content marketing plan

Benjamin Franklin once said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” Mr. Franklin was a smart man. In the world of content marketing, attempting to move forward without a plan is a recipe for disaster. There are tens of thousands of stories about businesses that have heard content marketing works and decided to give it a try. They create 1 or 2 500-word blog posts a week, post them to their blog and social media pages for a few months, and hope for the best. And then, after a little while, nothing happens. So they give up. They stop creating. They stop posting. Why didn’t it work? They were shooting at a forest, instead of a target. To avoid falling into this trap, you need to know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there. But how do you do this? By creating a bulletproof content marketing plan. And this guide is going to help you do just that. Let’s get started. [bctt tweet=”In the world of content marketing, attempting to move forward without a plan is a recipe for disaster. Learn more about building your best #contentplan yet for #contentmarketing results” username=”ExpWriters”] Why Do You Need a Content Marketing Plan? [bctt tweet=”Marketers that have a documented #contentmarketing plan have more success. @JuliaEMcCoy ” username=”ExpWriters”] Take a look at this infographic from the team at Impact: As you can see, 89% of B2B marketers and 86% of B2C marketers are using content marketing. But only 37% of B2B marketers and 40% of B2C marketers have a documented content marketing strategy. Not surprisingly, the percentage of B2B and B2C marketers that have documented strategies is almost identical to the percentage of marketers that say their strategy is extremely or very effective. This isn’t a coincidence. Having a documented plan is crucial to content marketing success. The 6 Steps to Developing a Rock Solid Content Marketing Plan You know you need a plan. Now we’re going to show you how to develop one. 1. Know Your Goals and How to Measure Them One of the most important aspects of developing a content marketing plan is to determine the actual goals that you’re trying to achieve through your efforts. There are essentially five goals that content marketing can help you achieve: Develop Brand Awareness Drive Traffic to Your Website Generating Sales Leads Converting Leads into Customers Improving Customer Retention and Driving Upsells But knowing your goals isn’t enough. You also need to know if what you’re doing is helping you get closer to reaching them. My three-bucket goal strategy can help with that. In this strategy, I teach the usage of three main content marketing goals that lead to profits, and what types of content you can put in each bucket to get there. Learn more here. Measuring content marketing success, as one would imagine, can be difficult. In most cases, it will require a fair amount of tools to cover the measurement of all of your identified goals. For example, measuring website and blog metrics requires the use of Google Analytics. Keyword research means using tools like Mangools or SEMrush. 2. Identify Your One Reader and Where You’ll Find Them As you probably already know, marketing doesn’t work very well if you attempt to target several different audiences. Instead, you need to identify exactly who you’re targeting and then find out the best place to target them with your content. CoSchedule’s Ben Sailer said it well: there are three main reasons to define your target audience. They include: But, how? In this guide to creating a detailed target persona, we cover more on this subject. Here’s an example of a well-developed persona: Need more help? Here’s the top 9 demographic areas you should know about your persona: Once you’ve deconstructed your persona, psychographics helps give you an understanding of how to talk to your target market. Personality, attitudes, values, interests, hobbies, lifestyle, and behavior are all important things to identify here. The easiest way to do this is by taking a look at the social behavior of people that fit your basic demographics. What do they share, tweet, pin, and like? As you generate this information, you can begin to shape your content messaging in a way that resonates with the audience that you’ve identified. Once you know the demographics and psychographics of your target audience, simply find out where those people are spending their time. And then publish your content there. Avalaunch Media put together a fun infographic that identifies the personalities of users on different social media platforms that can help with this: 3. Perform a Content Audit Content audits are important for many reasons. They help determine a variety of things about your website, including: Moz says that performing a thorough content audit of your website involves quite a few steps: Crawling all indexable URLs. Screaming Frog’s free SEO Spider Tool is a great way to do this. Gathering additional metrics. In addition to URL and on-page metrics, you’ll want to gather info on things like internal and external links, traffic, content uniqueness, etc. Putting your information into an easily digestible dashboard. The optimal option for this step is Excel. Understand your dashboard. Sizemore mentions that, “a good place to start would be to look for any content-related issues that might cause an algorithmic filter or manual penalty to be applied.” Write up a report. This report should summarize the findings, provide recommendations, and examine next steps for improving the site’s search rankings. While this process may seem a bit intensive, it’s necessary to ensure that your new content marketing plan is put together in a way that it can be successful. What If You Don’t Already Have Content on Your Site? If you don’t already have content to audit, you can perform a content audit of your competitors. And while doing this is important, you don’t want to get caught up spending hours and hours mulling over every single detail of a competitor’s website and content. Use these … Read more