How to Create a Content Marketing Plan for Your Business

In recent years, online content was limited to website content and blog posts that share information about a company or brand. Offline content marketing includes brochures, flyers, pamphlets, etc.  In short, content marketing was used only to share information about a business.

Today, you can use different types of content that help in marketing a business. Content is used in various marketing channels to enhance the reach of a business. It is creating an impact on the audience that allows businesses to expand their horizons. Hence, creating content strategies and long-term content plans is necessary to grow the presence of a business.

Do you need a content marketing plan?

Yes, of course. Content marketing is not successful without having a plan or strategy. Maybe, you have created the most interesting content for your brand, but it is not useful until it reaches the right audience. Whatever content you have created, it has to reach the targeted audience to expand your business.

According to Semrush, 80% of the marketers who follows a content marketing plan experience success in creating a brand identity.

What is a content marketing plan?

A content marketing plan is a strategy that helps your brand to optimize and distribute content among the target audience. It also helps to demonstrate the expertise you offer to the industry. The success of content marketing depends on the strategy you have developed. You should employ a creative content plan to receive traffic to your business website.

Traffic brings you leads and conversions. A content marketing plan will bring in new customers, retain existing customers, ensure using regular and consistent content, and encourage to have backup content. 

Here are the tips to create a content marketing plan that help you to expand your business.

1. Know the Target Audience

For creating a successful content plan, you need to define the target audience. The target audience should be the people who have the purchasing power for your product. Researching and understanding the target audience is critical if you are stepping into your industry as a new business.

You have to understand the demographics, interests, education level, age, activity on social media, time of activity, and gender of your audience. You should research and identify the diversity of the audience you have. Checking out the social media comments and likes, forum posts, and other discussion forums help you to know more about your targeted customers.

Design the content based on their interests and educate them on what your brand is all about. The content should answer all their questions related to your industry. Content developed relevant to your audience helps your brand to build a connection with them. 

For example, a simple survey conducted by Airbnb on Twitter helped them in getting a significant amount of engagement from their followers.

2. Define the Content Marketing Goal

What is your purpose in developing a content plan? 

Why do you need a goal? Because you should not develop content for the sake of doing it. You should have a definite goal to achieve through content marketing.

When you take baby steps to create a new content plan, you should know the goal of the marketing efforts. If you want your efforts to pay off, you should be sure about the goal that has to be achieved.

You may have to achieve multiple goals. However, you have to define each of them and prioritize them to measure the success of the campaign.

• Are you looking to build brand awareness?
• Do you have to retain existing customers?
• Is it all about purchasing the product? Do you want to convert visitors into buyers?

You should have answers to these questions to identify your goal. Once you have realized your goal and outcome, it is easy to achieve.

Measurable and achievable goals encourage you to work hard and conquer them.

For example, if you want to increase the number of visits to your blog posts or website content, you should develop content that creates interest in the visitors. This enables you to drive visitors to the website or blog post such as social media posts.

3. Identify the Content Format

After researching the audience’s interests, you may have an idea of the kind of content liked by the audience. What are they likely to read? What kind of content make them interact?

It is a trial-and-error experiment. You have to use different content formats to analyze which content works and which is not.

Some of the content types include blog posts, articles, infographics, podcasts, eBooks, videos, emailers, newsletters, social media posts, white papers, etc. All these content have their role to play in the content strategy. You have to use them wisely.

However, the content should explain a brand story to make it interesting. Create a brand identity in your content so that the reader can feel the authenticity and your involvement in the business. Use a creative and exciting title for the content that pulls the attention of the prospects.

Decide the tone and style of your content that is appealing to the readers. Publish the content on the right marketing channel so that it reaches the right audience.

4. Write Discoverable Content

Writing content that reaches the right audience is critical for the success of content marketing.

How do you make it discoverable?

Find relevant keywords of your industry and create content by incorporating those keywords. After understanding the target audience, you can easily find which keywords are used to search for a product or service in your industry. Create a list of such keywords and variations of those keywords.

If you are an expert in your industry, then you can find relevant keywords easily. Optimizing keywords into the content helps you to drive more and more traffic to your website or blog. SEO is one of the proven strategies to get high rankings on search engines.

When a potential customer enters the keywords in search engines, your content will be displayed on search engine pages. When your content is displayed on search engine pages, it is more likely discovered by potential customers.

Share the content link on social media networks to get more visibility. You can also share the content with other websites or influencers so that they will share it with their audience. This helps you to expand the customer base for your business.

5. Update Regularly and Measure the Results

Update content regularly to retain existing readers and lure new visitors. Periodical update of blog posts or articles helps your brand to retain visitors.

Conduct an audit of your published content to know whether they are successful or not. Reviewing the content helps you to improvise the content strategy to bring more traffic. Enhance the quality of the content if you have published low-quality content.

Analyzing the results of published content should be a part of your content plan. Most businesses are not tracking the outcome of the content. Tracking the results is a must to make your content marketing effective and result-oriented. Use Google Analytics and analytical tools of social media to evaluate the success of your content.

The insights displayed by these analytical tools will support you to ensure success and enjoy ROI.

Final Thoughts

Content marketing is becoming more influential and successful to create brand identity than other traditional marketing tools. It is cheaper than other forms of marketing, yet it brings value to the business.

Now, you know the things to be considered to create a content marketing plan. It is your job to plan and implement it in the right manner. With a proper editorial calendar for your content plan, you can create a brand identity among prospective customers.

Content marketing plan varies from one brand to another based on their industries.  Once you implement a content plan, you will gradually understand whether the plan will work or not for your business. Hence, there are no set rules to create a content plan. However, your business should need a definite marketing goal and a content plan that guides you to success.