE CREATE OWNED CONTENT RATHER THAN BUY SPONSORED CONTENT?

These two questions are so similar that it makes sense to answer them together.

Let’s start with the basic definitions. Shane Snow, CCO of Contently, covered the definitions in our “State of Content Marketing 2014” report:

It’s hard to say which one (native or owned) is better in an absolute sense; they simply serve different purposes, and in an ideal world, they work in concert. In an article earlier this month, Contently VP of Content Sam Slaughter detailed how brands should use native advertising to build an audience that they own:

One could make (and many have made) the case that brands communicating directly with their own audience is bad news for publishers who depend on being the audience gatekeepers. I don’t buy that.

For one, building an audience is hard. And more importantly, even a brand with their own audience will want to reach other audiences with their message. Whether they use sponsored stories, paid distribution, or social advertising to get there is dependent on the circumstances—but the need to reach additional eyeballs efficiently and effectively is constant.

Case in point: Here at Contently, we have a huge audience for our industry pub, The Content Strategist. And yet we still pay through the nose to place sponsored content on publisher sites like Adweek. Why would we do that when we could put it in front of our own audience for free? Simple: Adweek readers are people we want to reach.

Shane also tackled this question in an article for Ad Age, noting that having direct access to an audience is every brand’s goal, but it takes time, patience, and editorial leadership to make that happen. In the meantime, sponsored content is a way to align a brand with an already recognized and trusted platform.

3. WHAT IS THE VALUE OF A LONG-TERM CONTENT STRATEGY VS. A CAMPAIGN-BY-CAMPAIGN APPROACH?

As we noted last month, the cliché is true: Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. You need time to develop an effective editorial strategy through trial and error and to build trust with readers. That’s why some agencies and custom-content studios run by publishers are requiring brands to commit to a content push of at least four months, if not a year or longer. In an ideal world, they’d be signing on for 5-plus-year commitments.

4. WHO SHOULD WE BE TARGETING, I.E., WHO SHOULD OUR AUDIENCE BE?

Determining your target audience is content strategy 101. Who wants your service or product? Who shares similar values? What do they want but aren’t getting enough of? These are easy questions to ask, but difficult questions to answer—and those answers are different for each and every business. If you don’t have someone on your team who has built an audience before, you likely need to find the right help.

5. HOW DO YOU GO ABOUT DEVELOPING A BRAND VOICE?

This is a crucial aspect of brand publishing, and it was one of the main topics Shane covered in the first-ever Contently e-book, “The Beginner’s Guide to Blogging and Content Strategy.” Though three years old, the advice still holds strong.

Witty, smart, sarcastic, optimistic, skeptical— whatever the tone, be consistent. Early on, figure out what your brand’s message is and how you want to say it. Choose a tone or angle, and then consistently apply it to your content. If you want to be instructional and serious, stick with that. As Shane writes in “Beginner’s Guide,” it’s not so much what you say—it’s how you say it.

6. HOW MUCH CONTENT SHOULD I BE CREATING?

The short answer: a lot. A brand needs to pump out quality content in order to establish trust in their readership. The perfect mix is different for each brand, but when starting out, look at key engagement metrics (like engaged time, average finish time, shares, and return visits) to see which pieces of content are compelling your audience to come back. Then, double down on what works while constantly testing and iterating new approaches. That’s the approach the brand newsroom of the future will take.

7. HOW DOES A BRAND SET UP A NEWSROOM?

Brand newsrooms are all the rage right now. When TCS sat down with content strategist Neil Chase, he had some key advice for setting up a brand newsroom internally:

The brand newsroom must embrace and follow the company’s culture, but it also needs the ability to change that culture. To make a closed company more open. To make a company that’s nervous about publicity more comfortable with it. To help a company that operates in a regulatory environment able to do more than it thought possible before. To try new things, use new technology and break bad old habits. More here.

Brands have the opportunity to reimagine the traditional newsroom structure to best serve their needs. This means establishing specific responsibilities for each department. And as Shane explains in the talk below, most every decision should be driven by data and the quest for an exponentially increasing return on investment:

And for a visual guide to brand newsrooms, check out our interactive e-book, “The CMO’s Guide to Building a Brand Newsroom.”

8. WHAT’S A GOOD STRATEGY FOR GETTING MORE PEOPLE TO FIND YOUR CONTENT IN THE FIRST PLACE?

One of the most important principles for building an audience is the “superconnector.” This is a person or platform that has an established audience you can borrow. If there are people in your brand’s network with whom you can connect, do it.

But how? You need to offer unique and valuable content. Produce content that their audience is interested in and then give it away. This way you make the superconnector happy, and you get exposed to a broader audience. Offering value leads to trust, and the audience will be more likely to follow you to your own platform.

It’s a similar idea to finding influencers. Connecting to 500 people through one person is much more efficient than trying to reach people individually. In addition, don’t be afraid to pay to jumpstart your traffic. Creating good content is only effective if people read it. Here’s the TCS breakdown of the top distribution platforms.

For more, check out Shane’s webinar, “Superconnecting Massive Audiences,” below:

9. WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF OUTSOURCING CONTENT CREATION?

Don’t think outsourcing, think in-sourcing, as jargony as that sounds. (Forgive us.) Bringing in freelancers adds a fresh twist to a brand’s voice. For instance, General Mills brought in outside writers, photographers, and infographic experts to write and design their successful recipe site, Tablespoon. While the perspectives of freelance brand journalists are often at odds with traditional marketers, that’s actually a good thing, breathing fresh life into a content campaign. Their ability to connect with audiences and tell a great story in unorthodox ways can be invaluable.

10. IS IT REALLY WORTH THE INVESTMENT TO HIRE TRAINED JOURNALISTS FOR BRANDED CONTENT OVER CHEAPER WRITERS AND COPYWRITERS?

Definitely. With the saturation of Internet content, brands are not only competing with one another for attention, but also with established media powerhouses. Brands need the talent to compete, and that makes writers who are talented, experienced, and passionate about a brand’s mission invaluable. There is truth to the warning “You get what you pay for,” and when it comes to content, quality is king. Click here for more.

11. WHAT IS A GOOD STRATEGY FOR GETTING PEOPLE TO NOTICE YOUR CONTENT WHEN THEY MAINLY GO TO YOUR SITE TO BUY STUFF?

Depends on what you’re selling, but a smart strategy is to integrate editorial with the products themselves. You want a balance of boosting the appeal of your product with providing value through your content. The story cannot only be about the product. Contently uses the “Content Funnel” as a framework for creating content for varying levels of engagement.

The first step is to attract your audience by offering them stories that speak to their values and are either timely, seasonal, or evergreen—meaning always relevant. The second level of the funnel is for stories about the company and the customer. This gets a bit more personal and moves the audience closer to the product. The third tier is the stories concerning your product. The people who make it to this level of the funnel are the ones who will become patrons of your brand.

A few brands doing an awesome job of weaving amazing content into their commerce platforms are Mr. Porter, Birchbox, and Apple.

Groupon is one more great example of combining content and commerce. It made stories an integral part of each deal, and rode unprecedented conversion rates all the way to an IPO. People could connect with the company on multiple levels and kept coming back for more.

12. WHAT’S THE BEST WAY TO DEFINE YOUR CONTENT?

The best content is mission-driven: For us, that mission is building a better media world. That’s why we cover the media and marketing world here on The Content Strategist, give freelancers the tools and knowledge they need to succeed on The Freelancer, and fund independent investigative journalism over at Contently.org. If you want a definition, start with a question: What’s my mission?

13. WHAT METRICS CAN HELP YOU IMPROVE YOUR WRITING AND PERFORMANCE?

14. HOW DOES A BRAND CALCULATE THEIR ROI? NOT JUST A FORMULA BUT THE PROCESS AND TOOLS?

Most metrics focus on developing the brand, not the creator. The natural progression in smart content strategy is Stories > Engagement > Relationships > ROI. Each level of the brand newsroom should focus on one or more of those pieces. For creative people, the story metrics are the most important. For editors, engagement and relationships should take priority.

Story metrics that matter most: engaged time, finish percentage, and return engagement. These three metrics lead to relationships, which then directly translate to ROI when the conversion pathway is tracked correctly. For more, check out our “4 Keys to Calculating ROI for Content Marketers” (process) and our e-book, “The New World of Content Measurement” (tools).

15. WHICH SOCIAL PLATFORM SHOULD I USE TO BUILD A FOLLOWING OF WEALTHY INVESTORS USING LONGFORM CONTENT?

As we detailed in our “Banking on Content” e-book, LinkedIn is a finance content marketer’s best friend. LinkedIn has the audience you want, and their targeting capabilities are unmatched. If you’re publishing directly on LinkedIn, they have great engagement metrics built into the platform, and they also recently rolled out a redesign of their longform pages. If you can build an audience on LinkedIn, you can attract a following that will transfer over to your owned media platform.

For more finance content marketing tips, check out our “State of Finance Content Marketing” e-book.

16. AS FAR AS FORMATTING AND PLACEMENT ARE CONCERNED, WHAT IS THE SWEET SPOT FOR LINKING TO EXTERNAL RESOURCES IN ARTICLES?

If you’re giving a load of resources, do so at the end of the story, not as a distraction midway through. If links to external resources are important for context, definitely include them in-text (like in this piece). If you’re not concerned about content engagement, then split test it the same way you’d split test a landing page.

Also, whenever you reference a brand name in your article—yours or otherwise —always link it within the text. This can amp up your SEO ranking.

17. WHAT IS “THOUGHT LEADERSHIP” AND IS THERE VALUE TO BEING CONSIDERED A THOUGHT LEADER?

A brand that is a thought leader assumes expertise in a field. People rely on them as a resource. Thought leadership is the number one goal Contently clients list. Really, thought leadership is about branding. If your brand is intelligent, that’s exactly how you want to self-style. If your brand sells Doritos-shell tacos, who cares about thought leadership? You might care about entertaining teens and twenty-somethings.

And yes, thought leadership has become a buzz phrase, but it’s here to stay. Here are some tips to make it work for you.

18. WHAT TRENDS WILL BE IMPACTING CONTENT CREATION IN THE NEAR FUTURE?

What if Coca-Cola took you inside of a can or Corona could actually find you your beach? Immersive virtual reality is going to hit marketers by surprise. Strapping on goggles and transporting instantly to a virtual hangout will be a huge opportunity for bigger and better storytelling.

The main answer is that we’ll see more players: media companies, media agencies, creative agencies, PR firms, small shops—everyone’s selling content right now. We’ll also see an explosion in multimedia and branded web series, leveraging YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, and other emerging platforms and talent to reach millennials.

There will also be a greater merging between digital and social media, and traditional media. HP’s recent commercial featuring a montage of Vines is a great example. Finally, a select few brands will finally figure out how to structure their organizations like a media company.

THERE YOU HAVE IT.

Thank you to everyone who submitted your questions. As always, when others pop up, feel free to reach out @Contently.

5 Tips for Quality Content Creation That Won’t Bust Your Budget

via Content Marketing Institute http://ift.tt/OcukFH

By HEIDI COHEN published MARCH 10, 2014

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With more marketers focusing on content creationand more people communicating on social media, every piece of content you distribute has to break through the clutter and grab your audience members in a way that predisposes them to choose your message over one that comes from your competition.

It’s not just about capturing attention — if it were, all you would need to do is consistently post a bunch of cat videos; but that’s not exactly going to help you achieve your key business goals, now is it?

Content quality sets your content marketing apart

While cute cats are great, if your business is serious about attracting more readers — and higher rankings on search engines — you need to focus on content quality.

Research by Disruptive Communications in 2013 revealed that audiences care about the quality of your content. Here are two key findings that underscore that point:

• Forty percent of respondents admitted that poor spelling and grammar reduced their favorable impression of a brand. Yes that’s right. The writing you studied in grade school really does matter to your target audience.
• Twenty-five percent of respondents feel that brands’ social media updates are too salesy. What’s surprising here is that the percentage isn’t higher. Both content marketing and social media communications should be void of any promotional message. In other words, skip the sales talk.

As a marketer with a limited budget, the good news about focusing on quality content creation is that you don’t need to think in terms of producing more content but rather in terms of making each piece of content more effective.

Therefore, it may be time to rethink your organization’s processes to enable higher-quality content creation. For example:

• For larger organizations, this might mean working to bridge your organizational silos. With better team alignment, you can eliminate duplicated efforts and produce content that addresses higher-level marketing goals.
• For smaller organizations, this might mean planning ahead to find opportunities to create multiple pieces of content simultaneously, which will reduce your content creation costs.

5 tips to improve content quality without busting your budget

Here are five content marketing tips that will help you raise the quality of your content without significantly increasing your costs:

1. Perform a company-wide content audit: The aim here is to determine what effective content your organization has, what content is outdated or needs freshening up, and what information is missing from your existing offerings. To do this well and keep content costs down, think holistically across your entire organization:

• Catalog all of your content to determine what you have: Include content and communications from outside of the marketing department. You may have useful information in your sales manual, but it’s not going to do your company much good if no one knows it’s there, just waiting to be leveraged.
• Assess each piece of content to determine what to delete, what to revise, and what works well as-is: Examine your existing content assets with a critical eye. Think about low-cost ways you can enhance what you have or make it have greater impact.
• Determine where there are gaps in your current content assets: Are there topics you aren’t covering, or information that you aren’t providing for your readers? Based on what you’ve learned during your audit, make a list of new ideas that you might want to focus your next content efforts on.

2. Develop a company-wide editorial calendar: In many companies, only the marketing department uses an editorial calendar to track its content creation efforts. But to improve content quality cost-effectively, it’s helpful to develop a calendar that tracks your content activities across the entire enterprise. This higher-level view of your company’s content creation efforts will help you identify opportunities to unite the efforts and resources of various teams, eliminate waste from duplicated efforts, and extend the value and impact of the content you do create.

In larger firms, coordinating an enterprise-wide calendar may require a chief content officer — someone who would have first-hand knowledge of company-wide goals — and access to the team members who will be most essential in coordinating everyone’s efforts.

To develop an editorial calendar that functions across the entire organization, start with these three steps:

• Determine what types of content will work best to support your overarching promotion goals
• Examine the content, social media, and other marketing-related assets you have at your disposal.
• Identify all areas of your organization where information needs to be shared, such as sales, customer service, product development, website development, human resources, and investor relations. The object is to turn all communications into effective content marketing pieces, thereby increasing your content production without adding costs.

For example, instead of a traditional annual report, Warby Parker found a great way to turn a dull annual report into an engaging piece of content:

3. Plan your content creation efforts in advance: The goal is to create multiple pieces on related topics all at the same time. Where appropriate, develop marketing and corporate content simultaneously — this reduces costs since you are combining your efforts. You can also break a larger piece of content down into multiple, smaller pieces, thereby further extending your budget.

For example, Kelly Services repurposed one of its white papers into three different SlideShare presentations, each focusing on a different part of the conversation. In total, these three presentations generated 10,000 views, 1,000 new subscribers and 250 sales-accepted leads. Results that you can take to the bank!
4. Develop a plan for distributing content efficiently and effectively: Don’t just publish! Have a plan to ensure that your content will reach the broadest audience possible:

• Make each piece of content contextually relevant to the platform on which it will appear: Also, consider whether the content will render well across most commonly used devices and screen sizes (think smartphone and tablets).
• Include a relevant call-to-action: Remember your goal is to get readers to take the next step in your purchase process.

5. Be prepared to track your content marketing results: Check that your content quality efforts are improving your response and decreasing your costs in other marketing areas. Specifically, consider the number of leads your content is generating, as well as measuring the number of qualified leads and sales against your content marketing expenses.

Streamline your content creation across your organization to ensure that you create top-quality information that your target audience wants and needs, while eliminating duplicate and other wasteful efforts. By doing this you should be able to reduce your content marketing costs considerably.

What has your experience been with streamlining your content creation process across your organization? Has it resulted in lower costs and improved content quality?

For more great tips, ideas, and examples for creating quality content more efficiently, readEpic Content Marketing, by Joe Pulizzi. 

Cover image via Bigstock 

Karen McGrane on Content: Responsive Design Won’t Fix Your Content Problem

I spoke to a digital team at a large corporation a while back, and outlined some of the many challenges they were likely to face in creating, revising, and publishing their content so it would work well on smartphone, tablet, and desktop interfaces.

These included:

• Evaluating whether content is useful, valuable, actually worthy of being on mobile (or the desktop, for that matter)


• Assessing the amount of content that can appear on a “page” on different devices, and striking a balance for different form factors


• Creating multiple forms of headlines, teasers, or body text, so valuable information doesn’t get truncated randomly


• Planning to develop alternate versions of some assets—such as different image sizes and crops, alternatives to large infographics or tables, new demo videos showing both desktop and mobile versions of the interface


• Separating content from presentation in the CMS, so content and markup aren’t all dumped into the same blob of a field

An attendee raised her hand and said “I’ve been wondering when you would mention responsive web design. We’re going to use responsive design.” I responded “Well, responsive design won’t fix your content problem.”

Who thinks that, anyway?

I recently posted a link to an article that called responsive design a “poor man’s content strategy.” Then my Twitter feed exploded with people heavily sighing and rolling their eyes, insisting no one would ever conflate the two. Why, everyone knows that the container and what you put in the container aren’t the same thing. Everyone knows that just rearranging modules from the desktop to make them squishy is not a content strategy for mobile. Everyone knows if organizations discover problems that go beyond the specific layout solutions offered by responsive design, that’s not the fault of the technique.

Except not everyone knows that. These are just a few of the anecdotes I’ve heard recently from people working on mobile websites for major corporations—projects with large budgets, committed teams, and executive buy-in:

• We recently finished a massive CMS replatforming which necessitated a redesign of the desktop website. There is zero enthusiasm for going back through the content structuring, editing, and approval process with our business stakeholders and our legal review team. Whatever we wind up doing on mobile, we must use the exact same content we have on our brand-new desktop site.


• We just spent [insert unfathomably large number here] trying to take our existing desktop website and make it responsive. We genuinely believed this process would be faster and easier if we based it on what we already have. It’s not going well, and we’ll probably need to throw it all out and start over. We would have been better off if we’d started from scratch six months ago.


• I was hired as a developer to build a new responsive website, but I’m being asked to make all kinds of decisions about how to edit and restructure the content—decisions I don’t feel entirely qualified to make. I keep telling my client they need to bring someone in to deal with the content questions, but they think responsive design is just a front-end design and development problem.


• Our executives assume that since they made the decision to go responsive, every other decision would just be tactical details. In fact, implementing responsive web design raises issues that strike right at the heart of our business and the way we work. We need to fix our review and approval processes, our content management system, our asset management system, our design standards and governance. We need to clean up our outdated, useless content. But it’s hard to get people to step up to solve these bigger problems, because they don’t think they’re part of “responsive design.”

Seems like a lot of people are laboring under the mistaken impression that using responsive design means they can make a mobile website without dealing with their content problem.

Where’d they get that dumb idea?

We told them so. And, okay, yes, they’re using some magical thinking. But straight up, we told them that the mobile website should be the same as the desktop, and that’s why they should use responsive web design. We sold them on the value of responsive design by promising that they could manage and maintain one set of content and it would work across all devices.

We also insisted there’s no good reason to serve different content by platform. We got twitchy whenever anyone started talking about sending different content or less content to mobile devices (rightly so). We pointed out that you can’t discern user context or intent just from knowing screen size or device type. We told them content parity was the first and most important goal when developing a responsive website.

Is it any wonder they assume (hope?) they can just take what they already have, wave a responsive magic wand over it, and have their existing content automagically work on mobile? Why should it be different? We said it shouldn’t be.

Even companies that want to take a “mobile first” approach can’t just throw off the shackles of their desktop content. For some, suggesting the organization “start fresh” with new content would be organizational suicide, touching the political third rail of stakeholders and competing interests. Others acknowledge it’s time for a new approach, but need processes that will enable them to clean up and restructure existing content to make it appropriate for a responsive design. Responsive design won’t fix their content problem—but content strategy will.

Responsive design + content strategy = BFF 4 EVAH

It’s time we acknowledged that every responsive web design project is also a content strategy project. For designers and developers who might not know what to emphasize, here are a few talking points:

Your content must be revised

Even though the long-term goal is to serve the same content to every platform, organizations can’t just use what they already have. Smart companies will seize this opportunity to do what they should have done years ago: clean up and pare down their desktop content. You’ll never get a better chance to fix your content and publishing processes.

You may need to deal with legacy systems

The tantalizing prospect of responsive web design is being able to solve the problem of “mobile” completely on the front end. The front end is so much more malleable than the back end, so of course we want to start there. But many responsive projects require changes to the way content and data are structured and published from the CMS or other legacy systems. For some, an approach to APIs will be needed; for many others, it will be an overhaul of content management and asset management systems.

Design your editorial workflow first

The chicken-and-egg problem of content informing design (and vice versa) just got bigger—call it an ostrich-and-egg problem. While smart people have talked about the responsive design workflow and how design deliverables and processes must change, the editorial workflow also needs attention. Planning for how and when the content team will migrate, edit, and restructure content will help everyone ensure that the content and the design work together. Design deliverables like wireframes and comps are evolving—content teams must also evolve away from reliance on Excel spreadsheets and Word documents to manage this process.

You won’t have time to edit everything

Even the most dedicated and ambitious teams won’t have the capacity to revise and restructure every page of their existing desktop website. Making informed and realistic decisions about what to focus on (and what to punt on) will help with overall planning, migration processes, and design decisions. Acknowledging this early will help get teams and stakeholders on board with the fact that not everything will be perfect.

Plan for long-term governance

Responsive design also won’t fix your design standards and governance model, but we still need to include long-term maintenance in our objectives. I heard a story from one group who said they convinced their company that it wasn’t possible to do responsive design properly unless they also created and enforced a design system. The same argument could be made for developing and encouraging adherence to content standards.

Responsive design itself won’t fix your content—no one ever said it would. But the opportunity to implement a responsive redesign is also the opportunity to fix your content and its underlying strategy. It may seem more complicated to edit your content and fix your processes and systems at the same time you’re designing a new site—but in fact, pretending you don’t have to solve these problems just makes the job harder. Smart organizations will see this as a benefit, not a drawback, and will use this chance to make a better website, not just a squishy one.





via A List Apart: The Full Feed http://alistapart.com/column/responsive-design-wont-fix-your-content-problem

17 Essential Content Templates and Checklists

By MICHELE LINN published JUNE 3, 2013

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By far, the most popular post we have ever published at the Content Marketing Institute is 10 Must-Have Templates for Content Marketers. Though this post is almost two years old, our readers still seem to clamor for this type of information and advice. 

To that end, we wanted to provide a refresher on the most popular templates and checklists shared by the CMI team and our guest contributors. Some of these are “oldies but goodies” that we included in the first list, and others are new. All are intended to simplify some part of the content marketing process — and all can be customized to your particular needs.

Buyer-focused resources

Buyer persona template: The first rule of content marketing is that whatever you create must be relevant to your audience. Here are tips on how to create a buyer persona:

Content mapping template: If you sell something with a complex sales cycle, you’ll need to map your content requirements to stages in the buying cycle.

Content and process organization

Content marketing team and workflow checklist: You can’t create a successful content marketing program if you don’t have the right skills, resources, and experience on hand to support your efforts. Learn more about the essential roles and recommended processes for building your team and workflow plan.

Editorial calendar template: To keep all of your content projects planned and organized, you’ll likely want to develop an editorial calendar. This template will serve as a great starting point.

Content kick-off checklist: For a content project to succeed, all stakeholders — from the client to your content creators — need to be on the same page. We suggest answering these 15 questions before you start any project.

Content request template: Have too many content ideas, or too many requests from across your organization? Use this checklist to help you prioritize your projects, or those being developed by your team.

Content technology questionnaire: Are you considering a technology purchase to simplify your content processes? This checklist includes 14 questions to ask to make sure you select a solution that will meet your unique content marketing needs.

Creativity and design

Readability checklist: Not all websites are created equal. Here’s a checklist to follow for designing pages that are clear and readable, and can be easily navigated by your audience.

Killer web content template: If you are creating web content, use this template to help you make sure you’re driving action on each page.

Creating valuable content checklist: As you work through all of your content ideas, keep these key considerations in mind to ensure that you will be providing value to your audience.

Title evaluation scorecard: The importance of a great title for your content efforts shouldn’t be underestimated. This checklist walks you through the essentials for creating relevant, engaging headlines that will draw readers in.

Keyword selection checklist: While quality content rules, you shouldn’t ignore SEO. Here are 12 questions to ask to make sure you are targeting the most relevant keywords for your business.

Publication and promotion

Content publication checklist: Once you’re ready to share your content with the world, be sure to review these key steps that will help you prepare your publication for optimal reach, engagement, and ROI.

Content distribution template: Even after you’ve published, your job is not done. You need to market your content, and this template will walk you through the need-to-know basics.

Blog post promotion checklist: If you are promoting a blog post, there are lots of things you can do to position it for success. Check out our most recent list of tips to help get you started (you can also go deeper by reading our original post on the topic).

Localization checklist: If your content is targeted to audiences in different global markets, consider this checklist of tips and considerations for localizing the content you’ve created.

Content marketing success checklist: Of course, you will want to see which of your content efforts are performing best, so you can continue to deliver the information your audience wants. This checklist walks you through how to measure content marketing success.

If there are templates and checklists you have personally used in your content marketing efforts, please tell us about them in the comments. And if there are others you would like to see, let us know that as well!

Editor’s note: You can also check out these templates our readers have suggested:

• The Triangle of Relevance: Angie Schottmuller shares a content strategy principle incorporating three angles – business interest, user interest, and time significance – to maximize relevance and magnetize content, creating user action.

For more tools and ideas that will help facilitate all your content marketing efforts, read CMI’sContent Marketing Playbook.

Cover image via Bigstock