8 Step Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

This post is designed to help with an easy to follow 8 step content marketing plan to build your audience and your business.

1. SET YOUR GOAL:

Your goals need to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic & Timely.Don’t forget to address your budget for each goal and reassess offline expenditure for the best ROI.

2.PERSONA ANALYSIS :

Identify the top 2 buyer persona’s for your business. This is a detailed analysis of the PEOPLE who buy from you. It is all about people – pains, motivations, process, trusted sources and how you will tell your Brand’s story to them and make it relevant.

3.KEYWORD  RESEARCH :

Identify the most profitable keywords for your business, being used by your buyer personas. This is a great time to also review your competition and see what they are doing online! There are some keyword research tools Wordtracker,Keyword Discovery,SEO Book,Wordstream, übersuggest, Keyword.io,Keyword Suggestion Tool,Serpstat,Keyword Eye,Google , Keyword planner.

4. CONTENT CALENDAR CREATION :

One of the MOST important steps, creating your content calendar. Also known as an editorial calendar,this planning tool will ensure your content stays fresh, relevant and is published in the right place at the right time!

What to keep in mind while creating your content calendar:

i) What questions are you asked?

ii) Capturing Ideas - Using Google Alerts , Social Mention and Feedly.

iii) How do people want to digest it? This could be written text, images, info-graphics, videos, podcasts etc.

iv)When is the best time to publish? Day, Date, Time

v) How to make it relevant? Which platform is best?

vi) Seasonality and School Holidays

5.WRITE AND OPTIMIZE YOUR CONTENT:

Making your content attractive to both people and search engines can be tricky.

Here a six-step process that you can use as to create perfectly optimized content every time.

1. Build Trust :                                                                                                                                    a) Build trust by using the right words.                                                                     b) Build trust by being objective.                                                                               c) Build trust by featuring user-generated content.                                               d) Build trust by sharing research, metrics and case studies.
2. Match Intent
3. Create Quality
4. Establish Authority
5. Produce Calls-To-Action
6. Optimize Engagement With Visuals 

   6.PUBLISH YOUR CONTENT:

   

   Make sure you publish your content on all available platforms, this is your own blog, forums, LinkedIn and other 3rd party site’s you have access to.

   Here are some strategies for improving your outreach and getting your content planned, polished, and published:

   1. Create a content strategy.
   2. Do your research.
   3. Write what you know.
   4. Open up to your audience.
   5. Beef up your content.
   6. Cover all your bases before submitting. 

      7. PROMOTE YOUR  CONTENT: 

      

      Writing the content is the first step but telling your audience about it is where the real power lies! Share teasers of your content on your social media, Google +, paid campaigns, local destination sites and wherever else you have access to!

      Here are five new ways to promote your content for maximum impact.

      1. Reach out to influencers who share similar content.
      2. Create specific Google Alerts.
      3. Use IFTTT to search Twitter.
      4. Create an RSS feed of all of your content.

      5. Use a social sharing platform that publishes to multiple networks and analyzes the results. 

         8.MEASURE , REFINE AND REPEAT: 

         

         There are 4 types of metrics to measure, which one’s match your goals?

         1. Consumption Metrics
         2. Sharing Metrics
         3. Lead Generation Metrics
         4. Sales Metrics