The common thing among all successful content marketing strategies is that their creators know what they want. They have a defined goal from the beginning and strive hard to achieve it. So, before you start planning your strategy, have a clear goal in your mind. This way, it will be easier for you to determine the best possible route of materializing your content marketing plan.
Once you have a sound goal, you can move on to the actual planning that could help you in creating a successful content marketing plan. To give you a necessary boost, we have enlisted six tips, integration of which will increase your chances of crafting a winning plan. So without any further ado, let us begin!
Research Your Audience
Creating content with no clear idea about your target audience can cause your content marketing plan to fail. So do extensive research and define the type of audience you want to attract since this is the only way of creating the right content. Additionally, targeted content is not only valuable but it also nudges the right audience to take some action.
For this purpose, start with the buyer’s persona. This includes gathering market research and other information regarding your existing clients. Keep in mind that the more detailed you are in creating a persona, the better. If you are new to the marketing world, you can create your buyer’s persona by conducting surveys, interviews, and appropriate research. Once you are done with this, you can use this tool to make your persona.
Identify Suitable Social Media Platforms
To identify the suitable social channels, you need to figure out where your audience usually hangs at. Here, your detailed research on your audience will serve you well. Once you have found your audience’s preferred platforms, direct all your focus towards them. Additionally, you can expand your existing strategies on the selected platforms to cover more bases.
That said, you can also create a profile on each social platform and track your content’s performance to identify target channels. For this purpose, utilize Google Analytics as it can provide critical information regarding the platforms on which your content is being excessively shared.
Invest in a Content Manager
Invest in a content manager or in a content management system; whatever works for you. Both of the systems are equally benefitting so it all comes down to your needs. With a content manager, you will not have to worry about brainstorming for ideas, creating and updating content or with the editing process.
A content management system, on the other hand, will not be able to achieve this feat. Since it is a computer program, it can only manage content, track documents, scan content, and aid in the revision process. It can also allow you to measure the performance of your content published on various social media platforms.
You can opt for both the options or pick anyone depending on your budget. Whatever option you choose, keep in mind that you will still have creative control over the content creation process with both the choices.
Brainstorm for Content Ideas
Whether you opt for a content manager or a management system; you will still be required to brainstorm for suitable ideas. This is a difficult step as you need to figure out suitable topics that not only provides value but are interesting enough to drive engagement.
There are various strategies that can aid you in this step. For instance, you can begin the brainstorming process by spying on your competitors to get an idea of what others are doing. Use this strategy as a mere guidance tool by studying the competitors’ contents in a bid to understand what consumers want.
You can rely on topics generators, mind maps and perform extensive keyword research to find the hot topics in your industry. Whatever path you choose, always remember that generating ideas is not a one-man job; it requires team efforts. So, the next time you are brainstorming for ideas, always include a team in the process to get valuable insights.
Determine the Content Type
Now comes the part of deciding what type of content to create. Generally, long-form blogs provide strong results as they have the required value needed to compel users to either convert or share the content.
You can opt for long-form blogs; however, providing your audience with just blogs can take a turn for the worst. The best content plan is the one that includes a little bit of everything like videos, infographics, webinars, e-books, and podcasts. As opposed to blogs, videos have a proven record of increasing engagement and reducing bounce rate. Additionally, the visual content like infographics is more likely to be read than normal text with over 67,000 daily Google searches. That said, webinars, podcast, and e-books are also not far behind in the engagement stats.
The point is, this type of content can provide a break from the usual text and can be a visual treat for your audience.
Create and Publish Content
After accomplishing the above-mentioned strategies, creating content should not be a challenge. For a successful content marketing strategy, content needs to be of good quality. It needs to have the right kind of data apart from having a suitable amount of targeted keywords. On top of this, you need to ensure that the information is delivered in an interesting manner.
Generally, achieving all these elements in your content is not a hassle. However, if this is something you cannot manage on your own, then you should look into hiring a firm that provides content writing services. Once your content creation needs are accomplished, you can move on to publishing the content on your preferred social platforms.
The Bottom Line
The key to a successful content marketing plan lies in how well you market your content. So, you need to analyze different marketing channels.
From email marketing, social media marketing to SEO strategies, you need to work on each of the marketing channels to get desired results. In the midst of all this, never forget to set some performance metric to know how well your content marketing plan is performing.
Additionally, set some Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and measure your results against them. For instance, if conversion is your goal, then measure how far your content marketing plan has come in the conversion rate’s process and likewise.
All in all, creating a successful content marketing plan is not difficult. You just need to have defined goals, a clear budget, and a hard-working team that helps in achieving your goals.
The original version of this article was first published on V3Broadsuite.
- 6 Quick Tips on How to Design a Winning Content Marketing Strategy - April 23, 2019
