Establishing your business as a voice that people can trust, and ultimately feel good about purchasing from, takes time and effort. One of the best approaches to this goal of becoming a trusted authority in your field is to implement a content marketing plan that serves your audience so well that they come to rely on your voice for their needs.
In this post, we’ll give you a step-by-step breakdown of what to consider when you put together your content marketing plan.
1. Audit current content
If your business has already been producing content of any kind, the first step to a streamlined content marketing plan is to assess the efficacy of what you’ve already done. There are great paid tools and services that can run these audits for you, but if your budget won’t allow one of those services, this is a step that can be done on your own.
Start with a well-organized spreadsheet. Then, give yourself a time period to assess. Maybe you want to audit the content your brand produced over the last year. You’ll want to log data for every blog post, web page, social media channel, podcast, or video that you produced this year.
Then, use a few key metrics to analyze what content is working for your business. Some of these metrics include inbound link clicks, search engine rank, and social shares. Look for trends. Are certain blog topics more widely shared than others? Did your posts from the first half of the year rank higher than the ones in the second half? Why or why not?
Gathering this data will help your team to know what content types need optimizing and fine-tuning. The next step will be to determine whether you’re serving your audience well.
2. Know your audience
Revisiting the details of your audience demographics, interests, and pain points is, yet again, a critical step in formulating your content plan. If you’ve never done a deep dive into your audience and what they’re looking for, now’s the time to do it.
Creating a content marketing plan without clearly establishing the motives of your audience is like embarking on a trip with no map. You may get to your destination eventually, but you’ll have spent a lot more time and money than if you had a map to begin with.
Use the power of Google Analytics, your email marketing software, and social media analytics to understand who is most actively engaging with your current content. Then, conduct market research to find out what it is that your audience is struggling with or longing for. Coming up with that list of topics will be a goldmine for your team as you formulate content.
3. Establish KPI’s
KPI’s are your “key performance indicators.” Basically, what are you actually going to measure in order to determine the success of the content you create? Some of the most telling KPI’s for content tend to include:
- Hitting certain revenue targets in a period of time
- New subscribers to your email list, channel, or socials
- Inbound link clicks – viewers are engaged enough to visit your site or offers
- Improvement in search engine ranking
- Likes, shares, or comments
4. Plan your content
This is the fun part! Now that you have a better understanding of your audience, and have your KPI’s in place, it’s time to start planning the content you’ll create. You’ll want to make two different calendars for this: an editorial calendar and a social media content calendar.
Your editorial calendar should span a few months up to a year. This is where you decide on topics and publish dates for the content you produce. So, if your business produces blogs, you’ll decide how many blogs to publish per week or month, and strategically outline your publication dates so that you’re offering a range of topics to your audience every month.
Your social media content calendar works in conjunction with your editorial calendar. This ensures that you have a plan in place to properly promote the content you’ve spent precious time and dollars creating for your intended audience.
5. Publish and promote your content
This step is pretty self-explanatory: simply execute the plan you put in place from step 4. You’ll probably use some sort of scheduling software for your content, socials, or both, so make sure you pick one that feels intuitive to you.
6. Measure your content’s success
As always, closely monitoring the efficacy of your content in hitting your KPI’s is a crucial step in making your time and monetary investment worth it when it comes to content marketing. Using tools like Google Analytics, social media platform analytics, and any other paid services you use to analyze data will help you to optimize your content so that it converts readers to leads and clients.
Planning and executing your content marketing plan takes high-level strategizing and major organization, but with that comes major pay-off. If your team could use support in the creation or execution of your content marketing plan, reach out to our team at Deal Design.
