A comprehensive content strategy — or content plan — can really help you, as an industrial marketer, set the direction you want to be taking with your content marketing efforts.
Spending a bit of time on this strategy is important, as it’ll help you focus your efforts, avoid time wastage, and move ahead more efficiently. It also helps you and your team define your objectives, maintain accountability, and monitor results.
But creating an effective content plan can be challenging. So in this guide, I’ll take you through some of the key steps to creating a content plan for your engineering blog, so you’ll have to spend less time guessing and can spend more time succeeding.
Step 1: Define your goals and objectives
Perhaps you’re starting your engineering blog for the first time, or perhaps you’re working on expanding or revamping an existing engineering blog on your company’s site.
Regardless of where you’re at, the first question you need to ask yourself before setting the content strategy for your engineering blog is that big ol’ why.
Why are you starting or developing the blog? Is it to share knowledge? To attract business? Build a brand persona?
Of course, it’s likely to be a bit of everything, but if there’s any one element that’s more important than the other, this would be a defining moment.
For example, perhaps your engineering company already has fantastic business, but you often get questions on how your products or services work. In that scenario, you may think about starting a blog to address existing customer concerns. But, it could also be that your business is struggling to be seen, and you’d like to use the power of content marketing in order to attract new clients.
In both cases, you’ll be working on creating high-quality content that’s easily accessible to readers and search engines, but your primary goal will be different.
Of course, your goal can also change. So, for example, you may be working on revamping an engineering blog that’s served fine in answering existing customer concerns, but now you’re changing direction and want the content to also work for you in attracting new customers.
It’s also worth setting very clear objectives. For example, you may want to focus on reaching a certain number of visitors per day, or perhaps you want to use your blog to get a certain number of newsletter subscribers.
By setting key goals and objectives, you have something a little more tangible to measure the success of your blog.
So, decide on where you’re at with your engineering blog at the moment, and use that to guide you in setting some overall goals and objectives.
Step 2: Understand your audience
This certainly goes deeper than simply setting a content strategy, as there is likely to be a large overlap between the ideal audience for your company and the ideal audience for your engineering blog.
Your target market will definitely help you determine which engineering content ideas will perform well.
Take a look at who’s already on your website (using demographics data from Google Analytics). Is the content you’re planning speaking to them? Do you need to build a new audience? What type of content would work best for them?
By understanding your target audience, you can create a content strategy that’s more suited to what they’d like. It’ll also help you figure out which platforms and types of media may work best for them.
If your audience is very young, for example, you know that you may need to amend your content strategy to include more video and social media content.
Step 3: Brainstorm content ideas
An effective content plan will include both new content and content updates (if your engineering blog has already been running).
In terms of new content, you’d need to come up with great content ideas. I have a whole article on coming up with new content ideas, but in general, you can rely on tips such as running a competitor content gap analysis to find new opportunities, speaking with your existing customers, or using social media and current affairs as inspiration.
For existing content, look at what you already have, where you’re seeing content gaps, and what content needs to be updated – and how.
Google Analytics and Google Search Console can be very helpful here as they give you insight into how your content is performing and the keywords it’s ranking for.
When identifying content ideas, it’s important to focus on the primary keywords you want to target. You’ll likely do a full keyword analysis once you get to actually working on your content, but using keywords to guide your content ideas will help you with a more targeted approach.
But it’s not only about identifying content topics. From the get-go, you also need to set a clear direction on the types of content you’ll be creating.
Of course, blog content is paramount here, but perhaps you also want to focus on video tutorials or social media posts? Knowing from the get-go what type of content you want to be creating can be really helpful.
It’ll also help you figure out whether or not you have everything you need to even produce that type of content.
Perhaps you’ve identified that your ideal target audience would eat up video content, but you’re now realizing that you have no video experience or in-house videographer. Identifying that at this point will help you take the necessary steps to get everything you’d need.
Step 4: Create a content calendar
In order to run a successful content strategy, it’s important to prioritize consistent content output.
Ideally, you’ll be creating a new blog post every week, but you could also publish slightly more if you have the capacity for that. Hubspot research does suggest that publishing 2–4 content pieces a month is ideal, so I’d definitely recommend starting with that.
Your focus should be on high-quality content, though, and not simply churning out a large number of thin pieces.
You may notice at this point that you also need more writers to join your team.
If you’re planning on producing two articles per week, for example, and you know you don’t have a designated technical writer on hand but you’re also quite tied up with other projects, then you know at this point that you may need to hire another writer — or, alternatively, adjust your blog content calendar to fit what you can reasonably do.
Step 5: Develop a content production process
Once you know what type of content needs to be written and when this content ought to be published, you can start developing a content production process.
I’ve always found it particularly helpful to identify very specific steps, and, personally, I’ve found Trello invaluable for the content production process. But Asana and Notion are also very valuable tools to try.
Let me walk you through an example of how the process might look.
For example, you could say that the first step is deciding what content pieces need to be set for a specific month. You could then create further steps that break the content production process down into smaller bits so you — and your team — always know where in the process a particular article is. It may be in the SEO research and keyword analysis phase, writing phase, or the final editing phase.
At this point, it’s also important to identify which team members will be working on what, if applicable.
For example, you may have a designated graphic designer who’ll create original graphics before publication, or you may be working with an external proofreader who looks at all content before it’s published.
If that’s the case, identifying these people and slotting them into the content production process is paramount.
You may also want to set deadlines here.
For example, perhaps your graphic designer needs 4 days before an article is published to work on graphics. If that’s the case, your deadlines will need to reflect this.
It’s not always necessary to set specific deadlines, but it can help you remain more consistent in your content output.
Step 6: Produce and publish content
This is the most important part in your content strategy, of course, as it requires the actual creation of your content.
This is the stage where you or your team will sit down and actually write the content.
It’s worth remembering that all content needs to be fully SEO-optimized in order to rank well on Google, so paying attention to keywords, layout, and on-page SEO essentials is paramount.
I also have a guide on writing successful engineering content, which you may find helpful to look at as well.
Step 7: Promote your content
Once your content has been created (and published), you need to get it out there.
While search engines are a good starting point, especially if you’re creating high-quality, very well-optimized articles, you can find other ways to promote your content to give it a chance to shine.
You may, for example, choose to share each new content piece in a newsletter campaign or share the link on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, and X.
Alternatively, you could also repurpose aspects of your content to share images and videos on other platforms, and use those to refer back to your original piece on your blog.
Or perhaps you simply want to get into the habit of sending new content pieces around internally or even advertising them on your company’s homepage.
The sky’s the limit with what’s possible, so choose what works best for you to get your content in front of audiences who care.
Step 8: Measure and analyze performance
You’re not publishing into a vacuum, so it’s worth checking and rechecking the data of your posts to gather analytical feedback.
Is your article ranking as intended? Are people engaging? Is it driving traffic?
The answers to these questions can help you determine not only if your post is meeting your goals but also give you insight into how to change it if it’s not.
What you focus on depends on your primary goals, and this will change from company to company, and even from time to time.
If gaining website traffic is the primary goal at the moment, for example, then that’s what you’ll focus on the most in your analytics. But if growing brand authority is more important, then perhaps you may want to look at post engagement and social shares a tad more.
Your content strategy is a living, breathing thing that needs to be constantly refined and tweaked, and gathering data from your analytics will help you do just that.
Making your content work for you
By following the above, you’ll not only have a content plan for your engineering blog, but the tools to tweak it, too.
It’s worth reviewing your goals every quarter or so to see if you’re still on track and adjusting as needed.
Feel free to drop me a line if you need help establishing your content plan and creating engineering content that speaks directly to your target audience.
Content Plan FAQs
You may find calendar and organizational tools quite helpful. Google Calendar, for instance, could help you get a good overview of your content calendar, while tools like Trello, Asana, or Notion can help you stay on top of your content production process.
You don’t have to track metrics, but then how would you know if your efforts are successful? Keeping on top of analytics reports will help you figure out what works and what doesn’t, which can help you make the best use of your time.
Some of the basics in your content plan will stay relatively consistent. For example, your actual content production process may not change regularly, or only as needed. But other parts of your content plan require you to sit back down and reassess more frequently. For example, if you’ve developed a good list of content ideas and have established deadlines for all these pieces, you’ll need to go back to the drawing board and find new content ideas before your current content cycle is up.
