First thing first- a long term planning always allows you to stay focused on your business goals, anticipate potential challenges, and allocate resources effectively. Today I am going to take you through how you can layout a complete content strategy plan using the following seven steps. This step by step strategy will help you develop your content strategy plan and implement it with ease and flow.
Step 1: Audit your existing content first
In an era of mass content production, a content audit will bring you closer to your business goals. There are approx. 1.6 billion websites, and each month, more than 70 million blog posts are published. That being said, a tremendous amount of information is available for your targeted audience to click on. Creating content without knowing the needs of your audience is a waste of time and money.
Analyze the existing content using data sets to understand what works for your audience. Dig deeper into statistics to understand the actual state of your current content strategy. Get yourself familiarized with what content brings you great results, and what do you need to improve. An SEO company Los Angeles like Drive Traffic Media can help you decide whether your existing content strategy is performing well or not.
Step 2: Set your goals
Make sure each piece of your content is aligned towards meeting your business goals. Align your overall content marketing goals with the vision and mission of your business and hierarchically organize your content. Once you are confident about the overall marketing strategy, then clearly identify your long and short term content marketing goals.
Step 3: Goal setting framework
While most of the entrepreneurs are comfortable with SMART goals ( Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound), flexibility is the key to setting realistic benchmarks. Use a clear framework that will assist you to be more agile in a fast-paced digital environment.
An SEO company Los Angeles such as Drive Traffic Media can help you with goal setting framework while keeping in mind essential SEO strategies that are critical for your business.
Step 4: Determine Your Audience
Targeting your audience and engaging them with your content piece is the critical element of the success of your content marketing strategy. To do this, you have to pay closer attention to the values, needs, and problems of your targeted audience and align your content marketing towards it.
Know that your audience is not your buyers. Create your content marketing strategy keeping in mind the buyer persona. You need to understand that your audience does not necessarily consist of buyers. Your audience consists of people who are just initiating to interact with your brand before they made a purchase decision.
It is essential to provide content which will engage potential customers before they enter into the buyer’s journey. Do not just focus on your products, instead talk about topics the audience is interested in. For example, if you sell sports products, talk about once in a lifetime experience or extreme sports. Target young people who are usually adventurous and passionate about sports and love an active lifestyle. Engage them with high-quality content before you could offer the product. This kind of content will encourage loyalty that goes far beyond buying your product.
Step 5: Develop an editorial plan
Developing an editorial plan is one of the critical stages of your content marketing journey. It allows you to properly allocate your resources and see what things you can cover in a specific time frame.
Always prioritize your actions. Prioritization is one of the critical elements of efficient planning. If you plan ahead of time, you can quickly identify essential tasks you should do first. It will save your strategy from huge failures and grab the opportunities that can boost your business results.
Find relevant topics. Creating content without knowing audience preferences is a waste of time. Use research tools to find out topics that audience are audiences interested in. Once you find the relevant topics, use appropriate format to publish that content. You can place the content into your content calendar to make it easier to track the content publishing without missing out any important deadlines.
Step 6: Plan content production
Before you could start the content creation process, take some time to find out what purpose each content piece is going to serve?
Make sure your content supports the customer journey of your audience at each level. It will ultimately help you strengthen the long-term relationship with your audience.
Below are the various stages of the customers’ journey:
- Awareness stage
- Consideration stage
- Decision stage
- Retention Stage
- Advocacy Stage
Step 7: Plan content distribution
As mentioned before, one of the core elements of a content marketing strategy is how you plan to publish your content. Paid media and earned media represent essential elements of your content distribution strategy.
Make sure you distribute your content on the platforms where your target audience spends most of its time. Identify the most appropriate channels. Dig deeper into social media statistics to find which channels are best to engage your target market. For example, you can distribute your content on Pinterest, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
Step 8: Analyze the performance of your content
Make sure you analyze the performance of your content to learn what attracts the interest of your audience the most. It will make it easier for you to create content that intrigues your target audience.
Use the data of the following parameters to identify whether your content is performing well or not.
- User behavior
- Engagement rates
- SEO results
- Company revenues
These strategies may change during the years to come, but the core principle remains the same- developing authentic content based on audience values will always drive sales.
Have you started developing a content strategy plan for your business yet? Contact an SEO company Los Angeles like Drive Traffic Media to get great results for your business.
