Part 1: What is a Content Marketing plan?
The world has plenty of mysteries, like if Big Foot exists and whether hijacker D.B. Cooper survived when he parachuted from a plane in 1971 with a bag of extorted cash. In the past decade, small business owners have encountered another great mystery – what is s content marketing plan and how can it help me?
Whether you’ve spent thousands on brand marketing consultants or $10 hourly for enthusiastic summer writing interns, it’s not uncommon that a clear understanding of content marketing still evades you.
What is a content marketing plan?
Put simply, content marketing is sharing information online to raise awareness and interest in a business, their services or products. The Content Marketing Institute describes it as a strategic approach to creating and distributing relevant information that attracts customers and drives them to act. Although these are good overviews, it doesn’t represent the complexity, discipline and the multiple steps that are part of an effective content marketing plan.
Good content marketing practice identifies the topics that customers scramble to get to and share. Here are the steps needed to create great posts or videos and share them:
1. Know your customer (this is harder than it sounds)
2. Conduct research to uncover potential topics
3. Identify the goal(s) of each of each piece of content
4. Decide whether the topic will be explored in a short blog post, medium or long – or a video
5. Build an editorial calendar around those topics
6. Identify the means to promote the content, including social media sources
7. Write targeted, quality content
8. Proof and edit (don’t skip this important step!)
9. Distribute
10. Promote
11. Repeat steps 7 to 10, a lot
12. Measure and analyze the results
13. Determine if original content marketing plan needs to be adjusted – if yes, begin again at step 1
These steps demonstrate how the nuts and bolts of our plan – but it just skim the surface. Read on to discover how you can begin.
It starts with your customer
Getting started with a content marketing plan means getting to know your customer—when you know who your most profitable customers are, you can begin to deduce which information they’ll search high and low for.
If your best customers are young mothers, they’re going to be interested in anything that improves their kids’ health, their minds, make the reader and their partner better parents – or reduces the stress of being a great parent.
If your assumptions are correct, your customers might be itching to learn about educational software for baby, best college savings plans, local med spas with 30-minute massages and free child-care or videos of adorable kids who are naughtier than theirs. They’ll definitely want to share funny videos on Facebook – but the other information may also be shareable to their network of other young mothers.
The point is identifying topics that are interests of your targeted customers and creating content that they’ll search for and share.
How to uncover customer interests
The easiest way to find out what your customers are interested in is to ask them. It’s not a mistake that a lot of “free” content includes surveys. Data collected in this way provides companies with information that they can use to create content, ads, marketing and email campaigns.
You can collect your own data by asking customers their opinion in an email or posting a fun quiz on your company’s Facebook. Gather your customers’ responses and use them to figure out the best way to communicate with them and what will get them to come back to your site and share your posts.
You can also get information from the content that you post and share. The number of “Likes” and comments you receive tells you if the information you’re sharing is relevant and interesting to your customers.
Next steps
After deciding who your best, most profitable customers are, build personas based on the information you’ve gathered through customer comments and research into consumer behavior. Now onto step two…
As you can see, there’s much, much more to learn about content marketing. Check back within the next two weeks for the next post on using data and customer personas to create content that gets results.
Mary Barry is a copywriter, content manager and content strategist who has worked with clients in numerous industries, including higher education, healthcare, legal and construction. She can be reached at mary.b226@gmail.com.