If you have a blog (or any type of business website), you need a content roadmap. That is, if your goal is to grow traffic and generate leads or sales.
One of the most effective ways to do that is by consistently publishing new content. You need a plan for what to publish, when to publish it and how often to publish. In other words, you need a content roadmap.
Most blogs start out with a simple calendar and just hope for the best. Unfortunately, blogging this way is like driving with your eyes closed — eventually you’ll get in a crash (or at least lose your way). A good content calendar should be flexible enough to change as your audience grows, but also provide enough structure to keep you on track as your blog grows in size and complexity.
A content roadmap is a plan for the content you’ll create, publish, and promote to grow your website traffic over time. It should be based on your goals and objectives, along with data from your buyer personas, current content performance, and keyword research. Once you know what content to create and publish, you can create a schedule for publishing it over time so that it helps you reach your goals.
Why you need a content roadmap
Imagine this scenario: You’re working on an exciting new project, but you don’t have a plan to guide you. You brainstorm ideas off the top of your head, start creating assets, and post them whenever they’re ready. You stumble across some success, but progress is slow because you have no way of prioritising your efforts or knowing whether they align with your overarching goals.
Content marketing without a strategy is like travelling without a map — you may get there, but it’ll take longer and you probably won’t have much fun along the way! A content roadmap is not only essential for communicating your strategies to colleagues and stakeholders, but it also helps you to stay focused on what matters most. A content roadmap is a plan that maps out your editorial calendar. This is not where you come up with ideas for blog posts or videos. Instead, this is the place where you document all of your published content, who’s responsible for each piece of work, when it needs to be completed by and who it’s targeting (aka buyer persona).
A roadmap helps align your team’s efforts with your overall business goals so that you can avoid confusion, wasted effort, and spending money on content that isn’t moving the needle. Think of it as the step-by-step guide for how to get from point A (your current state) to point B (your goal).
How to create a content roadmap
Before creating your content roadmap, gather the information you need about your content marketing strategy. You’ll need this information to inform the decisions you make when creating your roadmap. At this stage, make sure you have your:
- Content marketing mission statement
- Value proposition
- Buyer person
- Marketing goals
- Content audit results (if applicable)
Use our step-by-step process to create a content roadmap that really works.
- Set your goals
- Do the research
- Get the team on board
- Create your content roadmap
- Use your content roadmap
- Review and refresh
The different kinds of content roadmaps
Your content roadmap is a living document that defines your brand’s point of view, guides content creation and gives everyone on the team an idea of where you’re going.
There are three types of content roadmaps:
Strategic roadmaps help you prioritise what to create next, based on your overall goals. They look at the big picture and help you decide which keywords to target for every piece.
Campaign roadmaps focus on a specific campaign or period, such as sales season or a big event. They answer questions like “What should we create before Christmas?” and “How can we support our sales team in Q2?”
Editorial calendars help you plan, schedule and manage your content on a daily basis. They keep everyone on the same page and make sure your posts go out on time. Often these are related to campaigns, meaning that one strategy may be divided into multiple calendars (such as Black Friday, Christmas and New Year’s Eve).
Elements of a great content roadmap
A content roadmap is not a traditional content strategy document. It’s closer to a product roadmap, though it’s usually narrower and shorter in scope. “Content” here means the stuff you create to attract, engage and support customers: blog posts, FAQs, videos, emails, ebooks and so on.
A great content roadmap is:
- Oriented around your business goals
- Based on detailed research into what customers need at each step of their journey with you
- Shaped by your competitive environment and where the industry is going
- Grounded in strong content fundamentals (messaging frameworks, principles for structuring information)
- Focused on delivering real value to customers along their entire journey with you
Benefits of a content roadmap
A content roadmap is an integral part of your content marketing funnel. It helps you to visualise and plan your content, as well as to align it with your business objectives.
A content roadmap helps you to:
- Understand how individual pieces of content fit into the bigger picture
- Identify gaps in your content, so you can create the right type of content at the right time
- Create a shared understanding of what everyone is working on and when it’s due, which makes collaboration easier
- Get buy-in from stakeholders and team members, because they can see what’s happening and why it matters
- Measure the success of your content, as you can set KPIs for each project and track them over time
Conclusion
Creating a content roadmap isn’t hard — all you need is a template, a little bit of information about your audience, and a list of topics that you want to cover. The key thing is to make sure everyone involved knows what the purpose of the roadmap is, so that they understand why each piece of content is being created.
Content roadmaps are like a map of the world you’re going to create. They help you understand where everything is, what’s important to your audience, and how they can get there. It helps you find new ideas and make better decisions. And it makes it easy to come up with interesting stories that resonate with your audience.
