One of the most important aspects of content marketing is planning. A content marketing plan answers the following questions:
- Who makes the content?
- What kind of content?
- When does the content get published?
- Where does the content get disseminated?
- Why are you marketing your content?
- How are marketing results promoted and analyzed?
10 steps to create an effective content marketing plan
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Set goals & KPIs
The first step is setting goals. What do you want content marketing to achieve? To create credibility and trust, 75% of B2B marketers stated content marketing helped them reach this goal.
Having a KPI for every target will help you track your progress. Track goals like reach, engagement, conversion, and consumer loyalty with social media KPIs.
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Identify target markets
Choose your target demographics next. This often matches your buyer or social media identities. Your content themes and categories will be matched to your target audiences, if you have multiples.
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Review your existing content
How can you know where to go if you don’t know where to begin? Uncovering your content’s value via an audit is simple. Record all existing stuff first. Set a time limit of 3 months or a year if there is an abundance. This data set must be comprehensive.
An audit of your blog entries may reveal previously undiscovered content. It may also help find duplicate content on your site. Social media posts can be evaluated using Sprout Social’s social media audit template. Aspiring content marketers can include a competitor or two to help benchmark their efforts.
Observe the following during the audit:
- Subjects: What do you post?
- Content Types: What content do you post?
- Channels: How do you distribute content?
- Results: How are your posts performing? Check
Then you can observe whether content and channels are performing better than others based on the documentation.
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Choose the best content channels
Your content marketing strategy should typically begin with distribution channels where you already have a strong presence. A content audit should have uncovered some trends on the best outlets for your content.
Look at your website’s analytics to observe the referral sources. How are people finding your blog post? Do they search for you? Knowing your audience’s origin helps you target them.
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Choose content types
The content formats to consider while building your content marketing strategy are as follows: Others are more expensive to produce and perform better on particular channels. User-generated content (UGC) is content created by users.
This depends on the marketing funnel stage and target demographic.
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Establish budget, tools, and resources
It’s important to establish your budget before you start creating content marketing plans. Budget, tools, and potential staff or freelancers are all included here.
Remotely creating material is difficult but not impossible. Calculate your existing and future resource requirements (which might require approval).
Most content marketing strategies require:
- Content creator: who creates the content?
- Content management system: where to plan, store, and distribute your content
- Data collection: Content analyzers, reports, and other digital marketing tools
- Content manager: who manages content topics and production?
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Make a content calendar
You need a content calendar. You need a content plan. That is, it should be able to track your posts and subjects. To track the progress of each piece of material, the distribution channel, who is working on it, and the final results of marketing it.
You may find several content calendar templates online. Your social media calendar or a spreadsheet might also help you track your content.
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Create content
Now it’s time to create the material you’ll share. Your content kinds and distribution methods should be clear by now. Creating and curating content follows.
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Publish and promote content
Post-production involves publishing and promoting content across numerous channels, based on the schedule you’ve defined. A single tool for managing your publishing calendar is ideal if you’re promoting across numerous platforms.
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Track outcomes
Analyze is the final step in your content marketing plan. Your goals will remain unachieved unless you collect data. You’ll need either Google Analytics or a native product for channels like newsletters or your website.
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