Optimum guide to Content Marketing Plan:

 Content Marketing plan provides you the road map to successful content marketing.

Plan will help you to define your key elements of your content marketing. Having great content is not sufficient you also need to have great content marketing plan.

So, You need to develop a well defined, easy to understand content marketing plan. Lot of marketers are not producing content plan and then failing in generating results. Content marketing is more than creating content.
You need to plan various things before posting it.

Planning involves creating content, sharing on social media platforms, Setting budgets for content marketing, bench-marking competition against other competitors.

Content audit becomes very important here. You have to audit previous content, Find which is working more efficiently and then start creating content like that.

Identify the audience, define your audience and then start creating content marketing plan. Look at your buyer's persona. By looking into buyer's persona you can find current needs of your customer and then design content according to it.

In today's era content marketing becomes necessary to generate traffic and leads. Content marketing helps you to educate people, attract people and convert them into loyal customers. But, for content marketing you need to design an efficient content marketing plan and execute it. Most of the people or marketers have great content but because of inefficient content marketing plan they fail to rise in the world of content marketing. we can't say that every plan is designed in a same way but, few elements are common in every content marketing plan. Now lets start with designing planning process: step-1 : Set your Goals and objectives. Step-2: Prepare your budget. Step-3: Do thorough research in your niche. Step-4: Know your audience and understand their needs. Step-5: Evaluate and assess your old or existing content. Step-6: Benchmark the competition. Step-7: Create a bunch of your ideas, messages and themes. Step-8: Identify your channels and tactics Step-9: Set up your process, team and tools. Step-10: Establish measurement and reporting guidelines. Things to Remember: # Without plan you can't succeed in the race of content marketing. # Without plan you won't find any great content ideas. # You will fail to educate your content marketing's myriad benefits. 

Build your marketing plan:

Step:1 Set your goals and objectives:

Here, you have to build a base and you have to use marketing goals for setting your content marketing goals. Use your business objectives to build your perspective.

Don't build big goals if you are new into this. set some easy and long term goal for one year. Try to analyse your goals on quarterly or half yearly basis.

Try to answer few questions:

Why are you doing content marketing?

What is your top most goal you want to achieve?

The content marketing plan should be designed in such way that it should support your business plan, not just marketing plan.

Step:2 Prepare your budget:

You have defined your goals and objectives and now it's time to add price tag on it. Think about what is your budget? What is your spending plan?

You need to add each and every cost and set your estimates of spending money.

Here, You have to design budget for your content marketing not for the whole organization. Don't create budget for content creation only.

Here, you need to include following things in your budget such as content distribution, Content analysis, Planning and Content Optimization.

High quality content requires high budget, High and efficient planning for your content. You have to set budget for the designing because without proper designing, Your content will not get value.

You can take a little budget from other marketing tactics because social media, SEO and website needs content. So, you can burrow money from other marketing budgets.

Step 3: Do Thorough research of your niche:

Do thorough research of primary and secondary variables in your niche.

Primary research should include:

Interviews with the stakeholders, Employees, Customers and prospects.

Secondary research should include Reports, Past data, Surveys or Past studies.

You can follow any type of research method whichever you like.

You should include research findings in these following areas:

- Performance of content, What is generating the most traffic, Which content is getting viral and which is getting high leads.

- SEO rankings of your previous content. Number of organic traffic reach.

- Social media research and other distribution channels.

- Your Competitors, which type of content they create and how their content is performing.

- Research about your target audience.

Use research data to create a content plan. Take key decisions using your research data. 

Once again i am repeating this............

Do thorough research because this research will help you in creating efficient content plan.

Step 4: Know your audience and understand their needs:

If you don't whom you are serving then it will not help you even if you have good content.So, know your audience and try to understand their needs.

This will assist you in creating valuable content for your audience.

In this step you need to answer few questions:

Who are your target customers?

Who are your best customers?

Who are your prospects? Can you turn them into loyal customers?

How do they interact with your content?

Do you want to extend your reach? If yes, Then whom you are including into this group.

Figure out who like your content because they can easily convince other people to like your products or content. How many people engage with your content when you publish it.

Step 5: Evaluate and assess your old or existing content:

In this step you have huge number of content, just the thing is you need a well trained person who helps you in evaluating each piece of content.

Things to analyze in this step:

Analyze whether your content is sales focused or not.

Is your design working or not.

Do a thorough research of your content:

Website, Blog, All sales material, Videos, Power point presentations, using

Your content should be great enough to grab others attention.

Have a look at the performance, Reviews and click rate of your content. Evaluate what can you do to make your content better. Create content in such a way that it should stand out alone in the market.

It becomes important because there are 1-2 million blog posts published everyday. So We need to have a great content to stand out in this content market.

Step 6: Bench mark the competition:

In this step We will compare our content against a number of competitors using different metrics. Here, you find out how your competitors are working and plan according to it.

Are they on social media platform?

Which type of content they are posting?

How do they use these platforms?

How many followers you have and how can you  grab more followers?

Which type of content they have ?

Do they have E-Books, e-mail newsletters, Videos?

Do they have a Website/Blog?

Make analysis of:

Who are performing the functions of content marketing  well?

What are they doing to stand in this huge crowd.

Insert metrics here.

Step 7: Create a bunch of your ideas messages and themes:

Find the cool content ideas and create a list of it. You can ask about these ideas on social media whether  people like your ideas or not. If people are liking your ideas messages and themes you can start working on them.

In this step brainstorming of ideas become very important.

Make sure you address these areas:

1. Ideas- Put creative spin in your content. You can go through open forum where people exchange their ides, Ideas can be developed through customer needs, company's goal and objectives.

2. Messages- Use messages to circulate your themes and know whether people are liking your themes or you need to make changes in your themes.

Create messaging guide:

Elevator pitch- A short explanation of what you do.

Boiler plate- A short formal description of what you do.

Buyer personas- Complete profile of your customers, buyers, their problems and challenges they face.

Competitive positioning- Something which differentiates you from your competitors.

3. Themes- In this point We will talk about company's values in front of target audience using stories.

Step 8: Identify your channels and tactics:

There is no point in designing content if no one is looking into it. You have to plan about where will your content exist and which platform will help you in receiving maximum leads and where will you will bet maximum target audience.

You have to build some plan for your distribution channels:

Your friends and fans: Find people who can share your content. Find who are loyal customers and convince them to share your content with their family and friends.

Your email list: You know the people who has responded or showed interest in your e-mail. So, Take benefit of it, build contacts and increase your engagement.

Syndicate your content: You know your industry, You know the people who owns similar website like you. Now it's the time to find people with similar interests and show them your content and ask them to include your content in their website or printed edition.

Step 9: Setup your process, team and tools:

You need to setup your team to carry out your content marketing plan and provide them right tools to carry out.

Team: Here we need to have some people who will help you in moving forward with your content marketing plan.

We need following people:

1. Strategist- This person design strategies and guide team to work according to it.

2. Editor- He will help you in creating stories and help you polish your piece of your content.

3. Project manager: He will help you in managing day to day work.

4. SEO Analyst: He will keep eye on your content and helps you to optimize it.

5. Social Media Manager: His work will be of distributing your content on social media.

Tools:

Blogging Platforms: You should have a blog.But, The main thing is it should be self hosted because you will have total control on your content and on your website.

CRM Software: It will guide you in getting leads and converting your prospects into customers. You can customize your software according to your needs.

Web analytics: Web analytics becomes important here. It will help you in understanding from which platform you are getting leads and how can you improve more, How can you optimise your performance.

Step 10: Establish measurement and reporting guidelines:

Measure each and every stage of marketing funnel so that you can know whether you are accomplishing your goals or not.

Measurement becomes important here It will help you to find how your performance in reference to your goals and objectives.

Things to measure:

Page impression 

sources

Bounce Rate

Unique Visitors

Devices

Feedback

Quality of content

Shares

Search Metrics

Leads

Comments

Keyword Value

Sales

Profit

Audience Metrics

Email subscribers

Conclusions: Perform all these steps to get great results. Design a proper plan because without proper planning you can't win this race. If you are not achieving your goal then change your plan and strategies.

 

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