It’s important to realize who might be interested in such texts and whether the actual visitors match your buyer persona. Otherwise, most of your leads won’t convert.
That’s why, to create great content, you need a content development strategy first. This plan includes all the steps necessary to attract quality traffic and meet other business goals.
Generally, the content marketing plan development at Marketechy starts with a competitor, market, and customer assets analysis.
After this, Marketechy runs keyword research and selection, identifies the right content type, and creates an editorial calendar. To set up the goals and evaluate the effectiveness of the content marketing plan, it’s necessary to select KPIs. The overall and organic traffic growth, number of ranked keywords, and visitors engagement rates are the most commonly used metrics.
If you have never developed a content marketing plan before, it may be challenging. It was so for a SaaS startup Inkit that requested content marketing assistance from Marketechy back in 2019. In 2020, they tripled their traffic and conversion. And here’s how we did it.
We hired them to support our content creation and SEO needs. Our goal is to show that we’re the best in class while increasing our traffic and leads, - Michael McCarthy, CEO & Co-founder of Inkit.
Content Development Strategy for Inkit
Since Inkit is a SaaS startup, it’s a rapidly growing company that regularly releases updates and new features. Their content marketing plan and SEO keyword strategy had to be flexible and proactive. That was the main challenge of content creation for Inkit.
After communicating with the customer and analyzing their business needs, Marketechy identified the initial traffic goals and started working on the SEO keyword and content strategy.
Goals of the SEO Keyword and Content Development Strategy
- Reach 10K visitors per month in 6 months, by the end of 2020;
- Increase conversion rates in 6 months, by the end of 2020
To achieve these goals, Marketechy created the SEO keyword strategy and content marketing plan focused on:
- Removing tech SEO issues blocking the progress
- Optimizing the existing content
- Identifying new keyword opportunities
- Regular blogging activities
- Back-linking activities to accelerate the progress (guest posting, listings & directories, etc.).
Step-by-Step: How Marketechy Developed the SEO Keyword and Content Development Strategy
Marketechy’s team isn’t into one-size-fits-all solutions. We create tailored content marketing strategies for all customers taking into account their market niche and business goals. Since all content marketing efforts must be data-driven, research is usually the first stage.
Content Development Strategy Step #1. Competitor Analysis
At the launch, Inkit was an offline marketing platform, which shaped their content marketing. As the functionality of Inkit started to become more versatile, the need for a new content development strategy emerged. It was necessary to keep competing with offline marketing automation providers but enter other market segments.
Marketechy took this into account while developing a content marketing plan for 2020. Our team analyzed the existing and potential competitors of Inkit, the market segments, and the company’s content generation assets to crystallize a viable, efficient, implementation-ready SEO keyword and content development strategy.
We paid attention to:
- Types of companies that are (and will be) competing with Inkit
- Marketing channels they use to publish content
- Keywords they target
- Frequency and topics of their blog posts
- Content types
- Messaging
- Positioning
- Buyer persona(s)
- Conversion path
- CTAs
- User & customer-created content (testimonials, ratings, case studies, etc.)
- Benchmarking
- etc.
The preliminary analysis allowed us to understand what blog posts would be the most interesting to Inkit’s existing and new target audience. Such research was also helpful to see how and where we could outperform competitors with content.
Content Development Strategy Step #2. Keyword Phrase Analysis and Selection
After the market research phase, Marketechy’s team understood what search terms are related to products like Inkit. We created the list of keywords and started to look for additional terms that might be related. Out of all the generated keywords, Marketechy selected the options with the best relevance, highest search volume, and optimum keyword difficulty to include them in the SEO keyword strategy.
Since the market competition was high, we built our SEO keyword strategy on two types of keywords:
- High-volume long-tail keywords for organic traffic;
- Niche, lower-volume, but highly relevant keywords for the conversion rate and lead generation.
Content Development Strategy Step #3. Content Type Selection
To pick the best type of content for the content marketing plan, Marketechy considered the search intents of Inkit’s target audience. It turned out that search queries that could forward customers to Inkit were mainly informational and transactional. This means that potential leads used search engines to learn how to do something or find the best solutions to their business needs.
Based on these findings, Marketechy’s team decided to keep updating the blog with helpful content close to guides, manuals, and FAQs type. To maximize the benefits of the content marketing efforts, all the published articles were highly informative, practical, and unique. They provided tips, statistics, step-by-step process descriptions, lists, and guidelines that ultimately positioned Inkit as an expert consultant in addition to a service provider.
Content Development Strategy Step #4. Editorial Calendar and Content Briefs
When the SEO keyword strategy was ready, we moved to more detailed planning. Marketechy’s team created a content calendar listing the future blog post topics. This allowed us to discuss the planned blog posts with Inkit and synchronize the work of our content writer and SEO specialist.
The topics for the blog posts were selected based on the previously identified keywords, content groups, types, and the priority allocated. All of these were created based on the SEO content task, with the specified requirements as per:
- Meta-data
- Content outline
- Cross-linking
- References
- CTAs
- Length
- Readability
When Inkit implemented new features, Marketechy expanded the variety of blog posts and the SEO keyword strategy accordingly.
Content Development Strategy Step #5. Publishing and Сontent Audit
Every time a new blog post is ready, Marketechy’s content & SEO editors proofread them manually for possible optimization and run automated SEMrush content checks. SEMrush is a trusted platform that helps create SEO-friendly content, audit it, and monitor content reach.
To make sure the articles generate traffic after publishing, we keep tracking them. This way, we identify the best performers and adapt the topics of the following publications if needed. Closer to the end of 2020, as the launch of new features approached, our team gradually shifted the focus of publications. It was necessary to start generating leads for new products in advance and explain how they work.
We’ve seen a 3x increase in visitors to our site, along with the same increase in leads. Thanks to their efforts in optimizing the site and backlinking, we expect we’ll increase those numbers even more. – Michael McCarthy, CEO & Co-founder of Inkit.
