How to Develop a Content Marketing Plan For Your Business

If you’re here, you want to know how to develop a content marketing plan for your business. Right?

Content marketing is a sure way to boost your brand and achieve outstanding results. It’s the ideal marketing strategy for businesses of all sizes looking to dominate any market.

But to find success with it, you need a well-developed content marketing strategy that keeps you in the race. 

Which makes you wonder…

How do I even get started?

In this post, you’ll learn what a content marketing strategy is, why it’s crucial for your success, and how to develop a content marketing plan for your business in seven simple steps. 

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a blueprint that your business follows to grow online using content creation. It covers everything from your end goals to the techniques you must implement to grow your brand. 

It also details the problems you may face and the steps you need to take to overcome those challenges.

Why Having a Content Marketing Plan is a Must

No business can make it in today’s competitive internet world without a content marketing strategy.

A solid content strategy builds a bridge between your growth objectives and your day-to-day business duties. Which allows you to clearly differentiate productive work from busy work and focus on what’s important.

Here’s why having a content marketing strategy is crucial:

1- Maximize Marketing Efficiency

A well-defined content marketing strategy improves your overall performance and spares you a lot of headaches. It maximizes your marketing results by keeping you focused on the metrics and results that matter.

Which saves you and your team countless hours in the long run.

2- Boost Brand Credibility

Credibility is one of the most essential factors in converting prospects into long-lasting clients. It’s also crucial to getting your brand to the top of search engines and social media platforms.

Creating and publishing high-quality content regularly is a sure way to boost your credibility. It helps you attract new visitors to your brand and keep them interested in your best offers.

3- Improve SEO Results

If you’re familiar with search engine optimization, you know that content creation is the way to go if you want Google’s attention. SEO is the main reason why many companies today are constantly creating content.

Once Google discovers your website and notices that you’re publishing quality content at a fast rate, it will reward you with top rankings for your target keywords. Most people searching for those keywords will then come to your website and engage with anything you have to offer.

Develop a Content Marketing Plan in 6 Simple Steps

1- Set Your Goals

As a business owner, you already have established goals and quantifiable objectives that you want your company to achieve. 

Whether it’s to:

• Build brand recognition
• Boost your site traffic
• Convert more leads
• Increase returning visitors
• Lower your Cost Per Acquisition
• Increase social engagement

It’s a priority to tie your content marketing plan to those goals to ensure that you’re not wasting any time or resources. 

So before you move any further in the process, ask yourself:

• What are my current business goals?
• Can content marketing help me achieve them?
• Which content marketing techniques will help me get there faster?

Remember:

Your business aims must be sustainable and achievable to enhance your growth. Setting goals that are out of your reach will only set you up for failure.

They also need to be measurable to help you adjust your plan of action based on your progress.

2- Identify Your Audience Needs

Some businesses will already have this figured out. But, it’s critical to remind everyone of the importance of understanding audience needs.

Identifying your target customers will save you a lot of time and frustration in the long run. Because your audience reflects the quality of your content marketing efforts and the results you’re going to achieve.

If you don’t know who your target clients are, their desires, and their pain points, it’s impossible to tell which topics you should focus on. You’d have a hard time figuring out a language that resonates with them best.

However…

With the right audience in mind, you’ll concentrate your efforts on providing relevant solutions to specific issues. You’ll anticipate their needs by emphasizing why your company is the best fit to solve those problems and how.

3- Choose Your Distribution Channels

Although content distribution comes after content creation, you need to address it first when developing your plan. Because a content piece is only valuable if a lot of your target customers can see it.

The distribution channels you choose will determine what type of content you have to create. And that choice depends on your objectives, industry, audience preferences, content types, etc. 

For example:

If you’re in the plumbing industry, you can write articles teaching plumbing basics and getting people introduced to your work. 

However, making videos would be much more efficient considering the nature of business. So in this case,  YouTube would be the best platform to promote your brand with content marketing. 

4- Review Existing Content

This is a simple step that will help you gain lots of insight into your current content plan.

You’ll take a look at all the content your business has created since its launch. Whether it’s blog articles, social media posts, infographics, videos, etc. 

By reviewing how your existing content performs, you’ll get a better understanding of your audience. You’ll learn more about their favorite topics and biggest challenges so you can help them. 

On top of that:

You’ll get the chance to further optimize any content piece you’ve published in the past. That’s how you make sure everything aligns with the marketing goals you set in the first step.

5- Create a Content Calendar

A schedule allows you to set clear deadlines for your content publishing goals and stick to them. It’s also key to keeping you and your team organized and consistent as you decide to publish more content.

Your content calendar must take into consideration:

• Marketing objectives and competition
• Availability
• Budget and resources

For instance:

If you’re in a fast-growing industry where your competitors publish dozens of pieces a month, the only way to catch up is by doing the same. You’ll have to create multiple high-quality posts each month to keep your brand alive.

Make sure to set precise times and dates for writing and publishing your content. Also, be specific about who’s going to create your various content pieces.

That’s how you can stay on top of things and meet deadlines more easily.

6- Publish And Promote Your Content

You’ve created an awesome piece of content that provides unique solutions to your target clients. It’s now time to publish and distribute that to the right audience. 

While publishing your content might be easy — promoting it is where it really gets tricky. You have to share each piece you create across various marketing channels for maximum engagement.

Here’s the thing:

SEO doesn’t need content promotion because Google bots will do all the work. So, it doesn’t matter which time you publish your posts or at what pace. 

But…

For most other strategies, such as social media marketing and email marketing, things are different.

To ensure the best results:

You should take into consideration the time at which you’ll publish your post. You must avoid sharing multiple posts a day to avoid spamming your audience. And you need to know which platforms bring the best results so you can focus on them.

7- Measure & Optimize

Monitoring how your content performs is key to focusing your efforts on what’s working. It’s the best way to keep your budget to a minimum and focus your time on other crucial aspects of the business. 

For example, you’ll realize that:

Some of your favorite topics aren’t interesting to your audience. While many other ideas that you consider obvious cause a huge problem to your average customer.

Or that…

Some distribution channels may not deliver good results compared to others, so you can abandon them later — especially if they’re taking up a lot of time to manage. 

To do any of this:

There are lots of monitoring tools you can use — such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Make sure to set them up as soon as you start publishing new content.

As you gain more insight into your strategy and how it’s performing, you’ll discover lots of new growth opportunities. You’ll then be able to refine your content marketing strategy to get closer to your goal.

Conclusion

Creating outstanding content that makes an impact requires careful planning and consistency in the process. That’s why generating a detailed plan should be the first step in your content marketing journey.

Ready to get your business to the next level with content marketing?

As you work to develop a content marketing plan, the Lorem Ipsum Company is here to help! 

Check out our content marketing services to learn more about how we can help. And feel free to contact us or give us a call at (949) 354-2574 — we’re happy to discuss your project needs!