Having a marketing plan in the digital world of today is important whether you are starting a small business or already manage a large company. Content marketing is a strategic approach focusing on the provision of consistent, relevant content to your target audience. The plan ultimately drives consumer interaction and attracts more customers to your brand. Here are the top 10 tips for your content marketing plan to help you achieve this:
1. Do Proper Research
It is important to analyze your company, the services or products you offer, and even the industry itself before you dive into content marketing. You should find out what interests your target audience to offer them valuable content that they will enjoy. Once you tap into this buyer persona and tailored the content marketing plan to the target audience, you will start seeing more conversions in the end.
2. Establishing Your Objectives
What are your reasons for creating this content marketing plan? What is actually driving it? You obviously want to attract more customers, but getting more specific about your goals will help you identify the most suitable strategy for marketing. For instance, you may wish to improve customer retention, increase brand awareness, generate more sales, or just drive more traffic to your site. Each of the objectives will require a specific strategy, which is why you need to know your objective from the get-go.
3. Search for Content Ideas
Once you determine what your goals are, you can then search for ideas on how to execute your content marketing strategy. The brainstorming stage will help you see what others are doing to ensure that their sites are more SEO-friendly as well as improve their social media outreach. You need to find out how other companies present their videos, podcasts, infographics, and blog posts, noting what is effective about each strategy.
Download Branding Resources Guide
Building a brand starts by having the right tools and advice. Download our top 10 essential tools and resources to kick-start your branding.
4. Determine the Categories and Subcategories of the Content
A content marketing plan is much more than simply uploading new blog posts each week. You need to set the categories and subcategories of the content to cover all your bases. For example, under “social media”, you should include a list of the social media platforms on which you wish to publish your content.
5. Use an Editorial Calendar
The most engaging content marketing plan is one that sticks to a particular schedule. Using an editorial calendar will help you keep up with the publication dates and motivate you to meet deadlines. The strategy will help you stay focused and avoid procrastinating. Just ensure that you schedule content publication at regular intervals to ensure that your audience stays engaged.
6. Determine Who Is Responsible for Creating the Content
Think about how you will be creating content for your brand. Will you be creating the blog posts yourself? Do you have an in-house content creation team that you have hired? Do you prefer using freelancers? Or do you plan to hire a third-party content company? Each option has its pros and cons, so weigh them carefully.
7. Create Quality Content
The focus should always be on publishing high-quality content whether you are creating it yourself or hiring someone else to do it for you. Know and adhere to your standards and ask for revisions if and when necessary. It’s better to have less high-quality content, rather than lots of lower quality stuff. In fact, a lower quality approach that focuses on having lots of content may harm your brand according to ClickFirst Marketing.
8. Make Recommendations
Recommending other blogs and websites might seem counterintuitive when you are trying to market your brand, but audiences usually respond to such helpful recommendations. To reach an even wider audience, you can network with other companies for mutual recommendations.
9. Customize the Content
Producing content regularly simple will not be enough if it is not original. A better idea would be to customize your posts. Customize the same content for various social media platforms, respond to your audience, and maintain your brand voice.
10. Implement Keywords for SEO Purposes
You can obtain a good SEO position by using the proper keywords, but ensure that you use them wisely. Avoid keyword stuffing and implement your target keywords into the content as naturally as possible.
