How to Create a Solid Content Marketing Plan

The key to a successful content marketing campaign which works to generate more leads for you is to make a plan. From working out your target audience to attracting them, getting them engaged and encouraging them to buy and share, there’s plenty of different content to plan and arrange.  

Each piece of content you create has to have a reason for existing and should be working to achieve one of your main goals, whether that’s attraction, engagement, education or experience. A solid content marketing plan can help you achieve all of this with ease. There are a few key stages which you should certainly incorporate into your marketing plan to get it off to a roaring success:

Stage 1 – Goals

You can’t expect to achieve anything if you’re not sure what it is you’re hoping to achieve in the first place. Sit down with your team and/or business coach and set out a few reasonable goals which are achievable within certain timescales. It’s recommended you plan what you want to achieve in the next year, 2 years and 5 years.

Content marketing is not an instant strategy, and won’t get you results instantaneously. It can take a few months to get off the ground so you shouldn’t be expecting miracles in the first year, though you should certainly have made some sort of impact.

Stage 2 – Analyse existing content

So you may already have a bunch of content on your website, but if it’s not helping you achieve your goals, it might as well be written in hieroglyphics. Whether you want to attract additional website visitors, email signups, increase sales or something else, you have to take a look at your existing content and see if that’s helping you do that. If not, it might be necessary to make changes to the content and add appropriate calls to action. At this point you should take a note of all stats too, as this is now your starting point from which you can measure success.

Stage 3 – Target your audience/customers

You may already know your target audience but it’s worthwhile investing some more research into this especially as your audience tends to change over different mediums so you may not be targeting the same people on your website as social media. Audiences change over time anyway, so it’s important to know exactly where your audience are and how to interact with them.

Stage 4 – Create purposeful content consistently

Once you understand your audience you can begin to create content which has a purpose. Whether that is attracting customers, engaging with them or encouraging your audience to share on social media, it’s important to analyse this and work out how the content you are creating is helping to meet this purpose.

Once you understand this it’s helpful to create an editorial calendar which can keep you right in ensuring you create appropriate content at regular intervals, which will help achieve your goals. In this calendar it’s important to include things relevant to your brand that you can be creating content about, such as launch dates of products or services, wider industry launches that you can create a think piece on and more.

Stage 5 – Promote your content carefully

We live in an age of shameless self-promotion, but rather than try to spam your audience with your content on every social media network at every opportunity, you should plan your promotion for maximum impact. For starters, make sure your content is full of lots of search engine optimised content which will rank well among your chosen market.

However that’s just the beginning – you’ll also need to consider social media platforms, email marketing and any other means which can grab the attention of your audience. Thanks to great analytics tools, you can now see when it’s best to reach your audience via social media and create effective email campaigns which are sure to last.

This is of course just the beginning in creating a solid content marketing strategy, as you’ll have to analyse results then refine your future content accordingly. It will take time but the repeat process of content provision, promotion, analysis and refining will build a solid content marketing campaign sure to give results.