Introducing content marketing for your business may be just a good intention, but it also may be a winning strategy if you follow a certain plan.
A content marketing plan incorporates all aspects important for a company growth, starting from lead generation, and up to selling goods and provoking buyer penetration. All you need to do is create a plan that will incorporate all the activities and will indicate when and why you should post the article.
Content marketing plan is not about your writing style and topics that you choose to cover, it’s more about the strategy that you choose to deliver your ideas to readers. A well-thought plan helps to attract new readers and build strong relations with your subscribers. In this article, we will tell you on what aspects you should pay attention while creating your content marketing plan and how to reach the desired success.
Three questions to answer before you start to work on your plan
The first question to be answered is what goals you want to achieve with your content. For example, if you write for a product company blog, your main goal may be to persuade visitors to buy products. Therefore, you will write the articles that will tell about benefits of your product and the problems a person may solve by using it.
The next question is how you want to achieve these goals. Perhaps, you want to write how-to articles or engage visitors by posting interviews with opinion leaders. Maybe, your main tool will be infographics and photos of your products.
The last but not the least is to define the resources that you need to generate content. If you want to post infographics, you need to find a designer who will make it for you. If you want to post interviews, you need to make sure that you’ll be able to contact necessary people.
Cover topics that are interesting to your audience
In case you just make your first steps in content marketing, it may be rather difficult for you to define the topics of your articles and posts. At this stage, you need to make an analysis of your audience to understand what’s more interesting to them, not to you or your boss.
When you write to satisfy content needs of people who visit your website, you notice the growth in leads. People who come to your site always have certain goals and expectations, and your task is to predict them.
Of course, it’s not easy to find out what your visitors will like and share, but you can always make experiments with different types of content. Try as much of them as possible, as in this way, it will be quite easy to define what topics are more interesting to your audience than others.
Small tip: every article should help with solving some problem. It may be narrative writing promts if you write for students, the review of the newest iPhones if you sell them, or telling people how to write a content marketing plan that will help their business to grow faster!
Create a schedule and follow it
Many will agree that it’s easier to follow the plan when you have written it down. We would recommend to go further and create a schedule for your publications. At the early stage, it’s enough to note the days of the week when you are planning to post the article and indicate the type of content. Later on, you will need to indicate time as well. The matter is that your audience may be more active in the morning or late in the evening, and that will result in the stats of your article.
Always analyze the results of each article or post
Analysis of your content plan will help you understand:
- The best topics that your audience prefers
- The most effective types of content (interviews, how-to articles, infographics, etc.)
- Time when your audience is the most active
These three things will help you improve your strategy and turn your content marketing into a new level. It will take you a couple of months to make all the experiments, and several more weeks to define whether the new strategy really works.
You should always remember that there is no content marketing plan that will be effective for ages. Your audience will change, and the requirements to content will change as well. You need to track these changes and introduce them to your strategy.
Content marketing plan is one of those easy and simple things that we frequently ignore but that bring huge benefits to the business. It won’t take you a lot of time to create a plan for the next month – just follow our tips! If you have some ideas to share, please feel free to leave comments. We’ll gladly discuss content marketing with you!