Designing a content marketing plan may be created in several different ways, depending on where you are in your content marketing journey. For example, you could be a new business just getting started and developing a plan could be something as simple as a mission statement.
For other organizations that have been creating content programs for a while, content marketing planning could exist as a regular checkpoint to ensure that your programs are able to keep up with your company’s (adjusting) goals.
Understand Your Purpose
As a rule of thumb, it is a good idea to understand why you are creating content. This can be accomplished by creating your content marketing mission statement.
Content Marketing – What is it?
The term content marketing has been defined by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), as a strategic advertising tactic centered on producing and supplying valuable, applicable, and regular published content to appeal to and keep a well-defined audience, as well as drive profitable customer action.
Follow these six steps to create your successful marketing plan:
1. Define Who You Are Targeting
To have your marketing plan be a success it is important to know who your audience is. You should be able to answer the following:
- Who are your model users and what do they look like?
- Do you know where they like to gather or meetup online?
- What are they talking about there?
2. Choose Your Purposes or Objectives
Keep it simple. A few examples are as follows:
- Create interest in your products or services?
- Do you want to provide support for customers?
- Form a group centered around a charity or organization?
- Demonstrate that you are an authority in your field?
3. Set Your Goals
Ask yourself what will you like your business to look like 6-12 months from now? Here are a few examples of goals to aim for:
- Publish your own e-book?
- Land a certain number of clients?
- Obtain a promotion or new job?
- Do a charitable fundraiser?
4. Determine Your Content Types
It’s important to take two things into account here:
- a) What can you do?
- b) What does your ideal audience require of you? Find out by asking questions and find a way to answer them or solve their problems.
This in turn will help you decide what content to produce. For example, you could create tutorials, guides, interviews, infographics, as well as curated content. As such, it will drive traffic to your website or blog.
5. Commit to Publishing Consistently
The number of published content does not supersede the quality of content. Consistency is a crucial factor when it comes to attracting visitors to your site and building your audience. For example, if you are going to publish once a week, be consistent.
6. Create Your Promotion Strategy
It doesn’t matter how good your content is, it needs an audience to use and distribute or share it.
Getting your content out there and shared takes time, but using email and social media can work wonders for getting your content shared. Just don’t overshare to the point it becomes spam.
Conclusion
If you have some tips on how to successfully plan your content marketing efforts, please share in our comments section below.