What Is Content Marketing Development?

It’s that time of year again.

No, I don’t mean enduring your extended family for a full two weeks or being attacked by a squirrel leaping from your Christmas tree or letting your cousin Eddie crash in his RV in your driveway.

I mean gearing up for the year ahead.

As a content marketer, I look forward to this time of year. As the new year approaches, it gives me time to reflect on the successes (and failures) of the previous 12 months and think about ways to approach things differently in the year to come.

This past year, I’ve had the opportunity to work on a number of content advisory programs, where our team is making recommendations for our clients’ content marketing teams – and then they execute. Among other things, what it’s taught me is that content marketing development looks different for every organization and there’s no set blueprint for getting the job done right.

That said, there are a number of best practices to keep in mind when developing effective content marketing programs.

What Is Content Marketing Development?

First of all, let’s define content marketing development. At its most basic level, “web content development is the process of researching, writing, gathering, organizing, and editing information for publication on websites.”

But any content marketer knows it’s more than just that.

Content marketing development is tied largely to content marketing strategy – as in, content is (or should be) developed with a specific goal in mind.

According to Content Marketing Institute, content marketing strategy is defined as “drawing and developing the larger story that an organization tells. [It involves] focusing on ways to engage an audience, using content to drive profitable behaviors.”

So, in a nutshell, content marketing development should be more than developing content for just the sake of it. Each piece of content produced must be tied to a certain goal (organic traffic, conversions, lead generation, brand awareness, etc.) – or else it’s just a waste of everyone’s time.

But, the question is, how do you get started? Like I said, there’s no one way to develop content – but I like to think about it in the following two phases.