How to create a content strategy plan

A content marketing strategy is a blueprint for your online marketing. In today’s digital world, far too many businesses lack a focused and intentional online marketing strategy.

There are many networks, services, and channels that your company can leverage to increase sales, but if you don’t have a plan to help guide you, then you are likely missing a lot of sales and wasting a lot of time and money.

A content marketing strategy functions as your guiding light in regards to the preparation, production, advertising, and measurement of content. Taking the time to make a good plan might seem like more work up-front, but it is going to lessen your workload over time and make your articles more effective.

5 Basic Steps To Create A Great Content Marketing Strategy

Let’s take a look at some simple steps your business can take today to build a robust content strategy. Don’t get overwhelmed by the amount of work it takes, because your content strategy will change over time.

Instead, focus on these most important points to help you develop a strategy to drive qualified traffic to your site and boost conversions!

1. Identify Your Business Objectives

The ultimate objective of a content strategy is to help you align your online marketing efforts towards raising conversions. While earnings are the main focus, your company has to build various facets of your company to attain this objective.

What do you plan to make with articles advertising? Are you aiming to generate more leads? Do you want to boost brand loyalty and increase retention prices? Maybe you would like to build greater awareness about your product or set your new name.

Before you begin drawing on a content marketing program, you want to ascertain the motive was driving your demand for content.

• Can you want to create interest in your services or products?
• Provide support for Clients?
• Build a community around your cause?
• Establish yourself as an authority in your area?

Producing, optimizing, and publishing content is not easy or inexpensive. This means that you should focus your resources on efforts that will help your business achieve your goals. You can create several content marketing strategies based on various goals, but you need to start with what your company wants to make.

2. Know Your Audience

Once you understand your business goals, you should turn your attention to understanding the audience you want to reach. Your customers are the most important part of your business because they exchange their money for your products and services.

You should look at your ideal customer before building a content marketing strategy because different customers will be reached through various networks and with different messaging. You need to make sure that the content you produce meets the demands of specific customers or else you will be wasting your marketing resources.

Before you merely churn out articles from the countless, you have to ascertain whether or not your audience will value the content you plan to produce. Ask yourself questions like:

• Which channels do my prospective readers utilize the most?
• What do they typically speak about?
• What do they need from me?
• What sort of content will they find most attractive?

Understanding your target audience is of particular importance for those who are new to the content marketing area. The idea is to produce relevant content that your target audience would want to share. Once you decide on your target audience, you should begin building content around their needs and distribute in areas that are relevant to them.

3. Choose Your Content Type

Now that you know what your audience needs and values, you can move on to picking the kind of content you should create. The content you create will vary based on industry, market, and your audience, but in general creating content can be pretty expensive. This is why it is vital to prioritize the content you plan to create around your business goals and target audience.

As you develop content, be sure to look at the capabilities of your company. Writing engaging blog posts for your business is an excellent way to build a relationship and perform soft sales, but they can take a long time to produce and optimize.

The same goes for video, but you can choose the best media for your audience. Just make sure that you can continue to produce content on a regular basis, or else your customers will not interact with your content. You should optimize all of your content to get found by search engines and help your customers find your great content that you spent time and resources to produce.

If you are having difficulty determining which material type to produce? Here are just a few of the various content types you could use are:

• Infographics
• Guides
• Webinars
• Interviews
• Custom illustrations
• How-to articles
• Industry news
• Surveys
• Q&A sessions
• Product updates
• Case studies

When deciding on your content marketing goals, you also need to ask a fundamental question: How can I measure this goal? Every goal has to be measurable. When it's a percent, a dollar amount or a traffic number, identify your desired goal and choose how you will track your progress. If you can not figure out a definite way to measure your goal, it is most likely time to rethink it entirely.

4. Create Realistic Production Goals

Once you've settled in your objectives, break down each one into the various steps you will need to take to achieve them. If you can’t keep up with a schedule, then consider reducing the frequency or reach of your content. Your customers demand ongoing support, and your business needs to be able to deliver great content on a regular basis if you want to achieve your goals.

Doing this will not only ensure that future content is aligned with your content marketing objectives, but it may also actually inspire your content creators. Knowing what a piece of content needs to reach for you on a bigger scale could spark an idea about what to create or how to make it.

You should set up a process for your marketing team to brainstorm, plan, produce, optimize, and publish great content. If you are not able to commit the time or money to have in-house content creators, then you can always hire a professional freelance copywriter to write your blog posts and other online content as needed. This is often an excellent way to reduce overhead for your business while also delivering the type of content your customers demand.

5. Produce A Content Calendar

A content calendar also enables you to plan resources to accomplish your online marketing goals. The content calendar might be the last step I include in this list, but in reality, it is the most important part of your marketing strategy. This is because it’s easy to do all the research, but skip the step of actually planning content.

Quality, relevance, and value are what makes online content stand out in the overcrowded environment. Your business needs to make great content (as stated above), but the truth is that you have a lot to think about during the day to run your business. A content calendar helps you develop a practical roadmap to publishing great content that drives revenue.

Blogging once a month isn't going to cut it, and a content promoting calendar provides foresight for you and your marketing staff to plan content around other events in your small business.

Once your company implements a content calendar, you will see it will offer visual direction on the requirements and abilities of your promotion strategy. While maintaining your marketing calendar takes some time, the calendar will serve as a model for your entire marketing strategy!

Developing A Content Strategy To Make You Money

Once your company begins to think about your content as a way to develop a relationship with your audience then you will have the ability to attract, retain, and convert more customers. A content strategy is a holistic process that demands input from various departments like customer services, sales, and marketing teams.

A successful content strategy is the result of awesome planning throughout your company, so consider your content strategy plan the result of everything else in your business working together.

Use the above steps to get started making a content strategy plan today for your business, and with some time and attention to your business development, you will be able to see improvements in all areas of your company. Just make sure that you commit at least six months to your content plan.

If you are not certain what to do, then be sure to reach out to a professional content marketing strategist to get you started and find the success that you want for your company!