Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve had the same strategy for a while, your content planning needs to work harder than ever to get through to your target audience.
If you want to upgrade your company’s ability to get found, grow leads and close sales, then a comprehensive and growth focused content marketing plan is what you need.
As Neil Patel put it in The Complete Guide to Understand Customer Psychology:
“Online marketers are obsessed with traffic acquisition numbers and conversion rates. It’s easy to forget that your consumers are real people on the other side of the computer screen.”
Why Does Content Marketing Matter for Businesses?
Content marketing creates reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic. It is a strategic marketing approach focused on producing and distributing content for a target audience.
The aim is to share your content so that it grows organic website traffic, and with embedded links and calls-to-actions generates leads, educates prospects and grows brand awareness.
Define your goal.
What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? What are your goals? The trick to setting goals that you can follow is to put some actual numbers down and hold yourself accountable for those results.
Working on your daily, monthly, quarterly or yearly goals for visits, contacts or customers, you’ll want to make sure you’re setting SMART goals for your business.
“SMART” stands for:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Timebound
Conduct Your “Ideal Customer” Research.
To develop a successful plan, you’ll need to clearly define your target audience, also known as the “buyer persona.”
Developing a buyer persona is a great learning experience especially for those who are starting out or are new to marketing.
The Buyer’s Journey
To understand how to connect your content to your buyer’s needs you should map out how your customers buy (the Buyer’s Journey – see below).
Typically this is not a linear process and prospects may move around as they pass through the different stages of the buying cycle.
Run A Content Audit.
If you’re an established business, review your previous content efforts and results. Figure out what you should do differently with your existing content, what worked and generated the most interest. Then consider how this audit should influence your future content efforts, and how to mix and re-use existing content to target a particular audience.
Content SWOT (Strength, Weakness, Opportunity & Threats)
When you are carrying out an audit, take the time to also carry out a SWOT. This is an internal and external review of your content and what is happening in your market. For example, your competitors may be using social media to distribute content or buying certain ad words. It could also be that you are not producing any content or could focus on a particular sector because you have an expert on the team. It is a high level opportunity to take a view on your content planning needs.
What Kind Of Content Should We Create?
The content plan should address how, when and on what particular platforms you will publish content. It will go beyond the type of content you’ll create, it should also cover how much resource you’ll invest in your content production.
Content Distribution
Content distribution can be considered as a way to extend the reach of your content marketing, it’s all about making sure the content you create gets found, read and shared by the right audience increasing its overall impact. A “rule of thumb” is to spend 50% of your efforts on creating the content and the other 50% on making sure it gets distributed.
There are three main ways of distributing your content – via your own channels (owned), other people distributing and sharing it voluntarily (earned) and paying to distribute it (paid).
What Is The Searcher’s Intent When They Find Your Content?
Depends if research shows searcher is expecting an instant short answer vs. a comprehensive one and the device type and where they are searching from (i.e. on the move)
Google commissioned Millward Brown Digital to do research on searcher intent, “demographics don’t always align with user intent. In fact, marketers could be missing as much as 70 percent of potential mobile shoppers by not understanding what they’re searching for at any given time…”
Navigational Queries – Searches for the name of a specific company, or for a specific website homepage (low value).
Information Queries – These are the basic, persistent questions of “how” queries (mid value).
Transactional Queries – These can include the classic “buy” searches i.e. product specs, forms, etc. (high value).
Commercial Investigation Queries – These are very similar to transactional queries, and often signal the beginning stages of a transactional query i.e. I “need or want to know” something (mid – high value).
Testing And Optimisation – The 90 Day Plan.
While a content plan provides direction on the content marketing efforts, the key to effective content is to optimise and repurpose based on performance measures.
Over the first 90 days of any campaign closely monitor the reaction of your audience, and the impact of traffic on your website, calls-to-actions, gated content downloads, etc. It is in these first few months that you are going to be able to see if your content is meeting your objectives.
- By creating content that is high quality, compelling, and relevant, you can engage your site’s visitors in a meaningful way and build trust.
- When content resonates with someone, it feels personal and authentic – hopefully to be shared.
- Adding proper structure to your content is essential to optimising performance.
