Your Content Toolkit: What It Is and Why You Need One

BLOG Aug 25 2021

A content toolkit is a crucial element of your content and overall marketing strategy. Between outsourcing content creation to freelancers and agencies, to having an in-house content production team, it’s challenging to maintain consistency and standardization across your content with so many cooks in the kitchen. Find out how a content toolkit can help you plan, produce, and promote standardized content at scale.

An effective content strategy is planned, documented, and executed with precision and determination. Depending on the scope of your content strategy and your plans for content production and promotion, it can sometimes be incredibly hard to organize and keep track of all ideas, deadlines, and guidelines regarding content creation.

This is why you need a content toolkit.

What is a content toolkit?

We’re glad you asked! A content toolkit is an approved set of guidelines that will help you plan, produce, and promote consistent and standardized content at scale, no matter how many partners or parties are involved in your marketing strategy.

Struggling with creating standardized content at scale? Click here to see how global brands get the most out of their content by creating content that can scale across regions and localities.

What should your content toolkit contain?

At a minimum, your content toolkit should contain your brand’s goal and mission statement, branding guidelines, buyer persona information, and your channel plan to ensure that anyone creating content for you is aligned on your how to create content that will work with your strategy. These pieces will allow you to run your content marketing campaigns effectively and produce standardized content at scale.

Goal and mission statement

To ensure that your content marketing efforts will produce substantial results, you’ll need to decide on one or more goals that you’d like to accomplish. Are you looking to increase traffic, drive more leads, or improve brand awareness? It’s best if you focus on one goal at a time.

Jot down your goals because you’ll need them to create your content marketing mission statement. The mission statement summarizes your reasons for creating content and will prove extremely useful in guiding your decisions throughout your content marketing campaigns.

Buyer persona information

Your target audience consists of different types of people. To make sure that your content creators know how to cater your content to each specific member of your audience, you’ll need to create buyer personas. Whether you’re targeting Millennials and Gen Zers, or Baby Boomers, without a clear understanding of who you’re speaking to, it’s incredibly difficult to predict the types of content that will resonate best.

Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of members of your target audience, characterized by their demographics, interests, challenges and pain points. Developing detailed buyer personas is crucial for creating relevant, high-converting content that answers your audience’s questions and solves their problems.

Content plan

Once you’ve prepared your goals, mission statement, and buyer personas, unite these into a single, comprehensive content plan that will be your best ally during your content marketing campaigns. Having a documented content plan will ensure that you always keep your goals in mind and never waste time when it comes to content creation.

Without a content plan, your chances of making common content marketing mistakes increase drastically.

Editorial guidelines

To make sure that all the content you produce is consistent with your brand, create editorial guidelines which will outline the style and voice, as well as the editorial standards and rules that you’ll use while creating content.

Channel plan

Your channel plan should include information on where and how you’ll publish your content. For each channel (e.g., blog, Facebook page, Twitter account), you should include relevant data on target personas, topics of interest, types of content, tone, key performance indicators, and specific channel goals. You’ll also want to ensure that your content is created with channel-specific guidelines and best practices in mind to get the most out of it. Above all, make sure to optimize your content for mobile first.

This covers all the necessities of your content toolkit. There are also a number of optional additions that you might want to include in your toolkit.

Last up, assemble your content toolkit

A content toolkit is a crucial element of an effective content marketing strategy. It should contain information on your goals, target audience, brand tone and voice, production, and promotion strategy.

Your content toolkit will significantly speed up and streamline your content creation process by aligning all content creators on your goals, objectives, and brand strategy, ensuring that all your visual content is standardized with a consistent look and feel.

Creating a content toolkit is time-consuming but well worth it. As the world’s first creators of the content toolkit model and masters of content creation and strategy, we’ve helped over 720 brands streamline their content production with our unique content toolkit service. Find out how a custom content toolkit can take your strategy to the next level! Get in touch today to learn more.

Schedule a call to discuss how Tag can help you create your content toolkit.