Content Marketing Process Essentials with free templates
Updated by Xtensio
Companies dedicate time and resources to content marketing as an inbound or organic lead-generation method to increase brand awareness, establish brand trust, and boost traffic to the brand domain. It’s bigger than ever now because the digital age made it so that content marketing can be a low to no-cost method of reaching potential customers. It used to be more like the side hustle next to advertising and sales. And for companies like us, it is the only hustle. If you chose to enter the content game, beware! It has become extremely saturated. There are more and more platforms, publishing channels, automation tools, and SEO knowledge that makes the content path accessible to all. A lot of copycat content out there that creates an echo chamber effect. There is huge competition for search ranking. Players with unlimited resources are merging the content game with the advertising game to tip the scales to their own advantage in the attention span wars. For small businesses or startups, the effort you put into content marketing should be nimble and experimental, but also well-planned and strategic. We put together instructional documentation templates that can take you through different phases of your content marketing efforts. These are the industry’s best strategy, productivity, and creativity frameworks to tap into.
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Content Strategy Planner
Go through each step of your content strategy, from planning and executing to publishing and optimizing. When it comes to content creation, there may be a number of people who work on your content: copywriters, designers, producers, analysts, SEO experts, and more. Streamline content creation across the marketing team with a content strategy, aligning everyone’s objectives.
Xtensio’s editable Content Strategy Planner Template covers:
- Core Goals
- KPIs
- Target Audience
- Keyword Search
- Content Types
- Frequency Calendar
- Publishing Procedures
- Distribution Channels
- Trends & Analytics
- Optimization & Action Items
To dive deeper into each element, follow our Content Strategy Planner How To Guide.
Brand Positioning Canvas
Brand focus is one of the 3 main components of content strategy. Our Brand Positioning Canvas guides you through forming a single statement that reveals the core value of your organization, product, or service. This is a one-pager that can be shared with your extended branding and marketing stakeholders to communicate your brand essence from a business perspective. Follow our Brand Positioning How-to-Guide to really dissect each section of this canvas and find some examples.
Brand Guidelines
Once you enter the content creation game you will soon discover there are many stylistic decisions to make, and many specifications to follow for each publishing platform. If you don’t keep a consistent visual and verbal tone you might end up with a Frankenstein brand. Follow the simple instructions in our Brand Guidelines template to set some basic branding rules.
Personas
Doing some research about your target audience is vital to identify focused messaging and value propositions that speak to your target customer’s needs. Create 2 or 3 personas that represent the audience you hope to reach. Cater the most relevant content to them.
Day in the Life Journey Map
Customer Journey Mapping is an essential exercise for user experience design. In the case of content marketing, it can be used to design the experience of serving good content to an audience. We recommend you play around with the Day in the Life Journey Map as a way to identify the best times, opportunities, mediums to connect with your audience.
Content Marketing Customer Journey Map
Identify what type of content will most effectively reach your audience. Take a Customer’s Journey through Attraction, Authority, Affinity, and Action content.
Content Calendar
The one thing the Internet will tell you over and over again about content marketing is to be consistent about it. This is more easily said than done. The biggest challenge is to make your efforts sustainable. Gauge your capacity to produce good quality content. Use or repurpose Xtensio’s social media content calendar template, and set the frequency to daily, weekly, or monthly. Populate with the types of material you will put out there to overview an achievable content plan. Our content calendar how-to guide will tell you more about optimal frequency, content audits, the rule of thirds, the 80/20 rule, and more.
Social Media Style Guide
This one is a spin-off of a brand guidelines document but specific to guide the content created for social media channels. Edit, duplicate, and expand sections of this template to make it your own. You can also tap into other style guide templates, such as the personal brand style guide, and repurpose them for your own content marketing project.
Mood Board
Mood boarding is a great way to visualize the look and feel of the content you’d like to put out there. Using Xtensio’s online editor, you can drag and drop many types of media, and interactive elements, add notes, and to-do lists to set the tone for your content. Try one of our mood board templates like the web design mood board or start with a blank project. Play!
Eco-conscious Brand Voice Brainstorm
Generate ideas and create a unique, memorable, and engaging brand voice that resonates with your target audience.
Landing Pages
Landing pages can take up a huge portion of your content volume as they are the main drivers of search traffic. Creating useful, educational content that is discoverable through search or backlinked by other domains is the name of the search game. We use Xtensio to draft content for our website all the time. Because creating a document on Xtensio is like creating a web page. In fact, even for this page, you are viewing right now, we drafted all the text, dropped in images, and added internal notes between our designer, copywriter, and webmaster before publishing it on our website. Take some of our landing page templates and examples to draft your own, or publish and share it directly with a custom URL.
Link in Bios
A Link in Bio is a special landing page that displays multiple links at a quick glance. A Link in Bio is usually posted on a social media profile page, but it can be used on other media like inside newsletters, sent in text messages, picked up on QR codes, etc. We created a few link in bio templates that you can edit and make your own.
Content Writing Checklist
From setting your intention to technical editing, check off these 44 essential steps before you publish your next blog post or landing page. This template is courtesy of Growth Marketing Specialist Aazar Shad.
Social Media Report
Once you have experimented with some ideas, and released enough content consistently over a period of time, go back and analyze what works and what doesn’t. If you have the resources for it, you can look at your content’s performance monthly. But giving the content some time to brew out there and watching analytics quarterly would give you more reliable results. Click and edit Xtensio’s instructional Social Media Report template to start tracking your content’s performance.
Of course, don’t feel obligated to put each one of these tools and processes to make your content marketing work. Sometimes documentation or process tools can get in the way of getting things done. So pick what’s useful for you, edit the templates, and easily add or delete parts to make them your own.
Why use Xtensio for Content Marketing documentation?
- Your day-to-day documents look good like a well-designed website. No need to download software.
- Flexible layout. Drag, drop, resize. Simple functions.
- Minimal instructions based on industry standards to help you fill each section.
- Embed and play videos, GIFs.
- Thousands of images integrated with Pexels stock library.
- Task lists you can check off.
- Fully customizable with your own brand colors and fonts.
- Live and mobile-friendly like a website.
- Presentable like a slideshow.
- Real-time collaboration.
No credit card is required to start. Create an account to save your edits.
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