Creating a Content Marketing Strategy
This guide will walk you through 11 easy steps to create and implement a content marketing plan that will help you grow your business without wasting time and money.
Step 1: Decide what your mission and goals are
A content marketing mission statement is a good place to start when making a plan for your content strategy. This is a short statement that helps you keep your content marketing strategy on track by making it easier to focus on what’s important and what’s not when you’re making content.
A mission statement for content marketing says:
- Your target audience
- How you’ll reach them and what you’ll say
- What they’ll get out of it
Try this method to come up with a mission for your own business:
We offer [type of content] to [the audience] to help them [achieve business goals].
Even though the mission statement explains what your audience will get out of your content marketing strategy, you should also think about what your business will get out of it. So, your business goals come into play.
Typical goals include:
- Your content marketing strategy will help you make more money.
- You can reach your sales goals by making more sales and getting more high-quality leads.
- Getting more people to visit your site, because the more people there are, the more likely you are to reach your other goals.
- Improving how people see your business so that you gain influence and authority and are seen as a thought leader.
- Success with SEO brings in more traffic.
- As your content gets better, your marketing costs will go down.
- Engaging with social media can help with both traffic and authority.
Once you know what you want to accomplish, you can move on to the next step.
Step 2: Decide what your KPIs are.
Making goals clear and easy to measure is the best way to reach them. That means setting your content marketing strategy’s key performance indicators (KPIs).
The key performance indicators (KPIs) will help you know when you’ve reached your goals by giving you milestones you can check off. They will include your goals for revenue, sales, traffic, SEO, traffic, and other aspects of digital marketing like email marketing and social media metrics.
Most of the time, these will have numbers written on them. You might, for instance, want to:
- Reach a certain sales goal within a month, three months, or a year.
- Signing up more people for your lead magnet is a sign that you’re getting better leads.
- Get a certain number of new people to sign up for your email list.
- More people will visit your site and interact with its content.
- Raising the search rankings of some of your most important pages can help you get more visitors.
- Get your pillar content mentioned, shared, and commented on a certain number of times.
- Get invited to some of the most important industry events
You’ll also want to keep track of how much you spend on marketing, how much you spend on different campaigns, and how much it costs to get leads and make sales.
Create a content calendar
A content calendar helps you plan and schedule your content in advance, ensuring that you consistently publish new material. Consider the types of content that will best suit your goals and target audience, and mix things up to keep your audience engaged.
Develop a distribution plan
Once you have created your content, you need to get it in front of your target audience. Consider the channels that your audience is most likely to use, such as social media, email marketing, or your company blog.
Measure and analyze your results
It’s important to track the success of your content marketing efforts to see what is working and what may need to be adjusted. Use tools like Google Analytics to measure website traffic, engagement, and conversions.
Measure Results
Last, it’s time to figure out how well your content marketing strategy worked. To do this, you’ll go back to the KPIs you set at the beginning of the content strategy plan and look at what’s changed and whether you’re hitting your goals.
This can be done by:
- Check Google Analytics as explained above to find out how well your content is doing.
Buzzsumo and other social analytics tools can be used to track social sharing. - Check out the conversion analytics dashboard on OptinMonster to see how well your marketing campaigns are doing.
- Google Alerts and Mention are two other tools that can be used to track the success of content marketing. Both of these will let you know if people are talking about and sharing your content, which will help you reach your KPIs for awareness and engagement.
Tools like SEMRush can help you figure out what your content’s KPIs are for its search rank. And the analytics in your email marketing software will let you keep track of people who sign up for your emails.
By keeping track of your progress, you’ll be able to make regular changes to your content marketing strategy so that it’s always up to date.
All done! Now you know how to make a content marketing plan that works from start to finish.