How to Write a Content Marketing Plan for Your Business

Whether you’re new to content marketing or have been using the same approach, there is no foul whatsoever when it comes to revising your plan.

In fact, there is no better time to have an edge on the competition by creating a sound content plan for the upcoming year. Here, we will step by step go through how to write a content marketing plan.

First, We Must Ask Ourselves What Do We Mean By Content Strategy?

Content strategy refers to a portion of your marketing plan in relation to the management of any media that you may create, be it visual or written.

A good content plan needs to have a purpose that it serves, thus, when developing a content strategy, there are things that you need to observe:

• Who is your audience?
• What problem are you solving?
• What format will you use?
• How will you make it available?

Why Create a Content Marketing Plan?

A content marketing plan helps in preparing for website leads and traffic. Think of it this way: creating a single blog post that will guarantee you a steady amount of traffic with the help of a link or a tool.

With the help of these tools and links, you can experiment on how to generate more views and revenue through distributed and sponsored content, and social media advertising. This will create awareness for your brand and help educate your prospects.

Now let's get into how to create that content marketing plan.

How to Create a Content Marketing Plan

1. Define Your Goal

Before you start writing anything down, make sure that you have a clear definition of what exactly you plan to achieve with your strategy. With this in mind, you will be creating a clear path for your thoughts to flow freely.

Ask yourself why is it that you want to create a content marketing plan. This will help in setting up your goal.

2. Know Your Audience

This is very important.

You must always be aware of who your audience is what their expectations are. This way, you will know exactly what to come up with so as to cater to their needs.

This is a very crucial step if you’re new to marketing or you’re just starting out. Once you do your research, then you can be in a position to provide valuable content for your audience.

On the other hand, if you are experienced in this field, then chances are that your audience may have changed or that you’ve moved into a new field and you don’t know your new audience. Ascertaining the type of audience you have is really helpful when it comes to market research and growing your business.

3. Audit Your Content

Whenever we get into blogging, we normally start with writing blog posts either every day or every week. And this creates a lot of content for us. If someone wanted to consume all this information, it would be very hard for them.

So, we need to think of other ways that we can easily compile our work for new users. How about creating an eBook that has a summary of all your previous content and can be read in 5 minutes or less? Wouldn't this be much easier?

If you’ve been doing this for some time, take some time off to review your efforts from the past year and see how well they were and if you could possibly make them better. You could also seek the services of a paper editor to go through your previous posts in an effort to revamp them.

4. Content Management System

Content management is a crucial part of your organization. The important parts of content management include content creation, analytics, and publication.

You must find a way to integrate these into your organization. With tools such as HubSpot, you can easily do all this. You can decide when the content should be published, look at how it is performing and come up with new content on the fly.

Your Sales PlayBook is also the perfect place to store your content marketing plan.

5. Brainstorm Ideas

A content plan needs content, and to come up with content we need to get some ideas. Brainstorming is a sure way of coming up with some great ideas for your marketing plan. There are tools that can assist you with you brainstorming activity.

They include:

Buzz-sumo which analyses social media activity to determine if the content published is popular and how it performed. Such information can help choose the right content to publish.

Headline analyzer – this tool helps you analyze your headlines, how long they are, the grammar, search volume and many other features. If you happen to have a few headlines, you can run them through here to help figure out which is the best one for you.

Topic generator – this is the tool for you if you are vague on your topics, just enter terms and general topics and see what kind of content that you can produce from those words. Works like a charm!

6. Know The Types Of Content You Want To Create

You have a variety of ways that you can create your content. These ways are mediums in which you can get your content out there. They range from blogs to templates. We will break down some of them for you:

Blogs are very popular these days and do not require that much time, they attract a lot of people if you know how to properly set them up. The posts should serve up the purpose that you create them for so as to ensure that people keep on coming back.

Podcasts assist in helping find your brands much easier and faster. The podcast pool is growing as there are over 57 million people who listen to podcasts – that’s a huge audience for you!

Templates are a handy way of shrinking content for easier use. When you put your content in a standard format people tend to engage with it more.

7. Publish Your Content

A content plan should not only focus on how to come up with the content but also on how to publish it and manage it. Come up with ways on how you will make sure that all your content is managed for easier reference.

You can use calendars to manage when you will be publishing what content, this can also be a good way of advertising yourself.

Know the season and what people will be expecting from you during that season, this will help you stay on top of things.

Conclusion

We hope this helps you get started with your content marketing plan so as to ensure a prosperous upcoming year. Focus on the details and reap the benefits!

About the Author:

Richard Nolan is a writer and a private tutor, sharing his experience in spheres of writing, blogging, entrepreneurship, and psychology. Richard writes for numerous blogs and gives useful tips for bloggers and students. Follow him on  Twitter and Facebook.