How to create a content plan that will deliver results
According to Content Marketing Institute, 58% of B2B marketers say content marketing helped them generate sales/revenue in the last 12 months, up from 42% the previous year.
Content marketing is crucial for many things. Not only does it help develop your brand presence, it also grows your audience engagement in order to drive sales. It focuses on the readers’ wants and needs by providing valuable, relevant information, answering specific questions, as well as showing how your brand can solve their problem. And now more than ever, a content marketing strategy is extremely important to have in this current digital landscape.
Let us help you understand how to create a content marketing plan that truly delivers results.
DEFINE YOUR CONTENT MARKETING GOALS
When you set clear, measurable, understandable marketing goals, you can create a successful marketing strategy. It allows you to focus your efforts and see whether your marketing campaigns are successful, and establish priorities to reach your goals quicker. This could be done by introducing the concept of SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound) goals.
Begin by setting common content marketing goals, such as increasing brand awareness, generating leads, boosting sales, and improving customer loyalty. These should, however, be specifically tailored to your business, and cover short-term as well as long-term success. For example, ‘increase website traffic by 10% within the next month’. These goals should then be stuck to, where they’re achievable and set within a reasonable timeframe. Ensure you’re reviewing your results regularly, so you know you’re on the right track and can make adjustments where you think it’s needed to achieve your targets.
UNDERSTAND YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE
Identifying your audience is a huge factor within your content marketing plan you can’t ignore. Knowing your audience means you can create content that truly resonates, which gives you a higher likelihood of achieving a sale.
Explore methods to research and segment your audience by creating buyer personas, analysing customer data, and conducting surveys. To help understand the likes of customer profiles, how they benefit your business and the best questions to ask when creating them, read our blog, ‘Identifying your B2B profile to increase ROI’.
CONTENT AUDIT
A way you can evaluate content and identify gaps or opportunities with your business is by developing a content audit. From analysing metrics to identifying top-performing content, auditing your content helps you understand what topics resonate with your audience, the themes that can be repurposed, and understand what your audience likes and dislikes.
By understanding what content has worked in the past, you can then strengthen your SEO performance to increase your brand awareness across socials, refine your message, and maximise your conversions overall.
There are three simple steps to a content audit:
- Define all of your content assets. For example, website and socials.
- Gather data from platforms, Google Analytics and Google Console.
- Analyse the successful content against the less successful.
CONTENT STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT
A content strategy is the development of content to achieve your business goals, implementing a well-thought-out strategy is essential. Having a grasp of your customers will give you the knowledge to help drive forward your user engagement, and establishing what they need is the first step.
Our blog, ‘B2B Content Strategy for Enhanced User Engagement’, can help you understand what you should be doing beyond blog posts and social media messages. Whether that’s choosing content themes and topics that align with your audience or exploring different mediums, such as podcasts, putting together a planned content strategy will help you maintain consistency within your brand, and build towards your end-marking goals.
CONTENT CREATION AND DISTRIBUTION
Within your content strategy, the creation of assets is incredibly important. When you’ve established your audience, it helps you understand what will be appealing and useful so you can focus on producing valuable and high-quality content, which will positively affect your SEO.
This type of content you produce can also vary across different platforms. Social media can be more top-level and light-hearted, with the use of GIFs and memes for example. It’s also an area where you can promote different distribution channels. This could be new blog posts and podcasts, or reposting and repurposing content that you believe your audience will benefit from.
On the other hand, a newsletter can be more business-focused. It can go into more depth about what’s new within the company, which can lead to click-throughs on specific content. This can also help you understand more about what certain audiences like within your content. For example, a digital marketing manager is going to be drawn to more posts focused on digital marketing. It’s important to note that content creation also needs foundations, such as a brand tone of voice and design. This will help you create consistency as well as recognition and a sense of identity.
MEASURING AND ANALYSING RESULTS
The best way to see what content is performing better than others is by analysing and measuring. You can do this by identifying your key performance indicators (KPIs) for content marketing. This could be through engagement rates, lead conversion, website traffic, and content shares. This can be done through various analytics tools. We’d recommend Google Analytics, HubSpot, or SEMrush for tracking content performance.
Another way of measuring results is by optimising specific content. A/B testing allows you to use various subject lines on emails, for example, or different thumbnails on YouTube videos, and it allows you to see which perform the best.
It’s also important you check timelines regularly. We suggest that your socials should be reviewed weekly and your website is fully analysed monthly. By refining your content strategy regularly, you can ensure it still aligns with your business goals and objectives for the short and long-term future.
To summarise, in order to create a content marketing plan that delivers results, we recommend:
- Defining your content marketing goals
- Understanding your target audience
- Conducting a content audit
- Creating and developing a content strategy
- Planning your content creation and distribution
- Measuring and analysing results
Not only does this help towards audience understanding, but the continuous measurement and goal-setting will allow you to deliver results.
If you need help or assistance with growing, engaging and converting, outsourcing your digital marketing with experts can allow you to tailor a more effective plan. Book a consultation with us today and we can help you, wherever you are on your digital marketing journey, by conducting a free audit to point you in the right direction.
