Your Content Strategy Roadmap
Chart a Path to Market Leadership
Founders, principals, and executive directors strive to create content that resonates with their audiences and drives relevant traffic to their website. But oftentimes, the results are underwhelming. Their traffic doesn’t increase, and site visitors don’t convert into customers and clients.
The key to making sure your content will be effective is to establish a comprehensive Content Roadmap.
Our Content Roadmap process is designed to prioritize user needs, boost audience growth, generate leads, and establish market leadership.
Let us guide you on the Content Roadmap journey and assist you in reaching your goals.
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Content Strategy Consulting for Your Business
Achieve market leadership with a Content Roadmap that aligns with your market position.
When to Create a Content Roadmap
Creating a Content Roadmap is Stage 2 of our Strategic Positioning Process. Before you create a Content Roadmap, it’s important that you fully understand your market position, and can communicate it clearly.
If you have not established your market position, we recommend that you build your Positioning Brief.
If you already have a Positioning Brief, then you’re ready to create a Content Roadmap.
What’s Included in Your Content Roadmap
Deliverable 1: User Needs + SEO Keyword Analysis
Your user needs and SEO keyword analysis set the stage for your website authority plan.
Our team works with you to create an analysis that includes:
- List of 10+ clear, urgent user needs per persona
- List of 100+ potential keywords based on user needs
- Relevant keywords for each user need
- Search volume for each keyword
- Difficulty of ranking for each keyword
We find the best SEO opportunities based on three key factors:
- Volume: on average, how many times is the keyword, phrase, or question searched in a month? Is that number trending up or down?
- Urgency: how fast does the person making the search need a solution to their challenge?
- Clarity: is the intent of the keyword, phrase, or question apparent, or could there be another reason why someone may make that search? For example, out of the 304,000 people that search for “Office Space” in a given month, how many are looking for physical office space, and how many are trying to find a meme from Mike Judge’s cinematic classic?
Deliverable 2: Website Authority Plan
Your website authority plan prioritizes the content that should be written first—your homepage, about page, service pages, etc.—as well as the ongoing content that will continue to drive more and more traffic to your site: your pillar pages, and blogs based on longtail topics.
Your website authority plan includes:
- 5 to 10 key pillar page topics
- 100+ longtail topics carefully curated and focused to drive market leadership
- Visual site map
Pillar pages are long-form, top-of-funnel content: guides, case studies, and tutorials that educate people who are just hearing about your brand. Pillar pages target high-volume keywords and phrases, and can successfully rank for some of the most difficult keywords to rank for. They also contain content that can be redistributed across paid, shared, and earned media such as social posts, one-sheets, emails, and paid ads.
Longtail topics are the basis for short-form content such as blogs and articles. Longtail topics tend to be more specific, focusing on lower-volume keywords, questions, and phrases. They target people who are looking for an answer to a problem that your business is well-equipped to help them solve.
Pillar pages and longtails topics are often interlinked, creating what we call “content clusters” that are relevant to the keywords you’re targeting and easy for both site visitors and web-crawlers to navigate.
Websites built using content clusters rank high on search engine result pages. As site visitors navigate from pillar pages to longtail blogs, your average engagement time and user engagement increase, showcasing to search engines that your entire website is a leading authority on the topics you talk about.
Deliverable 3: PESO Report
Maximizing your Return on Investment (ROI) requires a well-rounded approach to media. Our PESO Report provides guidance on how to effectively leverage Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media channels. We’ll recommend the ideal media type to roll out first and offer insights into the most optimal ways to distribute content across other media channels.
What is PESO?
| Media Type | Example |
|---|---|
| Paid | Digital ads, print ads, conference sponsorship |
| Earned | Media interviews, guest posts, editorials, mentions on other websites |
| Shared | Partner webinars, joint case studies, social media posts |
| Owned | Website content, email campaigns, brochures, blog |
Deliverable 4: Content Creation Timelines
Consistency is key to getting results from your content. Choose from our three content timeline options—12-month, 18-month, or 24-month timeline—to ensure a steady flow of valuable information reaches your audience.
How We Create Your Content Roadmap
Strategic Launch Meeting
To kickstart the Content Strategy Roadmap, we’ll conduct a 90-minute strategic launch meeting. During the strategic launch meeting, we set expectations between our teams and schedule the workshops we need to complete a high quality roadmap.
If you’re going through our complete Strategic Positioning Process, this collaborative session is an opportunity to celebrate the completion of your Positioning Brief and recalibrate for success.
Content Strategy Roadmap Workshops
Our content strategy workshops provide valuable insights and direction for your content creation journey.
Card Sorting Workshop
During the card sorting workshop, we collect your team’s key ideas and organize those ideas into a sitemap for a website that’s intuitive and engaging for your users to navigate.
User Needs Workshop
During the user needs workshop, we identify 10+ user needs for each persona. We consider the urgency and clarity of each user need so that your content addresses your audience’s biggest problems, and fosters brand loyalty when they need you most.
Idea Generation Workshops
Our idea generation workshops are designed to pull the best topics and content ideas out of your team. These workshops are based on classic techniques that have been used by some of the world’s leading strategists—from Hollywood writers rooms to agencies on Madison Avenue—for generating, iterating, and evolving ideas that resonate with a mass audience.
SEO Research
For SEO research, we explore a universe of potential SEO keywords, taking into account each of the terms and phrases that inspire users and are relevant to your business.
To further enhance your search engine visibility, we analyze the competitive landscape. We assess the strategies and content of your competitors, then devise the most effective topics and content types that can outrank them.
Our comprehensive approach optimizes your Content Strategy Roadmap to attract and engage your target audience, positioning you as a star in the market.
PESO Research and Analysis
We start your PESO analysis by revisiting the content channels uncovered during your Positioning Brief and Content Roadmap workshops.
We’ll see how your audience segments across different channels, and figure out the most effective opportunities for Paid, Earned, Shared, and Owned media. We’ll also determine how to repackage and redistribute your content to keep you top of mind and drive the highest ROI.
Finalize Your Roadmap
Finally, we review your Website Content Authority Plan, PESO Analysis, and content rollout timelines. Together, we solidify your Content Strategy Roadmap so that you can create content that will rocket you to the top of the market.
Embark on Your Journey to Content Authority
Ready to fuel your business and achieve atmospheric returns on your marketing?
Our high-octane content strategy helps you burn bright in your industry.