10 Content Marketing Plan Tips For Success
Having a clear content marketing plan is a form of marketing that is focused on creating valuable, important, and consistent content and distributing it to attract and retain a clear target audience to drive profitable customer action.
For one to succeed in digital marketing, the content used for marketing your brand must be well understood by the audience and they must be well convicted on why to settle on your brand and not choose another brand.
The content must be spontaneous to help the audience flow with your information and want to read and learn more about your brand. Following are tips on how to develop a highly effective content marketing plan;
Content Marketing Plan Strategies
1.Set a mission and goals to attain.
Your content marketing plan must have a mission that you desire to deliver to the target audience. The mission helps you to focus on what you need to do in creating your content and stay on the right track.
Your content marketing mission statement must have a target audience, the content you will use to draw them, and what benefit they receive.
Once the audience receives the message, you then must have a goal that you want to attain after this whole process. Your goal is to succeed on SEO that helps to increase your traffic, receive more sales, reduce promotional cost as the content becomes more effective, brand names speak for your company, and improved revenue.
2. KPIs Establishment
You can achieve the above-mentioned goals by setting key performance indicators for your content marketing plan. This enables you to know when you have achieved a certain goal by reaching specific milestones you can check off.
For instance achievement on SEO, traffic, sales, and others. You can attach a number on each goal and what you expect to achieve and check off once you have reached that goal. For instance:
- Increase on sign up for landing pages
- Site traffic increases.
- Reach a certain revenue target.
3. Know and retain your audience
For any content marketing plan to be successful, you need to know who your audience is to ensure they get the right content. You can achieve this by collecting demographic data of all your visitors, social media followers, and email subscribers.
The web, social media, and email subscribers analytics will help you in this data collection in regards to age, gender, income, and education.
From the above data, you can easily collect feedback from your customers. You also get to understand the priority of your audience, know where to reach them, and flesh out on your buyer persona.
From the buyer persona, you can get to know the buyer’s pain points and challenges. All these pieces of information will help in improving the kind of content your audience will react or respond to, how it will benefit them, and why they care about that content.
4. Assess your content marketing plan
By now, your content is already on the internet and moving. It could be on social media, blogs, podcasts, videos, and others. You need to audit and see if your content is helping you attain your goals.
For you to achieve this assessment, you have to log in where your content is like blog posts, guest posts, and assess their success and if they are useful. Identify if there are any gaps. You can compare your content with your competitors and arrange how you can introduce new content in the market.
There are online tools like Screaming Frog for content auditing, that will give you a complete analysis of your content like content length, backlinks, social shares, content title, and descriptions.
You will be able to view the metrics like the number of inbound links to the content, the SEO ranking for keywords in your content, and how wide your content is useful.
You will also be able to identify gaps like keywords not targeted with your content, questions from your target audience that you’ve not answered, and ranking content that needs improvement.
This kind of audit helps in improving your content marketing plan.
5. Research Your Targeted Audience
Another useful way of developing a content marketing plan is to research what problems people are having pertaining to your particular topic.
The question you need to ask yourself is “How do I figure out what problems people have?
One really useful way of doing this is by typing a keyword within your vertical (niche) into a tool such as Ubersuggest (which I highly recommend). Go onto the keyword ideas report, click on “questions” and it will show you all the question that people are typing.
This will give you a good understanding as to what questions people are wanting the answer to and by looking at this keyword base, it’ll help you figure out what problems people are facing.
Another really useful tool I’ve used over the years is a website called AnswerThePublic.
This is yet another site that will give you excellent questions that are Google by people looking for the answers to those questions. Write content around some of those questions found on this site to further give you content ideas for your marketing plan.
6. Keyword Research
One of the most critical aspects of creating a content marketing plan is finding and utilizing the main keywords to successfully rank your content on Google’s SERPs.
Keyword research ensures that the content you create is noticed by Google to allow your content to be seen in the search results.
You want to ensure that the keywords your using have a good amount of monthly search volume before creating your content. Typically, I like to look for keywords that have at least 100 searches a month to make it worth my while.
Anything less would be a waste of time.
Again, tools like UberSuggest are really great for keyword research. With this tool you will find a laundry list of keywords that you could be going after.
This will also show you what’s popular in your niche and what’s not.
7. Channels for your content
It’s good to focus on the channel in which your content marketing plan is working well and improve from there. If it’s working well on social media and YouTube, improve on that. Google Analytics works well in identifying this.
8. Type of content
The best content marketing plan is where you create content and publish it from your site and then share it on other websites. Blog posts work well with this and include a lot of different types of articles.
9. Content production and maintenance
Identify the person in charge of producing and maintaining your content and the tools needed for creating the content. How the content will be published is very important and the workflow as well as scheduling how often the content is published.
An effective way of a content marketing plan involves having a chief marketing officer who is in charge of content creation, approval, and publishing. This, of course, needs teamwork depending on the size of the company.
The officer in charge will ensure there is enough workforce for content creation, video creation, podcasting, and graphic design. You can choose to hire freelancers or have in-house experts in this field.
10. Create a calendar
Ensure you have a calendar showing when to publish content and on which platform.
After all the above, you are now ready to create your content and get ready to distribute and market it to the target audience. You can use email marketing, social media, OptinMoster, among others.
The last step is now to measure your results and you can refer to KPIs to see if you are reaching your target.
Bonus Tip
When it comes to your developing your content marketing plan, not many bloggers or content marketing “gurus” are teaching about the up and coming uses of voice search.
It’s estimated that roughly fifty percent of searches are voice searches, according to ComScore.
So, it’s crucial to use structure data markup (Schema, I will write an article on this soon) that will help your content be searchable when users search on devices such as Google Home, Alexa, and Siri.
By doing this, it will help your content get rich snippets within the Google search pages to be picked up for voice search queries.
This will also help your content more traffic and be seen as more of an authority by Google.
In conclusion, a well-created content marketing plan can improve your opportunity of achieving high sales in a short period. You will get to know how you are performing, understand your target audience, use a content calendar, promote your content, and keep a record of your performance.
Following keenly on the above steps and having a consistent calendar date will help you get more leads and prospects through a well created and developed content marketing plan. With all these in place, you can start to expect an increase in sales and a good turnover for your online business.
