Say that you have a huge amount of content lying around, including how-to videos, blog pieces, and product images. How are you going to spread the content and reach potential clients and customers? Do your content-related objectives have any specifics? Perhaps you wish to generate more leads. How about increasing your social media presence and brand awareness?
If you are struggling to find answers to such questions, then you need a content marketing plan.
It is always a good practice to oversee your content marketing strategy and make sure it's current, inventive, and engaging for your prospects and customers - regardless of when or how they intend to buy. This is true whether you're just getting started with a content marketing plan or you've been using the same strategy for a while.
Doesn’t matter whether you have an in-house specialized team or have outsourced marketing staff for handling your blogs; the tips mentioned in this blog will help your team create a content marketing plan that is truly customized for your target audience.
Let’s get started by having a look at what a good content marketing strategy implies.
What is a Good Content Marketing Plan?
A content marketing plan for the blog is a planned strategic roadmap to successfully publish content on a website or blog to achieve specific goals. It should be an essential part of your marketing strategy and should be developed according to the goals that you have to accomplish through your blog.
You can devise content and other promotional activities such as search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, and link building with a good content marketing plan. It will also define how you intend to market yourself and your website and motivate your buyer persona to engage with your content.
The results generated by good content marketing can boost your company's social media presence, generate brand awareness, educate users about your products or services, help in lead generation, and eventually increase sales conversion.
Also, you must have a strong content strategy if you want to compete in your business, given that 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing. If you don't know how to start developing a content marketing plan for your blog, here's an easy guide for you to follow:
How to Create a Content Marketing Plan?
1. Start with Your Content Goals
It's a golden rule to make SMART content marketing goals— specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-based. Content goals are essential to your blog post writing and must be met before you publish your blog posts.
For instance, the SMART framework for content goals below:
- Specific: Increase monthly website traffic, and increase conversion rate
- Measurable: Increase by 5% the conversion rate
- Attainable: Make sure that it's achievable with your improved marketing content strategies
- Relevant: Evaluate if boosting your website traffic can increase content goals or if you need to focus on some marketing strategies
- Time-based: Give a time frame of 3-6 months if enabling your website with good marketing content can also increase conversion rates
2. Identify Your Buyer Persona
Creating a content marketing strategy is about identifying your ideal customer and ensuring that your content marketing efforts cater specifically to them. When you use buyer persona in content marketing, you deliver only the relevant information to the ideal audience at the perfect time and on a specific schedule.
Once you've segmented your strategies and know your target audience, you need to ensure that you're always providing fresh and relevant content to feel like they're always "new." There's no point in delivering insufficient quality information to people who aren't likely to buy your product or service.
When you identify your ideal customer, you can then ensure that your content production and marketing funnel are always working towards making your business more appealing.
For example, a great way to gain brand recognition with your chosen target audience is to include them in your email marketing campaigns. Make sure you ask subscribers to opt-in to receive further information from your business; the same goes for any promotional content you produce.
Please note that it's better to identify your target buyer persona early than trying to guess and write about things the audience won't find interesting. This mistake is often made by novice writers and marketers alike.
Content marketing allows you to build relationships with prospective clients, resulting in new sales and increased interest in your brand.
3. Lead the Way in Your Buyer's Journey
Each of your leads takes a different path to a solution, including awareness, consideration, and decision stages. You have to lead the way.
Each stage of your buyer's journey takes a slightly different approach, but the overall focus is the same. The first step in any journey is awareness. If you think that at every stage your prospective customer is different (i.e., ready to decide, uncertain, or unsure about something), it makes sense that content also varies.
For example, if you are writing for your pet website and want to target pet owners of cats and dogs, you would start with an awareness of what cats and dogs are like as house pets. Then, describe some common mistakes owners make, how they treat their pets and why the buyer's decision might differ from a cat to a dog owner.
Once you build awareness, you can move on to the consideration phase of the buyer's journey. You would then describe some common behaviors of cats and dogs that might be problematic in particular situations and advise how a buyer can avoid making the same mistakes. Lastly, your call to action statement is important for the decision stage of your potential buyers reading your content marketing. How you implicitly lead them to decide and buy something from your pet shop can lead to sales conversion.
Therefore, your buyer's journey in content marketing will differ depending on what stage of their journey they are currently on. This way, a valuable content marketing process map can be developed to help marketers pinpoint which content marketing strategies need to be employed.
4. Organize Your Content Marketing Audit
When organizing your content, you need to perform a marketing content audit. A good content audit is a delicate process of evaluating and critically analyzing all of your website's content. You may start gathering your contents in a spreadsheet. Then, create columns for your buyer persona, target keywords, buyer's journey stage, main topic, format, etc.
Adding columns for critical metrics of page views, likes, and engagement is important. Lastly, you need to categorize each post that needs improvement, rewritten, or merged with other blog posts.
The biggest mistake in a content audit is that the company often does not have the expertise to highlight the weaknesses and spots. The result is to expose weaknesses and key strengths in your approach and adjust your website plan to your new marketing objectives. You must spend time doing an excellent job of doing the content marketing audit, or you will pay for it down the road with lost sales and customers.
5. Boost Your Marketing Content Promotion
It's no mystery that people are getting tired of reading sales pitches on the Internet. Most people have stopped going to the Internet for news and other activities because they become bored by sales pitches. So if you want to succeed at marketing content promotion, you need to start doing it differently than your competitors.
You can start with email marketing. Developing an efficient email marketing plan allows you to reach and engage with your target audience in a customized manner, increasing sales at a low cost. Email marketing tools, including other channels and media, have evolved to make it easier for the company to meet consumers than ever before.
Creating and distributing email marketing campaigns is one way to achieve this. Your messages are guaranteed to be sent to everyone on your email list. Even better, you can increase open rates by submitting related content to segmented lists, which means they'll be eager to read anything you send.
When making the email marketing approach, you have to do it correctly. For instance, you can use all available customer data and knowledge. Sending a promotional deal on a customer's birthday or informing them that their favorite meal is half off is much more successful than simply sending them a menu.
Another way to boost your content marketing is by taking advantage of social media platforms. Social media is primarily used for developing and strengthening relationships. It is also used to promote marketing content.
Content Marketing promotion is all about finding the right balance between sharing facts and making the message memorable to your audience. Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are excellent media outlets to deliver your marketing promotion. It's also worth considering podcasting as a content delivery channel, as more than 40% of Americans currently listen to podcasts.
6. Give Freebies and Add Valuable Marketing Content
One of the best ways to establish a credible image is to provide freebies in the beginning stages of implementing your content marketing plan. Freebies, such as newsletters or industry insights, can help you establish a brand name and generate trust among your audience, especially if delivered regularly.
Another way to create content for your blog plan is to include features readers need, such as tip sheets, checklists, infographics, quizzes, games, and eBooks. You may also have worksheets, templates, product guides, demos, or podcasts to include in your marketing content.
After looking at the steps to create a content strategy for your blog, let's analyze the different kinds of content marketing assets you can create.
10 Types of Content Marketing Assets
Get Ready to Create Your Content Marketing Strategy
Remember that every reader is unique and demands different content. When you're looking into how to develop a content marketing strategy for your blog, it's essential to know the proper ways to go about promoting your business and your products or services.
It's time to start developing your own content marketing plan now that you are aware of the steps. When you are creating and sharing content, you should have a plan in place to make the most of it. Your content marketing plan needs to be structured and include all the relevant types of content that can be valuable for your target audience.
If you feel that developing a content marketing strategy and creating varied forms of content can increase the workload of your existing marketing team, then outsourcing can be a great option for your business. It will eliminate the need to hire someone in-house and help reduce costs while giving you additional bandwidth for creating content. You can either opt for hiring an agency or individual marketing staff, depending on your needs and budget.
So, what are you waiting for? Take the first step today towards curating a content marketing plan for your blog and let the magic happen!
