The Complete Content Marketing Checklist (Updated)

Content marketing is one of the most efficient strategies for generating valuable content, increasing organic traffic, getting more leads, and engaging with your audience.

Following a checklist is the best way to ensure you’ll execute all required content marketing tasks successfully.

That’s why we created The Complete Content Marketing Checklist. Our checklist includes all the critical tasks you must complete to ensure you take full advantage of all the benefits content marketing can offer your business.

Content Marketing Checklist

1. Learn Content Marketing Basics
2. Get to Know Your Audience
3. Devise A Content Marketing Strategy
4. Find Content Topic Ideas
5. Prepare An Action Plan
6. Create Different Types Of Content
7. Optimize Content For Search Engines
8. Promote Your Content
9. Use Content Marketing Tools
10. Analyze Campaign Performance

1. Learn Content Marketing Basics

The first item in your checklist is to make sure that you have a clear idea of what content marketing is and why it’s essential for the success of a digital marketing campaign.

Content marketing is the digital marketing process responsible for creating, publishing, and promoting the correct type of content to the right audience.

The content marketing cycle has 5 main steps:

1. Market Research (define your audience).
2. Finding content ideas to satisfy the intent of your target audience.
3. Creating high-quality, optimized content.
4. Promoting the content using the proper channels.
5. Analyzing/Optimizing the performance of your content marketing campaigns.

Content marketing is important

because:

• It has a greater ROI compared to other marketing methods.
• It can tremendously help your SEO efforts.
• It’s a great way to increase your site visibility and brand awareness.
• It’s good for customer care and support.
• It’s the best way to establish an online business.

So, before you proceed to the next item on the list, ensure you understand the basics. The resources below will help you get started.

2. Get to Know Your Audience

As mentioned above, content marketing is about creating content for the right audience.

So, the first actionable step is to do your market research and understand your target audience.

At the end of your research, you should have an answer to questions like:

• What kind of content do they like to read?
• What type of questions do they have?
• Which channels do they use to find answers?
• What products can solve their problems?

Then, you should analyze their demographic profile (age, gender, location, language, education level, and ethnic background) and create different customer personas.

3. Devise A Content Marketing Strategy

It's essential to create a high-level content marketing strategy before discovering what kind of content to create and for which topics.

Your strategy can include things like:

• What are your high-level goals (get more visits, make more sales, brand awareness, etc)?
• What content marketing tools should be used for research (Semrush, Google Analytics, etc.)?
• What tools to use for creating the content (Word, Google Docs, Grammarly, etc)
• What budget and how much time should you allocate to content marketing activities?
• How often will you publish new content?
• How do you measure the effectiveness of your campaigns?
• Which channels should you create content for?
• What type of content (text, video, audio) you need to publish
• Which tools to use for content promotion?
• Who can help you with content creation (freelance writers, people from your team, etc)

Thinking about this information in advance and before starting the content creation process will help you A LOT with planning and budgeting.

Don’t forget that content marketing is one of the most expensive and time-consuming digital marketing processes, so it is important to consider all parameters before starting the implementation.

4. Find Content Topic Ideas

The next item in the checklist is to learn the process of finding what topics/keywords to target with your content.

One of the main goals of content marketing is to create the right kind of content for the right audience. You'll waste time and money if you start creating content without a purpose.

When we refer to the ‘right type of content’, we essentially mean:

• Content that your audience wants to consume
• Content that can increase your potential of ranking higher in search engines
• Content that can generate more conversions for your business (email signups, leads, sales)

The good news is that there is a process to help you identify what your audience likes and what topics to target.

Ensure you read How to Find Content Topic ideas for all the details.

To remove this item from your checklist, you should know:

• The process to follow to find which content topic ideas
• A list of keywords to target with the different kinds of content you’ll create

5. Prepare An Action Plan

Once all the above checks have been made, the next step is to create a detailed content marketing plan.

Unlike the content marketing strategy, which is a high-level plan, this should be an implementation plan with as many details as possible.

I use Google Calendar to maintain my content marketing plan, but you can use any other tool. Many people are using Excel and Google Sheets, which is perfectly fine.

HINT: In Google Calendar, you can create a custom calendar separate from your personal and work calendars.

What is important is to have the correct information in your plan, and the minimum details are:

• When will a piece of content be published, and on what channel (i.e., website, FB, etc.)?
• The actual title will be used (Blog post title, Facebook post title, YouTube video title, etc).
• Specify how long the content will be (in words).
• Specify whether the content will be a pillar page, part of a topic cluster, or a supporting article.
• Clearly define your target, long-tail, and LSI keywords that can be used within the texts.
• Specify who will write the content.
• Specify how the specific content is to be promoted.
• When to review the performance and when to update the content.

When it comes to SEO and content, you should always remember two things:

• First, content may take up to 6 months to rank in its final positions in Google.
• Secondly, once a page ranks on Google, it has to be updated regularly; otherwise, it will likely gradually lose its rankings.

Whenever I publish a post for the first time, I add to my content marketing plan a reminder every 6 months to go back and check the rankings of the particular post.

Depending on the ranking position, I also add a reminder to review and update the content every 3 months.  This way, I ensure that all my top-ranking posts remain relevant and up-to-date.

Having all the above information prepared in advance makes it easier to outsource the content to a freelancer, or if you choose to do the writing, it will dramatically speed up the content creation process.

6. Create Different Types Of Content

When it comes to content creation, in your checklist, you need to make sure that:

• You clearly understand a pillar page, topic clusters, how each type is used, and when.
• You know what evergreen content is and why it’s important.
• You know the different techniques you can use for creating linkable assets.

Some tips to consider:

• Each content you create is an asset to your website and should be treated accordingly.
• Good content is hard to produce, but when done right, it can generate millions of visits to your site for years.
• Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity. Successful websites are those that manage to create A LOT of great content.
• Create content for your target audience and not for your own prestige. For example, it’s easy for me to create content to impress my SEO colleagues, but this should not help my target audience, which is beginners to SEO and digital marketing.

7. Optimize Content For Search Engines

This is a critical check in the content marketing checklist. Before publishing content for search engines, you must ensure it is SEO-optimized.

SEO optimization does not make content less attractive to users; on the contrary, it is better for search engines and users.

Some essential checks to make:

• Optimize your post titles and make sure that they include your target keywords.
• Check that your post title is unique and is not the same as one of the titles that already appear on the first page of Google.
• Make sure that your URL is short and includes your target keyword.
• Check that your page has only one H1 tag, which is the same or similar to the page title.
• Ensure that your text has several headings formatted as H2 and H3 and include related keywords.
• Ensure your text content is easy to read (small paragraphs).
• Make sure that all your images have relevant ALT Text.
• Ensure the relevant schema is added to the post and optimized for sitelinks and featured snippets.

8. Promote Your Content

This is the final step in the content marketing process, but it is NOT optional. Without properly promoting your content, you minimize your chances of getting any returns from it.

• A page needs backlinks from other websites to rank higher on Google.
• For a post to go viral on social media, it needs the help of influencers.
• For a post to generate leads and sales, it has to be promoted to the right audience.

Here is your content promotion checklist:

• Promote the content to your email subscribers (send out a newsletter)
• Post the content multiple times on your social media pages
• Connect with websites/bloggers mentioned in your content (for this step to work, you need to strategically link to other websites/bloggers and let them know about it)
• Promote your content using paid advertising on various social platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, etc)
• Promote the content by adding internal links from other posts on your site (including your homepage)

9. Use Content Marketing Tools

Content marketing is a process that cannot be executed successfully without using tools.

You need tools for keyword research and to measure the effectiveness of your content marketing campaigns.

So, you must ensure you acquire the necessary knowledge to work with the tools you choose to run successful content marketing campaigns.

Tools that can help you with content marketing are:

• Semrush - for topic and keyword research, content audits, content creation, and more.
• Aherfs - an alternative to Semrush
• Google Analytics - for monitoring the performance of your content
• Google Search Console - for monitoring the Google rankings of your content
• Google Trends - for topic research
• Google keyword tool - for keyword research
• Google Data Studio - for reporting and analysis
• Grammarly - for improving the grammar and spelling of your text content

10. Analyze Campaign Performance

It’s not enough to publish content with the hope that it will generate the expected results. You need to monitor the performance of your campaigns using various metrics constantly.

The most common metrics to monitor are:

• Number of website visits
• Bounce rate (for website content).
• Number of email signups.
• Number of leads/sales.
• Number of likes, shares, and comments.
• Number of unique visits from social media networks.
• Video Views (for video content).
• Rankings (for which exact keywords and at what positions they appear on Google).
• Number of backlinks.

Creating a spreadsheet with all the information in one place is highly recommended. Doing so lets you quickly find out what type of content works better than others and adjust your content marketing plan accordingly. Also, it will be much easier to perform content audits and remove content that does not perform well in search or any other channel.

Key Learnings

A checklist can help you execute all the tasks needed to run successful content marketing campaigns.

I recommend following the abovementioned steps and not skipping any planning items (items 2,3 and 5). Good planning can help you tremendously during the implementation phase of a campaign.

Like other digital marketing processes, content marketing is a continuous process. You must keep publishing content, observe what works and does not, adjust your process, and repeat.

Don’t forget that if your goal is to start and grow any online business, you need to have a process in place to produce LOTS of great content, and the checks mentioned in the content marketing checklist will help you achieve that.