A content marketing plan is more than just content. Staying up-to-date with the latest trends and revisiting your content plan is an essential step that should not be overlooked. Content planning is a strategic approach to creating valuable, relatable, and consistent content to attract a clearly defined audience. The first step is to understand what we mean by a content strategy or plan.
- What is a content plan?
- Types of content marketing
- Why do you need a content plan?
- Steps involved in creating a content marketing plan
- Closing Thoughts
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What is a content plan?
The planning, development, and management of content, be it in written form or other media, is known as a content marketing plan. It is used to achieve certain business objectives with the help of content. Let’s say that your business wants to increase brand awareness. To do so, you must have a content strategy that can help you focus on increasing your website traffic and ranking on search engines. We may have to focus on SEO practices and other methods of driving traffic to the website.
A plan is a necessity as it helps in providing a foundation for the content. Early in the content creation process, we may feel that a plan is not required because the content is of high quality. However, to ultimately succeed, it is essential to attract new prospects to your brand. It can also be helpful to increase overall customer satisfaction. According to Hubspot, over 70% of marketers actively invest in content marketing. Before we learn more about the steps in our content marketing plan, we must ask ourselves the following questions.
- Who will be reading the content?
- What problems are being solved for the audience?
- How does your content make you unique?
- What content format will you focus on?
- What channels will you publish your content on?
- How will you manage the creation of your content?
Answering these questions will provide clarity on what you want to achieve from the set content marketing plan. Having a certain sense of clarity will help you create a plan that works best for you.
Types of content marketing
Before creating a content plan, we need to know the different formats through which content can be created and distributed. There are several ways of marketing content; they are as follows:
- Blog Posts
- Social Media
- Podcasts
- Video Content
- E-books
- Infographics
- Case Studies
- Templates
- Email Marketing
- Lead Magnets
- White Papers
- Slide Decks, and more.
Why do you need a content plan?
Aside from creating high-quality content, having a strategy in place is a great way to bring in cost-effective sources of website traffic and generate leads. It helps a brand define its goals and set priorities while working. It can also help us track our progress compared to when we first started creating and publishing content. If we’re clear about the bigger picture, we can focus our efforts in the right direction. This helps us direct our costs effectively as well. Putting efforts into work without a plan can lead to wasted time and resources. Having short-term goals and long-term goals will help in understanding what you’re working towards. Setting SMART goals and constantly analyzing and revisiting your past plans will help you enhance your chances of success.
Let’s say you plan to create a blog post. This blog gains a decent amount of organic traffic. If you place a link to your e-book in the blog post, this may continue to generate leads long after you have published the blog post. Having certain plans that can be a reliable source of traffic and lead generation are a great way to create brand awareness.
Steps involved in creating a content marketing plan
Before you start publishing content, it is important to create a plan. Let us see a step-by-step on how to create a content marketing plan.
1. Establish your goals
Before we start creating content, we need to define our goals. Why are we creating content on a particular topic? Do we want to generate more leads? Do we wish to improve brand awareness? Will creating content help bring more traffic to the website? Answer these questions, come up with an objective(s), and set targets that need to be met. You can then quantify these targets to assess whether your content marketing efforts will be worthwhile or not.
2. Define your target audience
Knowing who you want to reach through your content strategy is extremely important. Let’s say you want to reach a specific segment of the population. Understanding what they like and dislike is crucial before marketing your brand to them. Knowing what kind of content the target audience appeals to will help you build a persona for your target audience. This will help you define the demographics such as age, location, income group, and gender of your target group, which helps you curate your content accordingly.
3. Research your competition
With the amount of content being generated on a daily basis, there’s a good chance that you will face some competition. Researching the kind of content they are generating, looking at the keywords they are targeting, and what factors are aiding their success can be a good way to decide what you can do differently or how you can add value to your target audience. Apart from direct competitors, several other channels of information such as newspapers and entertainment sites may cover similar topics as you. Doing thorough research on these competitors will help you understand what you should or should not do.
4. Keyword Research
After you know your target audience and have set certain goals or objectives to be achieved, you need to learn about the keywords being searched for by these individuals. What are people looking for? And how we can provide them with the answers they are looking for in the best possible way. Choosing relevant keywords with a decent search volume will help you yield surprising results. Several tools such as SEMrush, Google Search Console, and Ahrefs are available for you to conduct thorough keyword research and plan your content accordingly.
5. Review the existing content
Reviewing the existing content will help you analyze which content has received the most traffic. Analyzing past performance can help you gain insights on which content works best for you and which content may need to be further optimized. This helps you build a better picture of what resonates with your target audience.
6. Create a plan of action
Now that you have defined your goals, figured out who your audience is, what works for you in terms of content, you are ready to create a content marketing plan. Make use of the research done so far and figure out which methods you’ll use to promote your content, which platform you want to publish the content on, and what is most appealing to your audience. Let’s say that your audience resonates with social media posts rather than white papers; then, you can work on creating more content on social media. Do they prefer watching videos or reading long-form content? If they prefer video content, prioritize video content marketing. In some cases, a mixture of different forms of content may work best. Choose what works well for your goals and start creating a plan.
7. Plan your content resources
Once you’ve come up with a plan, you need to figure out how to achieve it. Do you have in-house writers who will work on the content creation and generation process? Are there certain parts of the content that you would rather get outsourced? Will you require additional resources to handle the social media or content marketing campaigns? Is there an allocated budget that you need to work with? Will someone be working on replying to user comments and questions? Planning all of these various resources is essential to success. Content marketing can be time-consuming and may require several resources. However, it is surely worth the effort.
8. Plan your schedule/create a content calendar
Creating a schedule to help you understand when the deadlines are, the publishing dates, the allocated resources who will be working on creating a particular content piece, etc., will be helpful in planning and organizing your plan and being consistent with publishing.
9. Create, publish, and distribute content
Creating content that is of high quality is extremely important. We must be able to add value to the readers or individuals who are consuming the content. Don’t rush the content creation process. Ensure that it is well-researched and factually correct. After creating and publishing the content, we should work towards promoting the content on various platforms. We can post it on social media, share it through emails, tweet the content link, or more.
10. Continue to review and refine the content plan
Monitor the content to see how it is performing on various platforms. Refine your strategy if required. Stay ahead of the changing trends and be flexible in your approach. Keep your goals in sight, discover new opportunities as they come, and increase productivity. When you see a brand developing relevant content consistently, it can be traced back to the quality of their content marketing plan.
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Closing Thoughts
Creating compelling content is extremely important to a brand. Having a well-structured content plan will surely help brands attract more customers to their websites and increase brand awareness. It takes time and effort to create a content plan that works best for your brand. Trying out different strategies will help you learn more about what works well and what doesn’t suit your needs. Having a good foundation will help you stand out from the crowd. So if you wish to do the same, make sure to stay up-to-date with the latest trends. Upskill with the help of digital marketing courses and earn a certificate from prestigious and globally renowned universities and get prepared to land your dream job.
