21 May
Create a successful Content Marketing Strategy Plan
63% of businesses don’t have a content marketing strategy plan.
Content Marketing success depends on a strategy. Without a strategy, you might fail to reach your goals because then, it’s just luck.
64% of marketers say that their greatest educational need is learning to build a scalable content marketing strategy.
We’ve been using content marketing to grow our traffic and boost conversions. We want to share what we have learned along the way.
This guide will walk you through 11 simple steps for developing a content marketing plan for your company. It will help you grow your business without wasting time and money.
Here are the best steps for getting started with your content marketing plan
To formulate a content strategy, you need to :
- Set up Goals
- Establish KPIs
- Identify Audience
- Assess where you’re at
- Determine the communication channels
- Finalize the content types
- Allocate Resources
- Create a content calendar
- Write Content
- Distribute Content
- Measure Results
1. Set up Goal and Mission Statement
A good way to start a content marketing strategy plan is by defining the mission statement of your content creation. This should be a brief statement that will help you stay focused on what you need to do for your content marketing strategy.
A content marketing mission statement outlines:
- Target market
- Type of content you’ll use to reach them
- Benefits they get from your content
The mission statement covers what your audience will get from your content, but you also need to focus on how you’ll benefit from it, and that becomes your business goals.
Here are some goals for content marketing success
- Improve revenue
- Make more sales
- Get high-quality leads
- Get traffic to your site
- Improve the perception of your business – so you gain authority
- SEO success
- Reduced marketing costs
- Social media engagement
Once you identify your goals, it’s time to move to the next step.
2. Establish KPIs
The best way to achieve goals is to make them measurable. By setting key performance indicators(KPI), you will be able to better understand the success of your content marketing strategy.
KPIs will help you to achieve your goals by providing milestones that show exactly what you plan for revenue, for traffic, for SEO.
Your KPIs could be as follows:
- Revenue targets – monthly, quarterly or yearly
- Target signups / leads
- Number of mentions, comments and shares for posts
- New Email Subscribers
- Content Click Through Rates(CTR)
3. Identify your Audience
You need to be clear about who your audience is and create the necessary content that appeals to them.
Three action steps are:
1. Collect different demographic data points
The first step is to collect demographic information on your website visitors, email subscribers, and social media followers.
Web analytics will provide you with data of your audience:
- Age
- Gender
- Income
- Education
This can in turn provide ideas on how to optimize your marketing efforts.
To find out the interests of your web visitors, you need to go to Google Analytics tool – Audience » Interests » Overview. Here, you’ll be able to see the market segment they are in and what their key interests are.
MonsterInsights helps you view all this data and reports in your wordpress dashboard.
You can use Twitter analytics to gather demographic data on your followers
Facebook also offers demographic data on your Facebook fans through Page Insights. You can get insights that break down the gender, age range, location, and language of your followers.
2. Customer feedback
Collect feedback from your current customers, to understand more about your target audience.
You can also create surveys with WPForms, to collect feedback for free.
Collecting feedback will help you find aspects of your product that need improvement.
It also makes your customers feel involved and important.
3. Create buyer personas for your brand
Without Identifying your target audience, you cannot create buyer personas.
Buyer persona is basically a fictional representation of your ideal customer.
The best customer avatars include information about the pain points your customers might have, what challenges they are facing, and where they find sources of information.
Once you know this, you’ll have better understanding of content that speaks to your idea persona and sales and marketing strategies tailored to just those people
Below is a simple snapshot to help you create effective buyer personas.
4. Assess where you're at
Many businesses already have existing content, such as blog posts and social media posts, and videos.
So, are you sure the content you created is helping you meet your goals?
It’s important to perform a content audit. That means,
- Logging all your pieces of content.
- Collect and Analyze data
- Make an action plan
- Adjust you marketing strategy
How content marketers can log their content?
Screaming Frog, a URL crawler, checks websites for all content and provides valuable information about architecture and all the data on the site.
- List down all the URLs and their report
- Analyze page title and descriptions
- Find duplicate pages
With the free version, you can crawl 500 URLs. You can also use this tool for competitive research.
You can also create a project and log your content on SEMRush in the Content Audit tool.
Choose the section of your site you want to audit, such as your blog and select URLs. Press the Start Content Audit button to begin.
Analysis of your content would include:
- The Page titles and descriptions,
- Length of content
- Backlinks
- Social Shares
You can export all this data in a spreadsheet that contains all the URLs.
Measure your Content Marketing Campaigns
The next step is to assess the usefulness of the content. Look for metrics like:
To figure out the amount and quality of backlinks on a page, use the SEMrush tool. You can also find more info by using other SEMrush tools such as the site audit and position tracking tools.
This helps us in identifying which pieces of content are the most effective and need no improvements, which ones need some improvements to make them better, and which ones should be replaced or removed.
Identify Content Gaps
Find out the gaps and work towards filling these like:
- Determine if you are targeting a certain niche, and are not using keywords related to that niche.
- Find out the questions your target audience is asking and you’re not answering it.
- Determine the content that’s starting to rank well but could improve.
Ahrefs can help you with your content gap analysis.
Go to organic search » content gap, and add the domains for your main competitors under show keywords that the following rank for.
Add your own domain under but the following target does not rank. Press show keywords.
It’ll show you a list of keywords that you can use in your own content.
5. Determine the best communication channels
When you’re brainstorming a top-level idea, you identify which parts of your business are already making money and work on expanding those projects or products.
The same way you find out where your strongest online presence is. It’s best to focus on what is already working for you.
To find out the social media platform where you have the most engagement, go to the Acquisition tab in Google Analytics and click on Social and Overview.
Buzzsumo is also helpful. You can see charts showing shares by network, shares by content type, and shares by content length. Top content in the past year.
This can help you to find out which network to target.
6. Finalize the content types
Think about what type of content you need to create. There are certain types of content that are used in every content marketing strategy plan.
In order to do content marketing, most successful strategies rely on having a central core of new and unique content that is published on your own site (or home base), and then repurposed and shared on other sites (outposts).
Thus, blogs are an essential part of your content marketing mix. They still deliver strong results. It is recommended to create actionable, valuable and shareable posts. The posts may also include a variety of different article types such as educational or creative posts.
If you’re looking to outsource your content marketing strategy management, feel free to check out our Social Media Management Plans. With our plans, you get assigned your own marketing team at a fraction of a cost which inturn works on your brand’s entire social media content calendar along with query management.
How to map content to social media and find the best content marketing strategy plan ?
With Buzzsumo, you can map the types of blog posts you want to create for potential social shares and engagement.
Using Buzzsumo you can also find out what other successful content is out there.
First, type in a topic related to your blog post. Next, you can see how often that subject is shared across the web. One example is long-form content on content marketing is very popular.
It also shows you data on most shared domains on this subject.
What are some other types of content?
Studies show that video marketing is an essential part of any marketing campaign. It drives site viewership due to the engagement it creates and improves lead generation. Video marketing also reduces abandonment on websites.
Tools such as Piktochart and Canva can provide infographics to help with content.
Consider adding lead magnets to your content strategy for improved lead generation. Lead magnets can include webinars, ebooks, checklists, or worksheets.
As podcasts have become more popular, they should be considered in the creation of content.
7. Allocate Resources
Now that you’ve planned your content types, make sure you’re delivering the marketing strategy right.
These questions will help you deliver your strategy.
- What human, physical, or digital tools and resources do you need to create the content?
- What will your publishing workflow look like including content scheduling?
- Who is in charge of content production?
What are your thoughts on the allocation of roles? Your main point of contact with clients should be in charge, while the actual work of bringing them new designs should be assigned to designers.
Your content marketing manager will ultimately approve the final content and strategy. Your content marketing team will create content according to their expertise and deliver the execution on a daily basis.
Buzzsumo can be used to find freelancers with a certain degree of skill, who have written top content. You can contact them to see if they’re interested in working with your content team.
Additionally, great freelance content producers can also be found by searching through networks like Contently, NDash, or ClearVoice.
Content Workflow
To create a blog post, you may need to do some research, write the post itself, then polish and edit it. Few of the steps that have to be followed are:
- Form an Outline
- Create the Content
- Review for quality
- Publish
- Distribute it
- Audit and Review
Your outline must be approved before you can start writing.
8. Create a content calendar
As part of your content marketing plan you need to know when you want to publish your content on each platform that you want to use.
Lack of strict scheduling is a common content marketing mistake. One of the most essential strategies is to keep all your content scheduled.
You can input due dates in your Google Calendar, which creates deadlines that are easy to remember.
This is one of the basic approaches you can follow. But if you are publishing often and have a content team to manage it is likely to resort to more advanced tools and features.
There are many options for managing this, and these include productivity apps such as Asana, or a custom editorial calendar tool like CoSchedule. These tools allow you to schedule different parts of the content creation plan.
Discover questions asked by your customers
One way to find out what your audience wants is to use Buzzsumo’s Question Analyzer or Answer the Public.
Type a topic into the Answer the Public search box, and you’ll get a list of questions people have actually searched for on Google.
Planning ahead for content is one strategy you can use to make sure that you always have well-written post ideas.
Select a question from the suggested ones and decide on the content type like a blog or Social media post, and then add it to your content calendar.
Repeat these steps until you’ve planned out your content for the next few months.
9. Create Content
As you’ve seen, there’s a lot of prep work that goes into a content marketing strategy before you create a piece of content. But now it’s time to do just that. We’re going to use a blog post as our example, but these tips will work for any type of content creation.
You should have some idea of what type of blog post you would like to create. For example, list posts and how-tos are popular with our readers.
Now it’s time to start working on your content.
Researching Your Content
Before you begin writing, you need to find out
- What are your competitors writing about?
- How does your content add value to your readers
Find out the top few results on Google and then see how you can improve on it with your content.
The technique is called the Skyscraper technique and involves improving your content specifically to climb over your competition on search results.
You can also use original research if you have the right kind of data to back your theories.
To optimize your post for SEO, use keywords. Searching for and picking a strong keyword can greatly improve your ranking on Google search.
Creating content to attract customers
This step entails writing and creating content. At this point, you’ll have to think about how your brand’s personality will be reflected in the content you write.
You may have a mix of professional work or very casual, which you’ll need to manage by balancing expertise with your audience.
Keep the brand voice consistent with your content, SEO and content optimization matters.
10. Distribute Content
To get the results you want in your content strategy, distribution and marketing are key aspects. You can expect to:
To promote your content, set a schedule for social media posts, create a drip campaign and send emails to subscribers. Notify influencers mentioned in your content.
You can use OptinMonster to provide users with relevant information to grab their attention just before they leave your site.
You can also use OptinMonster to deliver lead magnets and direct your visitors to the most important parts of your site, engaging them with new content every time they land on your website.
11. Measure Results
To assess the success of your content marketing strategy, you need to return to the KPIs that you set at the start of the plan and check whether you’re hitting them.
With Google Analytics, Buzzsumo and other social analytics tools, you can measure how well your content is performing.
You can also look at conversion analytics of OptinMonster to assess marketing campaign success. Other tools include Google Alerts and Mention. Both these tools help you see if your content is being shared or mentioned anywhere.
Sites like SEMRush can help you assess the quality of your content by looking at the search engine ranking. You will be able to monitor email signups through your analytics software, which should come with your email marketing software.
That’s it! Now you know how to create a successful content marketing strategy from beginning to end.
Ready to build your Content Marketing Strategy with best optimization techniques!
Our team of content writers, SEOs, Graphic designers would be happy to help you.
Do check out our Social Media Management Plans, you get assigned your own marketing team at a fraction of a cost.
