Posted on April 5, 2022

Create a perfect Content Marketing Plan in 10 easy steps

Brands make significant efforts in the development of content marketing plan to compete in this highly competitive B2B marketing environment. Why? Content marketing is a very effective method of generating leads.

Content marketing is a vital growth strategy for most organizations since it is one of the most successful techniques for increasing audience engagement, establishing your brand’s visibility, and generating sales.

It is also one of the most cost-efficient strategies for increasing audience engagement. The next sections discuss content marketing, such as the advantages of providing consistent, high-quality material as well as how to quantify performance.

With the use of content marketing, you can provide answers to your audience’s queries while also increasing conversions and generating leads. Customers increasingly demand consistent, high-quality content from the companies they trust. Eighty percent of marketers, according to the State of Inbound survey, place a high value on creating engaging content. As a result, on average, B2B marketing spends 26% of its expenditures on content marketing.

One of the many aspects that affect the development and success of your company is the consistency of your brand message. Consistent branding is a skill that big businesses have honed through time. The same principle applies in content marketing: Your material must have a distinctive style and tone across all distribution platforms. Your reliability, trustworthiness, and reputation are all bolstered when your content is consistent.

Why Create a Content Marketing Plan?

Define your Marketing Objectives

A content marketing plan assists you in defining your marketing objectives and prioritizing your efforts. It enables you to organize your work and guarantees that all marketing efforts are directed toward a certain objective. With a structured content strategy, you may guarantee that every piece of work put forth by your team results in measurable outcomes for your organization.

Analysing your Content Marketing Effforts

When it comes to evaluating the efficacy of your strategy, have plenty of content marketing plan examples. Your short and long-term objectives serve as a yardstick. A sound content strategy should include the metrics that should be tracked and analyzed regularly to assess if content marketing activities are delivering positive outcomes.

Get New Ways of Generating Content

The most successful content marketers are always on the lookout for new ways to generate content. In an attempt to reach a larger portion of their target audience, they produce material on trending news subjects. So, a strong content strategy should define all the ways a marketer may track news and trends and uncover story ideas to aid with this. An uncoordinated approach to spotting fresh chances will be mirrored in the tone of the brand’s publications.

Organised System of Working

It’s not uncommon for folks to require a little push in the right direction. Everything from team member productivity measurements to a content development timetable to social media accounts administration best practices to marketing automation system upkeep is outlined. All of this is made a lot simpler when you have a plan in place, which leads to a more effective marketing team.

How to Make a Content Marketing Plan for your Brand (Step by Step Guide)

Determine Your Purpose and Objectives

A smart beginning point for your digital marketing plan is to develop a mission statement for your content marketing efforts. In a nutshell, this is a clear description that makes it simpler to concentrate on what is essential – and what isn’t – while developing content, so ensuring that your content marketing plan remains on track.

A content marketing mission and vision contain the following points:

Your target audience is a group of people who
The kind of material you’ll employ to reach out to them.
The advantage that they will get

While your content strategy‘s mission statement focuses on what your target audience will get from it, you should also consider the benefits for your company as a whole. Here are your company’s aims.

These are common aims:

As a consequence of the content marketing approach, a rise in income.
Increasing your income by increasing your sales and obtaining a greater number of high-quality leads.
When you have a higher number of visitors to a web page, you have more opportunities to accomplish other objectives as well.
Increasing your company’s credibility and authority by being viewed as a thought leader in your industry.
Success in search engine optimization leads to an increase in traffic.
It will save you money in the long run since your content is more effective.
Engagement on social media may assist with traffic as well as authority.

Having established your objectives, it is time to take the following step.

Establishing KPI’s

Making objectives that are detailed and quantifiable is the most effective strategy to attain them. Key performance indicators (KPIs) are important for measuring the success of your content marketing plan.

The key performance indicators (KPIs) can assist you in determining whether you have accomplished your objectives by offering milestones that you can tick off. Included in these will be your expectations for income, sales, traffic, and other metrics related to digital marketing such as email marketing and social media metrics that you want to reach.

In most cases, they will have a set of unique identifiers associated with them. You may, for example, desire to:

Achieve a certain income goal within a given time frame.
You’ll know you’re receiving better leads when you see more people signing up for your lead magnet.
Increase your email list size by a specific percentage.
Watch how your website’s audience becomes more receptive and invested in what you have to say.
To increase traffic, improve the search rankings of some of your most important sites.
Your pillar content should get a particular number of mentions, shares, and comments.
Participate in important industrial gatherings based on an invitation.

You’ll have to keep track of how much money you spend on marketing initiatives, as well as the cost of gaining new leads and closing sales.

Understand your Target Audience

When developing a content marketing strategy, it is critical to identify your target audience to provide relevant material. To go forward, you must take three steps.

Gather Information on the Population’s Demographics

Identifying your visitors, email subscribers, and social media following is the first step.
The information you need to know about your audience may be found in web analytics, email subscription analytics, and social media analytics.

Get Feedback from Customers

Collecting feedback from your present consumers might help you understand even more about your target market. You’ll get knowledge about:

What do people think of what you’re now putting out
The most pressing issues they’re facing.
How you can use your content to help them solve their issues

A client feedback survey may assist you with the following:

Recognize the priorities of your readers and subscribers.
Determine where your consumers are most likely to be.

Construct Buyer Personas

It’s easier to construct buyer personas once you have demographic information and client feedback. You may better focus your content by creating buyer personas, often known as customer avatars. The finest customer avatars incorporate information about the problems, difficulties, information sources, and behavioral motivations of your consumers.

Knowing all of this information will improve your knowledge of:

Identifying the kind of material your target market will be interested in

What benefit they will get from it

What is it that will compel people to pay attention?

Track your position

Existing material from a variety of companies may be found online. Included in this will be blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, videos, and other types of media. If that material doesn’t assist you to achieve your objectives, it’s time to move on.

(Step 4 may be skipped if you’re just started and have no content.)

You’ll need to conduct a content audit to do so, which means:

Content logging includes anything from blog entries to guest posts and so on.
Determining whether or not they have been a success.
Acknowledging the Errors

Look at how your content stacks up against your rivals’ and how new material fits into the market. For your content marketing plan, let’s have a look at an example.

How to Keep Track of What You’re Doing

Screaming Frog is a great place to start if you want to keep track of all of your website or blog material. With its help you can do the following:

A list of web addresses
Examine the headings and subheadings on each page.
Recognize and remove duplicate web pages
Map your website

Take a Look at the Performance of Your Content

The next step is to evaluate the content’s usefulness. The metrics you’ll be searching for include:

If the material has a large number of inbound links.
That piece of content’s search engine rankings for relevant keywords.
A lot of people will see it if it’s shared extensively.

Identify the content gaps

Last but not least, identify any openings in the system that you may exploit. A few examples of these include:

Relevant to your niche but not specifically targeted by your content.

What questions are you not answering to your target audience?

A piece of content that is beginning to rank well, but might be modified, for example, to target Google’s response boxes. These are the boxes that display the above search results and include the answers to a particular query that has been asked.

Determine the most effective content distribution channels.

As you go through this process, you’ll begin to get an understanding of where your target audience hangs out online, as well as where you currently have a strong online presence. Instead of attempting to achieve everything at once, it is preferable to concentrate on what is working and grow from there.

You may also use Buzzsumo to get similar information. Enter your domain name into the search box on their Content Analysis tool. Charts will appear when you press the Enter key:

The network’s share of the pie
Shares based on the kind of content
Shares based on the duration of the content
The year’s best material

Decide on the Types of Content You Want to Create.

Next, consider the kinds of material you’ll need to provide. A good content marketing plan will always incorporate certain sorts of material. When it comes to content marketing, the most effective strategy depends on getting a central core of information that can be recycled and shared on various sites (outposts).

Blogging is a crucial aspect of any marketing strategy since it continues to provide impressive results. As a rule of thumb, your blog entries should be actionable, beneficial to your readers, and shareable.

How to Use Buzzsumo to Map Your Content to social media

If you’re looking to increase your blog’s visibility and readership via social media, try using Buzzsumo’s post-analysis tool.
OptinMonster readers, for example, are big fans of how-to articles and checklists. Using the drop-down menus, you may get a list of your most popular content types and networks.

An effective content marketing plan isn’t simply about looking at your own site’s data and trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s also a way to get ideas from other people’s successful work. Also, Buzzsumo may be of use here. Enter your subject into the search box of the same tool. You’ll be able to check how many people have shared your content.

Recognize and Distribute Available Assets.

To make sure your content marketing strategy succeeds, it’s crucial to ensure that you have all of the tools and resources you’ll need. To do this, you must answer questions like:

In whose hands does the content creation and upkeep reside?
What kind of human, physical, or digital resources are required to produce the material?
What are the details of your publication process, including the scheduling of content?

Consider each of them in further depth.

Content Creation Is the whom responsibility?

The assignment of responsibilities is at the heart of this query. What matters is who is in control and who is accountable for providing certain pieces of material.
Whether you’re producing content in-house or outsourcing it will be determined by the size of your firm and the size of your content team.

An example of how this may appear is as follows:

Content and content strategy are subject to final approval by the CEO or chief marketing officer.
They are in charge of executing daily tasks per your content marketing plan and will work closely with the editorial staff.
Content will be created by individuals based on their area of expertise.

Are There Any Specific Tools or Resources That You’ll Rlocatingequire?

The next step is to decide how you’re going to go about creating the material itself. Included among your content creators are:

Creators of in-house content
Video, podcasting, and graphic design experts
Freelancers

One approach to rapidly locate fantastic freelancers is to return to your Buzzsumo search results and check who’s produced the most relevant content. No harm in contacting them to see if they’d be interested in joining your team of content contributors. Networks like Contently, NDash, ClearVoice, and others can help you locate excellent independent content creators. In addition, you’ll need equipment for podcasting and video production, as well as hosting on sites like YouTube, Vimeo, Spreaker, and Blubrry, to name just a few options.

Make a Content Scheduling Calendar.

Your content strategy should include a plan for when you’ll post your material on each of the channels you plan on using. It is crucial to utilize a content calendar to ensure that all of your material is planned in advance. This may be done in a variety of ways.

Google Calendar is a great place to keep track of due dates for various pieces of material. If you’re not putting out a lot of material, this is a great solution.

This is the most basic option, but if you’re dealing with an extensive content team and a production pipeline, you’ll need more options. You may use productivity and task management tools like Asana or a platform specifically designed for managing editorial calendars like CoSchedule to keep track of all of this. Both of these tools let you plan out the many steps involved in the development of your content.

Example of a content calendar for asana

Doing some preliminary research to discover themes that your target audience will be interested in is one approach to come up with ideas for new material for your calendar.

Find out what your customers want to know.

We have discussed the importance of creating content that is tailored to your audience’s needs. The Question Analyzer or Answer the Public on Buzzsumo and other sites may help you figure this out. The Answer the Public search box will return a list of questions that people have looked for on Google if you enter a subject into the search box.

The public search results should be answered

Decide on the sort of material, such as a blog post, and add a title to your calendar for the question. Continue this approach until you’ve planned out material for the next several months in advance. Repeat as necessary.

Produce a Work of Art

Your content marketing approach begins long before you even write a word of original content. However, the moment has come to take action. As a starting point, we’ll take the example of a blog post, but these techniques may be applied to any sort of content development. You’ll know what sort of blog article to write based on the research you’ve previously done. Lists and how-tos, for example, are often requested by our audience. To begin, choose a topic from the content calendar and begin working on it.

Research Your Subject Matter

To write, you must first determine:

Everything that’s already been put out there.
In what ways may your fresh material benefit your target audience?

The best way to accomplish this is to run a Google search, look at the most popular articles on your subject, and see how you can enhance it. That’s known as the skyscraper method, and it works. If you’re gathering the correct kinds of data, you may want to look into doing your original study as an alternative. Take advantage of keyword research to come up with a list of the most important search phrases. In our Keyword Research 101 tutorial, we go through this procedure in great depth.

Produce the Information

Finally, go to work on your content creation. Think about how you can include your brand’s personality into every piece of content that you produce. It’s up to you whether you want to present yourself formally or informally. You’ll also have to strike a delicate balance between demonstrating your knowledge and seeming condescending to your readers. Here are some tips from Sprout Social on how to keep your brand’s voice consistent while still optimizing your content for search engine rankings. These great content marketing examples might serve as a source of inspiration for your efforts.

Distribute and Sell

Distribution and marketing are the next important parts of any content strategy. To put it another way, failing to deal with things properly will lead to disappointing outcomes. For instance, you’re likely to hear:

Set up a drip campaign using a platform like Missinglettr to share your material on social media regularly.
Subscribers may access your material through email marketing.
Make sure to notify any influencers who have been referenced in your material.

You can also use it to promote your content on your website and through email newsletters using OptinMonster. OptinMonster, for example, increased Olyplant’s pageviews by a whopping 157 percent.

OptinMonster comes with the following features:

You may use a variety of targeting options, including the ability to target visitors down to the page level.
Exit-Intent Technology allows you to catch visitors’ attention with tailored information just before they leave your site.
Referrer, device, activity, and more may all be used to start content marketing campaigns.
Email marketing integrations with all of the main providers

OptinMonster may also be used to:

Emphasize the most crucial elements of your website to new visitors.
Showing fresh information to your site’s visitors is an effective way to keep them interested.
It has been shown that OptinMonster’s marketing campaign software can quadruple your email list and increase conversions by 3806 percent by using gated content.

List of Content Planning Tools

ContentCal
Content Marketing Strategy Plan Template
Trello
Notion
Asana
CoSchedule
Google Sheets
Google Calendar
Basecamp
Wrike
Hubspot Planning Template
Monday.com
Airtable
Smartsheet

Conclusion

The development of a content marketing plan is a cycle, not a one-time effort, as you can see from the 10-step plan provided above. Your understanding of your audience and the kind of material that works will grow as you develop, and you will need to update your strategy regularly. This is what make brands hire content marketing services. However, the suggestions provided above should assist you in getting started with the creation of a content marketing strategy.

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