The bad news: the messaging and goals you created don’t line up with their understanding of what you’re doing. Your boss is supportive of your content marketing, which is great. However, there is a discrepancy between what you want to achieve with your content and what they think you should be doing.
The challenge: she wants to see a content marketing plan . . . and you have NO IDEA what that is supposed to look like.
I’ve been there.
It’s hard to document your content marketing strategy when it’s something you’ve been doing intuitively. It can be difficult to translate your gut feeling into a document, and content marketing usually requires a lot of flexibility. How do you account for that in a strategic document?
We’ve found some great content marketing strategy templates online and put together a step-by-step guide for creating your own content marketing plan.
This was built with both the in-house content marketer and the agent in mind.
Let’s go!
What is content strategy?
A successful content strategy will use various forms of content to attract your target audience and keep them engaged at every stage of the funnel.
If you want to increase brand awareness for your business, one way to do that would be to focus on SEO for your content strategy. By increasing your website’s visibility on the SERPs, you can drive traffic to your products or services.
New business owners might think that a content strategy is not necessary early on, but it can actually be very helpful in building trust with new audiences and succeeding in the long term.
A good content strategy is essential for attracting prospects and providing them with a positive experience that will keep them coming back. By following the inbound marketing framework, you can create targeted content that will help you close more sales and keep your customers happy.
Since 70% of marketers are actively investing in content marketing, it’s important to have a content strategy to be competitive in your industry.
Preface
Before we get too far in, I’d love to start things off with a few quick notes:
1. This is a long article.
Consider bookmarking or sending this to your Pocket so you can set aside some time to read it later.
2. Content marketing strategies aren’t easy to write.
After reading this text, the reader should understand that the author plans to discuss different strategies that can be used to improve a website. These strategies include website crawls, persona profiles, thematic taxonomies, and competitive analyses. The author also suggests some further reading material for each strategy.
3. This isn’t gospel.
The following text is more like guidelines than actual rules. You’ll find that some projects need more in-depth planning than others.
4. Stay flexible.
A good content marketing strategy should give you a clear focus, while still allowing you to be flexible and experiment with new ideas. The key is to be able to adapt your strategy as you learn more about what works and what doesn’t.
Now that we have mentioned the things to be aware of, let’s see how to write this content marketing strategy!
How to Write a Content Marketing Strategy Step-by-Step
This text provides a guide for writing a content marketing strategy. It explains how to create a plan that pulls together all the necessary elements and provides a clear roadmap for implementation.
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1. Start with an outline.
A strategy can be a difficult thing to write. You have to decide how much detail to put in and how high-level the document should be. An outline can help you get an idea of everything you need to include, and it might help you from wasting time on things that aren’t important.
And what is the right ground to cover anyway?
A good content marketing strategy will answer three basic questions:
- Why are we making content in the first place?
- What content do we need?
- How do we get that content to accomplish our goals?
An outline will help you organize your research and ideas so you can focus on answering these important questions.
2. Write down what you’re trying to accomplish.
You should write out your content marketing goals here. What do you want to achieve? Having specific goals will help you compare your content to your goals later on to see what is really aligned.
A goal may be considered SMART if it is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
The goal of this company is to be seen as a thought leader on the topic of Roomba rodeos. They want to be known for their knowledge and opinions on the subject.
- Objective #1: Generate $500,000 in revenue from online training courses by December 31, 2016.
- Objective #2: Rank on the first page of Google search engine results for “Roomba rodeo” by April 1, 2016.
- Objective #3: Grow an email list of 5,000 unique double opt-in subscribers by March 4, 2016.
What are some questions you could ask to get started with content marketing in your organization? -What are the overall marketing goals? -How can content marketing support those goals? -Is there a separate content marketing team, or is this effort outsourced? -Who are the other non-content marketing stakeholders in the organization?
Tips for Building a Content Culture in Your Organization 1. Start by asking other teams and departments for content input. 2. See if there are any commonalities in the content that people are interested in. 3. Create a process for gathering and approving content. 4. Make sure that everyone who is creating content is following the same process. 5. Celebrate the wins along the way.
Once you’ve written down these goals, you can ask yourself (and your team) a few questions:
- How does good content accomplish these goals?
- How can we measure whether or not our content is aligned with these goals?
In this section, you will list the key performance indicators for your content.
3. Conduct persona research.
A successful plan cannot be developed without first understanding who your content’s target audience is. This is also referred to as your buyer persona.
If you’re just starting out in marketing, it’s important to know your target audience. produce content that They will want to read and convert on.
If you are experienced in marketing, you may want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market. Alternatively, you may want to keep your target audience the same. It is important to revisit your audience parameters by conducting market research every year, in order to grow your audience.
Featured Tool: Buyer Persona Generator
4. Run a content audit.
It is common for brands to start with blog posts. If you want to try different formats, you can do a content audit to see which types of content perform best and worst. This will help you decide what to do next.
You should review your content marketing efforts and results from the past year if you have been in business for a while.
What can you do differently in the upcoming year to aligned your team’s goals with the rest of your organization’s goals?
If you are not sure what is resonating best with your audience, a content audit will help you figure that out. It will also help you identify gaps in your topic clusters, and brainstorm fresh content ideas.
5. Choose a content management system.
Some key aspects of content management are coming up with ideas for new content, getting that content out there for people to see, and then evaluating how well it performed.
You should invest in a CMS in order to create, manage, and track your content more easily and sustainably.
The HubSpot CMS allows you to manage your content creation process from start to finish, including planning, publish, and measuring your results.
CMS stands for content management system. WordPress is a popular content management system to which you can add the HubSpot WordPress plugin. The HubSpot WordPress plugin provides free web forms, live chat, CRM access, email marketing, and analytics.
6. List the types of content you’ll be dealing with.
You have completed a large part of this strategy article: you have examined all your content and channels to find what is effective, what is not, and what you would like to create.
Well done. Very well done!
Now we need to start making a plan for producing content. Just for reference, “producing content” covers two general areas of content crafting:
- Optimizing, updating, or otherwise fine-tuning the content that you identified in Step 11 (content to fix).
- Creating the content you listed in Step 13 (content to add to the mix).
We’ll start by listing out the kind of work this will involve, namely, the types of content that need to be crafted. This might include:
- Long-form, SEO-driven blog posts
- Interviews
- Ebooks
- Infographics
- Email courses
- Explainer videos
Once you have a list of the kinds of content you’re dealing with, you may want to give each one a brief description. For example, you could write:
- Long-form, SEO-driven blog posts. Posts targeting specific search concepts, usually 2,200+ words in length, written to gain backlinks, comments, and organic search.
- Ebooks. Documents expounding on a specific topic, usually 5,000+ words, delivered as PDFs, written to give away as lead-generation pieces.
This is important because in the next steps you will outline how this type of content will be created.
7. Brainstorm content ideas.
Now is the time to start thinking about ideas for your next content project.
Here are some tools to get the juices flowing.
1. Feedly
Feedly RSS feed can help you find new content ideas by allowing you to track popular topics in your industry.
You express what topics you are mostly intrigued by to the software and its AI function will take care of the rest.
Instead of needing to search the internet for new content ideas, you can go through your curated list. This list contains content from news sites, newsletters, and social media.
2. BuzzSumo
If you’re looking for content that is popular and well-liked, this company can help you out. They offer a number of market research tools, one of which uses social media shares to determine which content is popular. With this information, you can create content about topics that are sure to be well-received.
3. BlogAbout
IMPACT’s blog title generator can help you come up with ideas for headlines. This tool is similar to Mad Libs, but instead of creating jokes, it shows you common headline formats with blanks that you can fill in with the subject you have in mind.
This technique helps you to contextualize general ideas in a way that would be appealing to your target audience. Once you have a headline you like, you can save it to your “Notebook” for future reference.
4. CoSchedule Headline Analyzer
HubSpot’s Blog Ideas Generator can give you ideas for blog posts for an entire year. All you need to do is enter general topics or terms you’d like to write about, and the generator will do the rest.
This tool can help you improve your headlines and titles by giving you feedback on things like length, word choice, grammar, and keywords.
If you have an idea for a headline, you can use the Headline Analyzer to see how you can make it stronger and to help you brainstorm.
5. HubSpot’s Website Grader
This tool is perfect for getting an overview of your website’s performance and SEO. It grades you on different aspects of your website and provides a detailed report on how to improve.
This tool can help you improve your website’s SEO and identify areas that need improvement.
8. Publish and manage your content.
An important aspect of your marketing plan is how you will organize your content. This includes what topics you will cover, who will create the content, when it will be published, and how often you will post new content.
An editorial calendar can help you publish a variety of content on your website. A social media content calendar can help you promote and manage your content on other sites.
While many of the ideas you have will be just as relevant months or years from now, you shouldn’t ignore timely topics either. These timely topics can help you generate spikes of traffic, even though they may not make up the bulk of your editorial calendar.
Most people use holidays like New Year’s as an opportunity to do marketing, but you don’t have to limit yourself to those days.
You could attract your target audience by publishing content on your blog or social media about niche holidays that they might be interested in.
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