How To Create A Content Marketing Plan?

Whether you are new to the field of content marketing or you have been planning to figure out new approaches to make your content marketing activities successful, then there is no better way rather than implementing effective content marketing plans and strategies – to make sure your content marketing steps are trendy, innovative and eye-catchy.

According to recent research of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), there were around 62% of businesses had no documented content marketing plan since 2018, but in 2020, the percentage of B2B businesses have been increased who are focusing on implementing a successful content marketing plan. This percentage has reached 69% by the end of January 2020.

CMI research states that the most effective B2B marketers and companies are engaging in investing 40% of their marketing budget on content marketing as of 2019, increased 3% from 2017. Have you ever thought that what you have to do to leg up in this field where the competition is very high and sustainability is less than 5%? The answer is the lack of a sustainable and successful content marketing plan.

If you are planning to attract the potential target audience and enhance your brand image then you are required to place solid plans for your content marketing. We are here to help you out to understand what content strategy and planning actually is and how to include fresh ideas in your bucket for its successful implementation.

What Is Content Strategy?

Content strategy is associated with the factors of making a balance between readers’ goals, content objectives, topics of the content and your ideas. In other words, it refers to the business marketing plan that effectively emphasizes and demonstrates what your brand is and the expertise you want to deliver to your target audience and industry.

If you know about the significance of content creation then you definitely can understand that without effective and well-planned marketing strategies, you cannot achieve your content objectives.

When content marketers develop a business content plan, there are few key points needed to be considered:

Readers’ Goals

First, they need to understand for whom they need to create content. Understanding the limits of digital reach is very important. Who is your target audience? what are their choices and preferences? It is necessary to figure out what content plan can be made in order to attract potential customers first.

Your Business Objectives

Being a content marker, you always need to understand what is unique about the content that makes you stand apart from the crowd. It is a fact that your competitors might have the same product and service to offer, but your content objectives can make your business more reliable and unique in front of the audience and targeted segment.

Your content should deliver a message to your audience about your achievements, business practices, and objectives so that they could realize what is different in you, what is worth buying from you.

Content Topics

While developing your content, have you ever thought about the forms of content? Understanding of content forms while developing content topic and body, is very essential. Having recognized topics (infographics, video scripting, Guest Posts, Articles) will help you determine your budget and format of writing so that you can find the best way to express the right meaning and feeling to your audience through your content.

The Tone Of Voice (Content Structure)

The content structure includes those elements that help you to manage credibility, readability and allows you to enhance the content’s ranking efficiently. According to content structure standards, your content should be framed according to the preferences of your audience. It has meaningful use in HTML heading that breaks each content part into two headings “section” and “subsection” that allow your readers to read and understand the content easily. It also allows you to share readable content and increase content ranking opportunities.

How To Make A Successful Content Marketing Plan In 2020?

Franking speaking, the making content strategy can be implemented effectively, when businesses will understand its worth and processes how to execute content marketing plan successfully. We are here to help you putting efforts together to document plans and generate great outcomes from content marketing 2020.

Understanding Business Goals Content Marketing

 The Content Audit

Nobody can understand and tell whether they are going in the right direction or not without proper and effective content audit. Before starting making any plan for marketing the content, it is important to start with auditing content requirements.

To rectify, first, you need to collect all the content details recently produced by your company such as; keywords, blogs, content formats, content channels, social media platforms, etc. Then, you can use a content inventory or records spreadsheet, to verify how effectively each of these components has been giving you relevant and expected outcomes based on your previously maintain content strategy.

There are many tools available in the market to audit content accuracy such as SEO site checkup, Site Analyzer, WooRank and so on. Anyone from these tools will be able to give accurate analysis and results, which content was the most important and gave you the successful and expected results and which one is not up to the mark.

Content auditing analysis will also help you to make perfect notes of gaps observed related to all subjective areas in which you help you to edit, change and re-create content again perfectly.

Selection Of Content Management System

The selection of an effective content management system is necessary for the proper management of content planning.  It includes content creation, content publication, and web analytics. You can HubSpot, WordPress, etc. to plan, develop and publish your content.

These management systems allow you to measure the effectiveness of your content creation. WordPress Content Management Systems are organized and hosted by WP Engine.

 

Brainstorming Content Views

Brainstorming for content management is very essential, it helps in content strategy to understand the types of content marketing, also assist in starting with new content framing ideas for the next upcoming projects.

Content Brainstorming tools are built to create a spark in your mind and help you to frame organized and structured content. We are sharing the name of a few of those content brainstorming tools:

IdeaBoards

IdeaBoards allows you to set up your own virtual boards online to make content ideas, it is a web-based tool where you can create various sections and areas and invite collaborators to share your ideas.

Google Documents

The actual use of Google Documents is more than a sharing doc. files and virtual control on documents. It is also used as a simple brainstorming tool by professionals in order to share content ideas, building a professional group to edit those documents and add a valuable comment to review and admire the best ideas.

Solo Mind Mapping

Solomapping is another brainstorming tool in which you can start with the major concept and start adding other subtopics with that. It is just like the mind map tool in which you can reduce and expand branches, add more hyperlinks and create a customized color, patterns, etc.

Create Buyer’s Persona

For developing an effective and perfect content marketing plan, businesses should understand and figure out their actual target audience. A clear definition of a public is very essential to plan the limit of digital reach and conduct user persona research – this concept is known as a Buyer Persona.  You can conduct analysis based on demographic data based on age, gender, geographic region, etc.

Knowledge of the target audience for any business is also important to increase online business presence and increase website traffic perfectly. In this overall analysis, digital marketers need to understand that buyer persona analysis cannot remain constant, its changes are based on factors such as types of businesses, types of content format and differences in the sizes and nature of businesses. Twitter and Google Analytics can be used to get demographic information from your followers.

Experienced marketers understand that making relevant and authentic content can retain potential target audiences and attract new customers too. In this analysis, you can revisit your audience parameters, notice numbers of target visitors by conducting a marketing survey based on unique and relevant information.

Content Map

Content Mapping is an important stage of a content marketing plan which is used to delivering the right content, to the right target audience, at the right time. Content mapping is divided into three essential stages based on the awareness, consideration and decision-making stages. You should use this tool to optimize the right content according to its lifecycle stage.

By combining the User (Buyer’s) persona with these life cycle stages, you can really create your own specific target segments of the audience and frame customized content to resonate with specific audiences.

Content Channel Plan

Figuring out the best content channels and social media platforms is very necessary to attract more customers to increase your digital reach. A content channel plan will help you to attract potential customers and show them your successful online presence. For this purpose, you can take of diferent public engagement tools such as Web Analytics, Google Analytics, Youtube Analytics for content optimization.

Through Youtube Analytics, you can optimize your content and analyze visitor’s engagement. While using this analytics tool, go to Analytics < Overview < Performance/Engagement to review your main social networks where your content is being shared.

Content Calendar

It is another essential part of your content strategy and planning. You cannot think of implementing and publishing any content successfully if you are not able to manage your content timing. This tool is used to create a content schedule for writers.

 

Google Calendar is an excellent example of this. Professional content writers and businesses use this system to manage their work while publishing content. You can use this tool to manage your content easily by putting due dates and for each content.

Create, Publish And Manage Content

The last and very mandatory part of a content marketing plan is the creation and management of content. Your marketing plan should be relevant and interconnected with each step explained above to frame organized and structured content. Editorial Content Calendar will help you to optimize and track your content while publishing it.

Expecting organized, creative and standardized content is good, but it will take a lot of time, patience and effort to grow an effective, successful content marketing plan. For additional assistance, you can coordinate with SEO Consultant for creating a content strategy for your business.