Content marketing plan

Content marketing is not all about writing and publishing blog posts. Instead, it goes deeper beyond that. You need to have a clear content marketing plan in order to achieve success for your company. But it is important to note that one cannot design successful content marketing strategies all by himself. By looking around in other people’s websites that are successful, you will start realizing some commonalities. This article looks at the commonalities from those very successful content marketing strategists.

For your content marketing plan to be successful, you must revisit it frequently to ensure that it is up-to-date, strong and innovative at the same time. The truth is, as a company, you might be facing stiff competition from your rivals, and thus you must always be engaged in tricks that can help you beat the competition. For the year 2018, B2B marketers spent close to 40% of their budget on marketing, according to Content Marketing Institute. This shows you how serious it is when it comes to content marketing. You must invent new and innovative content marketing strategies if you want to remain relevant in any B2B business.

But even before we delve much into the easy ways of creating a perfect content marketing plan, perhaps we should first understand what we mean by content strategy.

What is content strategy?

Content strategy is more or less any tangible media that one can create and own. It can be visual, written or even downloadable which you dedicate to marketing. Individuals use content strategy to demonstrate their expertise in the field in which they do business.

Factors to consider when creating a content strategy

Just like any masterpiece, you need to fully understand what you need for you to come up with an unbeatable content marketing plan. This is important as it will provide you direction even as you plan and execute the strategy you come up with. Below are some of these factors:

●        Your audience

It is important to understand among many other things the audience that you are targeting, the size of the audience, their ages and so on. Remember that your strategy should not be made to only focus on one type of potential customer but diversify it as much as you can to attract even those audiences that you had not targeted initially.

●        Problems to be solved

Every product in the market is meant to solve a certain problem. Same thing to any good content marketing plan, it must address a real issue. As a planner, you need to tailor the strategy to address issues of your targeted audience. This way, you can easily edge out your competition.

There are many things that to be consider before coming up with an excellent marketing plan. But those that we have discussed are the general ones and not specific to any niche. Let us now look at how one can create a good plan.

●        Have specific goals to address

For you to have an easier time in coming up with your strategy, you first need to have clear goals. Be sure to fully understand the reasons for coming up with the content strategy, reasons why you need to produce content and market it, the goals you need to achieve through the content and more. It is these specific goals that will act as a lead when writing, and it is only through them that you can know you have come up with a masterpiece.

●        Conduct in-depth research

Your buyer persona, or simply the target audience is a fundamental ingredient to your plan. It is only through proper research that you can produce truly relevant content that will catch the attention of the people you are targeting and convert them into buyers or subscribers.

It is however important to note that reasons for research can vary. While new and inexperienced marketers might be interested in knowing their target audience, those that have been in the field for long enough might only be interested in expanding the audience or getting new groups. As an experienced marketer, you need to revisit your plan from time to time to enable you know the areas to target when researching.

●        Have an editorial calendar

The leading content marketers such as Neil Patel post regularly for their efforts to bear fruits. Why not copy from them? Have a calendar that clearly shows when you are supposed to publish your post. Having a calendar will help you get all your plans done, especially if you have written down what to do and when to do it.

The editorial calendar needs not to only have when to publish, but also what to publish. You can indicate the topics that needs to be going live on specific days, and thus you will have an ample time writing contents of those topics. Remember that one of the most difficult things in content writing is coming up with a good topic, so if you already have one, then it is like half of your problems is solved.

●        Content auditing

It is not so helpful writing content even when it not working for you. It is essential that you conduct a content audit to determine what has worked and what hasn’t. In the audit, be sure to include the content links as well as the distribution channels.

If you have been doing videos and publishing them on YouTube and realize that people are clicking on the call-to-action and getting back to your site, then such a strategy worked and needs to be enhanced. However, if you realize that no one is getting back to your website, even after publishing, then you need to change the strategy.

●        Have a good content management system

It is always good to have in place a system that will help you in managing your content. Content management system will help you in coming up with the most critical parts of any content, namely content creation, content publication and the content analytics. Having a software like the HubSpot or WP Engine can help boost your content marketing plan.

In conclusion, it is very essential for any marketer to have a content marketing plan. And for you to have a good strategy, then you need to fully understand the things that are essential in coming up with one. This article has provided what you need, but you can always read other online sources about content marketing, to have more knowledge on how to remain unbeatable even in the face of fierce competition.