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How To Build A Content Marketing Plan
A content marketing plan has proven to be a powerful tool in skyrocketing your business to success. When done correctly, you will be able to see a steady increase in traffic, leads, and conversions.
Unfortunately, the majority of businesses actually don’t have a documented content strategy. That means most businesses are just shooting blanks and hoping for results. Either way, this lack of planning shows in brands whose content isn’t cohesive, and you don’t want to be one of them.
Great content can only go as far as the strategy allows it too so regardless of whether you’re starting out or already have some content at hand, it never hurts to revisit your content marketing plan. In fact, you may have to revisit it several times and make adjustments. So let’s get started!
So you’ve found yourself with a product or service that you believe will do well. You set up an account on one of the many social media platforms and then proceeded to take a few photos or come up with a write-up.
With your product/service at hand, you have created a little digital advertisement detailing out your offer then proceeded to post it up on your preferred social media platform. You click ‘Post’ and now patiently wait for any inquiries to come in, and call it a day. Sounds easy right? Well, that could work, it’ll get you noticed and maybe a few people will be interested. So what’s next, post more content perhaps, but what are you posting?
Benjamin Franklin’s quote sum’s it up best:
“If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail”
This applies to many choices we make, including your social media content. The content could be there, but apart from planning the content, it also needs a strategy and together form the overall content marketing plan. Hence, content marketing needs both a plan and a strategy.
Is Your Content Relevant To Your Target Market?
Content marketing is the combination of the content plan and the strategy in one and although it takes a little more time to produce compared to ad-hoc content, a carefully planned one is more likely to succeed for obvious reasons. Here are three aspects that we believe are the most important So let’s delve into the details.
When developing a content marketing plan, three important factors to consider include:
1) Target Market
2) Branding
3) Strategy
Target Market
Before you can develop a content strategy or even before you have a product or service to offer, you will need to define your target market so that you’ll know who you’re creating content for.
Get to know the people in your audience, what they’re looking for, their interests, how to reach them, and how they will benefit from your services or products.
There are also tools like Google Analytics to help determine the demographics, behavior, and interests of your audience. This will help you create content that’s relevant to them and meets their needs.
Branding
Having a clear understanding of your brand and brand values are essential to your marketing campaign. It will give you greater conviction in promoting your products or services and enable you to distinguish yourself from your competition.
If you think about the big brands out there, what do they represent? Usually, a brand is a promise to the consumer of what they can expect from it. You’ve probably heard of people say ABC and the like are quality brands despite not having tried that specific product themselves. This may indicate that they associate the brand based on their experiences with it.
Content Marketing Strategy and Channels
You should have a strategy for your content and part of this will be choosing the right channel in order to determine the best ways and times to deliver your content. As a business owner, you can choose however many delivery channels at your disposal, as long as you can manage them.
Key channels to disseminate content include:
- Social media such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc
- Blogs
- Web pages
Your choice of platform and timing will depend a great deal on what’s the most effective way in reaching your target audience and this goes back to the information that you have gathered from the first step: Target Market.
This also informs the exact type of content you’ll produce, in terms of the look and feel and the way you choose to have your copywriting. So pick out a platform that is best suited to your product. For example with Facebook, you can create events and get an idea of its attendance.
On the other hand, if you’re in the fashion industry then perhaps Instagram would be better since it is more about showcasing people and their visuals. By contrast, an accountancy firm should be far more concerned with offering expert insights to readers so the tone of writing and the appearance should match the formality, and a web page would suit it better in most cases.
Choosing The Right Platform
Platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter allow users to engage with the businesses and each other. Users can ask questions, post comments, add content, or debate other people’s content on their site. Instagram on the other hand is primarily visual, with mostly two-way communication as a means to interact with your followers.
The platform will also determine how you interact with your audience and one of the most important parts of social media is to be engaging so if you want your website or social media to be a hit, you’ll need to do the same.
Spend some time to know your audience, the more you understand them the better your chances of success. This type of engagement can be done through various means, such as asking and answering questions, posting competitions, and such to pull them in.
The above is just a brief overview of content marketing which covers the basics and does not touch on more advanced tools such as SEO Analysis, consumer mapping etc. Now that you have a better idea of what steps you need to do to get on track, it’s time to get creative and produce content which is guided by your plan and strategy.
Nevertheless, we also understand that not everyone has the time and resources to tackle this on their own and that’s why we are here to help you achieve your goals. Feel free to contact us about how we can help you unravel insights into your business and turn them into a compelling content marketing plan that works.