The 8 Ingredients of the Ideal Website Content Plan

The 8 Ingredients of the Ideal Website Content Plan

Efficient digital marketing is all about recognizing your target audience's needs and addressing them timely. A well-crafted website content plan combines a structured approach to help cover all the funnel stages and seasonal needs (i.e., helping your audience with the industry reports and predictions at the end of the year) while keeping some flexibility for the new market developments.

That said, many companies either do not create a proper content plan, hoping to come up with some ideas at the last moment or fail to maintain and revise what’s been planned according to the market circumstances and their audience’s needs. But once you start investing in content strategy expecting some ROI, an established content plan is a must. 

As Michael Brener of Marketing Insider Group pointed out, well-done strategic content marketing can become a good source of new prospects for your business:

“...if you can weave together the endless list of possible content choices and channels, with the strategy that speaks to your audience in your brand's voice, you know exactly what content marketing is and how to make it grow your business.”

Therefore, if you map content creation essentials, you’ll streamline workflows that underlie long-term digital success. Let’s dive into the vital guidelines to help you maximize the benefits of your website content plan.

Why Mapping Website Content in Advance?

Growing your B2B website benefits both you and your customers. The strategic content strategy translated into the tactical website content plan is the core of this growth engine, where business objectives and customer needs converge. Website content plan here serves the following purposes:

• It maps the primary keywords you aim to rank for. The preliminary competition analysis will update you on the keyword gaps in competitors' content strategies so that you can take advantage of them.
• It identifies the gaps in content required for different pipeline stages. Each of them will require different types of content like case studies, guides, reports, white papers, etc.
• It helps you determine which content to promote through paid ads & email campaigns. You will maximize the outcomes of social media posting and email outreach by promoting the most impactful content types.
• It fosters planning for lead nurturing and communication with your existing customers. With a website content plan, you’ll ensure regular customer communication covering product updates, tutorials, playbooks, and showcasing materials to benefit your product users.

Through website content plan development, you can be sure that all the lead and customer segments are properly taken care of. Otherwise, your content strategy will turn into clumsy guesswork that is misaligned with business goals and customer expectations.

As a concise takeaway, here’s the summary of three prime benefits a well-laid website content plan will bring you.

#1. Maximization of the Content Marketing ROI. Semrush’s survey showed that 55% of B2B respondents were dissatisfied with the low quality of leads generated from their content marketing efforts. Another 42% of executives still struggle with generating ROI with their content marketing. With a content plan, you’ll get better visibility and control over the prospects’ website path.

#2. Synchronization with Other Lead Gen and Growth Efforts. Mapping content topics for a cross-channel approach ensures consistent messaging of all your marketing efforts. Continue with the feedback loop to collect the engagement signals from the audience, identify what content formats and themes bring in more leads, and reuse the best performers for planning further campaigns.

 #3. Evergreen Marketing Assets. Based on past content performance and trends analysis, identify what kind of content could be the core of your future campaigns. If you don’t have such ‘winning’ content pieces yet, include potential lead-capturing topics in your website content plan. If you already have such marketing assets, still include them into your website content plan to ensure timely updates to keep them evergreen.

On the whole, a website content plan effectively synchronizes content-making workflows for multiple purposes, including well outside of the content strategy. And that’s the key point of success for productive cross-team collaboration and the strategic success of your business.

Building a Viable Website Content Plan in 8 Steps

Let’s dive into the specifics of building a B2B website content plan. Adhere to these guidelines, and you’ll surely succeed with your content marketing activities.

1. Clarify Your Goals

Follow this pattern:

• Define and prioritize your goals. Do you aim to improve conversion rates or win additional organic traffic for your landing pages? Or maybe you need more content for your newsletter to update your existing customers on the best product use? Determining a clear goal is where you must start, no matter what.
• Decide on the % distribution between content types per goal. Your total number of content pieces per month will depend on two factors: 

• Your content team’s content production capacity
• Previously identified and prioritized content goals and target audience segments.

Should your content team’s production capacities not be enough, consider outsourcing at least a part of your content creation process to professional helpers.

A hint for you: while AI-generated content can really help scale your content efforts, it’s not enough to paste a quickly-generated piece into your CMS. Every AI-generated content piece currently requires a human in the loop to be usable. More on this in our further posts.

Now, from the SEO perspective, the minimum content plan for a website should include at least 4-6 well-optimized, at least 1200-word blogs just to keep the website afloat with the influx of new traffic and keywords. You’d add more to cover product updates, company news, and other content areas according to plan.    

• Break down your yearly plan into quarterly and monthly plans. Your goals could change quarter to quarter, especially if you’re a start-up pivoting and still exploring the market. Plan for some flexibility and adjustments, and make sure your content can still be relevant and re-purposed in case of a change.

2. Identify Your Audience’s Intents and How They Behave Online

Pinpoint and unify customer data collected by the support team, social campaign monitoring tools, or third-party data vendors. You can push surveys to collect qualitative sentiment data if you have a sufficient email list. Let your email subscribers speak their minds on their favorite products, content types, and the overall user experience they get from interacting with your website. Use heatmap analyzers to analyze the scroll depth and identify any on-page blockers.

The collected data points will underpin the buyer’s identity resolution, which will help you better understand your ICP’s most current interest. With basic prospecting knowledge, you’ll be able to cater to customer needs with your website content.

3. Research Your Competitors

The competitor analysis helps you discover the gaps in topic-related content and might give you some ideas on the possible content directions. Remember, you’re not analyzing to copy, as your final decision on selecting the topic and type of content will largely depend on your content goals identified for your website content plan, your product’s or services’ main selling point, keyword difficulty, and so on.

4. Audit Your Existing Content

Even if your website doesn’t have any blogs, articles, or videos yet, you will definitely have some other content types: social media posts, case studies, slide decks on features or services, demo recordings, news, and so on. Remember to also take these into consideration as inspiration or source of data.

Things to look for:

• What materials do your sales and customer support teams use most frequently? That’s a great indicator of useful content that your target audience should have access to.
• Which stage of the lead & customer journey this asset corresponds to?
• What pages and search queries generate the most traffic? Check them out in Google Search Console. Leverage GA4 custom event tracking to analyze user journeys and detect what content and UI gaps make them bounce off.
• Are there any content gaps? A content gap analysis will help identify the possible missed topics. Additionally, it will reveal where to double down to outdo your direct competitors. We’d recommend you look out for 4 omissions in website content:

• High bounce-back rate and low engagement. Are there content pieces with a high bounce rate, low scroll depth, and lacking engagement?
• Outdated content. Even the “evergreen” content requires occasional revision, refreshment, and update.
• Not yet covered topics. Make sure you cover the sought-after subtopics as well. This way, you can successfully target smaller audience segments and pull them into the buying cycle.
• Poor format variety. Align the content formats with customer intents to hit the spot. For instance, you can leverage the power of the immersive marketing experience and interactive storytelling we’ve mentioned in our overview of 2024 hottest marketing trends.

5. Map the Core Keywords Across Your Pages

Keyword mapping is fundamental for a purposeful website content plan. Keyword difficulty for the related keyword clusters will also determine how likely you are to own the keywords for a topic like this – and not every topic on your content plan is for ranking purposes, of course. But for where you aim for ranking, detect the keyword gap. SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush will help you identify where you can outdo your competitors in SERP from the get-go.

Two things to keep in mind when allocating the target keywords to the topics on your website content plan:

• Keyword clusters

Keyword clusters encompass the same topic seed and related keywords or KW variations you can use on the same page.

When your website content plan includes clustered keywords, the related topics will serve as an additional booster for each other, ensuring higher relevance for search, better cross-linking, etc.

• Keyword cannibalization

That said, make sure your related topics are distinct enough, and avoid duplications or redundant overlap in the body. So, plan for the outline in such cases as well. Otherwise, things will get messy as soon as different copywriters start working on related or adjacent topics. After all, you don’t want multiple pages of your own website competing against each other.

6. Plan for the Content Production Workflow Stages

A content piece is not done until it’s available to the target audience. So, the additional visuals, HTML formatting, and CMS publication (or whatever your production process includes) should be accounted for in your website content plan as well. This will help you better understand when your content assets actually become usable, which is extremely important for planning any campaigns or newsletters utilizing the assets. This will also help with team coordination.

7. Plot the Promotional Campaigns

Generate a buzz with your content and let it reach the right audience. Take time to plot the correct promotion patterns and include them in your website content plan.

For instance, you can consider some of these:

• On-site content promotion. On-site content promotion is a cheap yet effective method. With in-text, banner, or pop-up CTAs, you can effectively orchestrate user flows and help them get to the pages that meet their needs.
• Promotion within your network. Make your current collaborators and partners your prime promoters. It will add both authority and attention to your messages.
• Email. Automated email campaigns help content marketers effectively nurture list-based audiences. You can effectively re-engage almost any lead with proper segmentation and email campaign management.
• Paid ads. Marketing pros continuously invest in paid advertising since it's one of the most flexible digital channels. With decent experience and a knack, you can substantially grow awareness and generate leads while keeping PPC bids low.
• Social media posts. Go proactive on social media. Don’t zero in on posting in your account: promote the content across relevant communities and join the discussions. Show your potential audience your willingness to listen and share your wisdom.

8. Revise and Optimize: A Follow-up to Website Content Plan Essentials

Running a content strategy upon your plan will inevitably expose you to new challenges and goals. Revise your content plan at regular intervals. Set up the success criteria and related KPI(s) for the content performance, and make them a part of the plan available to the team, so you’ll see at a glance what goals, sections, topics, and content types worked – and what didn’t go according to plan.

Another important area in the revision and optimization process is optimizing your existing content, of course. We recommend including Optimization efforts in your plan as well.

Tools and Tips to Help with Your Website Content Plan Creation

Topics Research: Google Trends & Answer The Public

Google Trends is a free tool that helps the content team analyze how often and at what intervals users google particular keywords. In the exploration view, you can adjust the time period, country/subregion, and industry. Moreover, you can look into specific types of web searches like Images, YouTube videos, News, and Google Shopping.

In Google Trends, you could also compare two search queries head to head to check which topics remain in high demand. As you can see, people have googled “content marketing guide” more frequently, whereas “content marketing trends” is a seasonal query that significantly spikes in January. This intel will help you roll out relevant content and pump it with link juice beforehand.