Wow, it’s been quite something going through the last ten days, hasn’t it? There’s an awful lot that goes into a really effective content marketing plan, isn’t there?
So, rather than going onto a new topic straightaway, today is all about wrapping up the last ten days and pulling everything together to get your content marketing plan finished and working for you.
While there’s still a lot more to come to help you get to grips with your content marketing, your content marketing plan is one of the biggest pieces, and once you’ve got that done, things will get easier.
Here are six steps to work through around forming your content marketing plan and making sure it fits with your business goals.
1 Where is your business right now?
Only you know how your business is doing and whether your marketing is working for you or not. Take a good look at your current marketing efforts and see where you can do better and what you need to stop doing that isn’t working.
Check out your competitors and see what is working for them. Don’t try to copy them, but use what you find as inspiration for your own ideas.
Think about where else and how else you can promote your business that you’re not currently doing.
2 Who is your target market?
Remember Days 4 and 5 of our challenge, where you looked at who your target market is and where you can find them?
After looking at the current state of your business, getting to know your target market really is so important that it’s number two on the list when you plan your strategy.
The more you know, the more you can create the perfect content for your audience and post it where you know they’ll see it.
3 Establish your business goals
Now you know who you want to target and where you need to do some work on your marketing, the next step is figure out your goals for your business.
Be really specific. It’s not enough to say ‘We want to post a lot of content and get more business.’ You can’t measure against that to see if your content plan is working.
Write down your goals, then once you implement your content marketing plan, keep checking back regularly to see if you’re reaching your goals, or if there are things you want to tweak.
4 Why are you doing this?
If you’re not a solopreneur, you may have other people to convince, perhaps even a board of directors, and while anyone in marketing is likely to be convinced that creating content is massively important, the finance director might not be quite so keen.
If you know why you are creating your content and what results you are aiming to get from it, you’ll be on far more solid ground when trying to convince other people in the business.
5 Create your content marketing plan
This is where you pull together everything from the last ten days, where you bring together everything you know about the type of content your audience wants, where and when you want to post and what you want to achieve, and make yourself a plan using an editorial calendar or a planner (see below!)
Work out what content will go on your own site, where you’ll guest post, where you’ll promote everything and get everything down in a solid plan.
Don’t plan out every tiny detail for a whole year as you might find your business aims and goals change too much over that time, but if you can plan a few months ahead, you’ll be able to more easily keep things on track.
6 Measure your results
You won’t know if you’ve improved if you don’t measure your results.
Think about what you want to measure that will make a real difference to your business. You might want to look at your traffic, where you get the most visitors from, your conversion rates, and number of sales per month.
You should also look at what isn’t working so you can stop wasting time on things that aren’t moving you forward.
After you’ve gone through those six steps, you won’t just have a content marketing plan, you’ll have a full content strategy that should really push your business forward!
Action Point!
It’s time to pull together everything you’ve learned in the last 10 days and create your own content marketing plan.
You have everything you need from the last ten days’ posts to create your own plan. Just grab some paper and start working through, or get your ideas down on the computer.
If you need a little more help, I’ve put together a Content Marketing and Promotion Planner to walk you through the whole process.
You’ll find more info on how to find your target market, surveying your audience, how to create your plan, different types of content, promotion, and everything you’ll need to put your plan together, along with a target market worksheet, content inventory checklist, your content marketing planner, tracking report, and more!
Click here and you can get the planner for only $17!
Don’t forget to drop me a comment below if you need any help!
Woohooo, your content marketing plan is done! That’s also the end of Day 11, and tomorrow, we’re going to look at different content formats.
Don’t want to wait? Prefer to get all of the 30-Day Content Marketing Challenge posts in one place, so you can work through at your own pace? Here’s a link to all of the challenge lessons: https://creativeblueberry.com/30-day-content-marketing-challenge-catch-up/
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