One of the greatest challenges most individuals face is how they can market effectively to their target audience. While many marketing strategies are readily available, choosing the right approach isn’t easy, especially if you’re a small business with only a minimal budget.
That’s why crafting an excellent content marketing plan is a valuable tool.
We’ll walk you through with simple, practical tips that you can apply to boost conversions and enhance online visibility through content:
1. Plan It
A great place to start is planning everything first. Focus on what’s essential and what isn’t when it comes to creating content. That way, it’s easier for you to stay on track later on.
Then, make a clear outline of:
- Your target audience.
- The type of material you’ll be creating.
- The significant benefits you’ll gain in the process.
You also need to set clear and actionable business objectives. Some of the most common goals include:
- Gaining traffic to your site: There’s a higher chance that you’ll be meeting your targets if you’re earning a significant amount of traffic on your site.
- Gaining authority and influence: As you gradually improve and establish yourself in your niche, you’ll be seen as a thought leader.
- Boosting revenue: You’ll be getting a higher profit in the process.
- Higher quality leads: Getting higher quality leads will help you achieve your business targets.
- Drop costs in marketing efforts: You’ll be experiencing a steep decline in marketing costs as your content becomes more effective in getting organic traffic in the long run.
- Social media engagement: Increased engagement in social media over time will help you build authority and steadily improve traffic.
- SEO success: This will help land you on the top spot-on search engines, which leads to higher amounts of traffic to your site. Make sure you have both Google Analytics and Search Console setup prior to implementing your strategy as they will be essential tools in evaluating your content.
When it comes to establishing goals, you have to make them specific and measurable. Setting key performance indicators or KPIs is essential, especially when it comes to crafting a content marketing plan. Also, setting relevant KPIs will let you know if you have reached a particular objective.
2. Know Your Audience
Just like any strategy in marketing, knowing your audience is vital.
But how can you do that? You can start by doing your market research in advance. Are the demographics you’ve picked the right choice for your brand and product?
To further understand your target demographic, you should outline your “ideal customer.” Know vital pieces of information such as their family life, career, income, educational level, and even particular personality traits.
Another important aspect is to get to work with your clients one-on-one. Know them on a personal level. What appeals to them the most, scares them or even excites them? As you gradually know your clients individually, you can then start useful generalizations later on.
Then, you need to start looking for your competitors. Try to study the existing marketing strategies they employ, as well as the kind of message they bring out.
3. Create Your Content
After researching, it’s time to create. In whatever you’re writing, take into consideration how it will reflect your brand personality first.
Be casual with your readers yet professional with your tone.
Also, show your expertise in your niche, so that you can create trust and rapport with your readers.
Content creation is a long and tedious process. Not to mention, there are a lot of preparations that have to be done before that.
Here are some steps that you can follow when it comes to creating material that is both practical and useful to your target demographic:
3.1. Research Your Content
Before you start, you first need to find out:
- The type of material that already exists out there.
- How you can come up with a kind of content that will add value to the lives of your readers.
That means, doing a quick Google search and finding out what’s the top content on your specific topic. Then, think of ways where you can enhance that material. You can also do keyword research to find out what terms work best for SEO, and improved search results.
Text Optimizer is a cool content research tool that uses semantic analysis to identify related topics and help you with content creation:
From helping you build sentences to suggesting new content angles to cover, Text Optimizer editor helps writers create content that’s engaging, compelling, and ultimately share-worthy.
3.2. Create Your Content Calendar
Perhaps, the greatest content marketing mistake is the lack of planning. For you to conveniently get everything all scheduled, you can use a content calendar.
If you’re not publishing a lot of material, you can use Google Calendar and add due dates there. However, if you’re posting many types of content, and managing a large team, you can make use of online content calendars.
If you are working on several sites, you can set up a self-hosted calendar that manages many entities under one roof. Namify will help you find a cheap domain for that.
Content management is not just about on-site content. There are other types of content marketing to include into your editorial calendar.
If you’re looking to create content for a monthly newsletter that will alert customers to new products or highlight promotions, turn to an automated newsletter service that makes design, creation, and even response rate analysis simplistic, email newsletters can be a great way to engage with your customers.
Social media is excellent for this purpose as well. Though managing these accounts can be hectic, there are ways to schedule posts ahead of time and manage all platforms simultaneously.
3.3. See the Results
Now is the time to evaluate whether or not your content marketing plan is a success.
To accomplish this, here’s what you can do:
- Utilize Google Analytics to measure and track your progress.
- Analyze the organic visibility of your specific content through WebCEO
- Analyze social sharing activities through social analytics tools like Buzzsumo.
- Track outcomes through social media monitoring tools. Both allow you to know whether or not your content is being shared and mentioned, helping you reach your KPIs in boosting brand engagement and awareness.
- Keep an eye on your subscribers and how your list grows. WP Beginner lists some great email marketing solutions that come with detailed analytics solutions allowing you to evaluate your progress.
Ideally, you need to return to your KPIs and evaluate your content strategy. See whether or not you’re hitting the right targets. Monitoring and tracking your results will help you make necessary changes when it comes to your content marketing plan.
Wrapping It Up
Content marketing is a vital element if you want to boost engagement, establish trust in your target audience and bring in a significant amount of traffic to your website.
Just like any other tool in marketing, if you craft a highly efficient content marketing strategy, you’ll have better returns for your efforts. Now, it’s up to you to decide which among these steps work the best for you.
About the Author
Ann Smarty is the Brand and Community manager at InternetMarketingNinjas.com as well as the founder of ViralContentBee.com. Ann has been into Internet Marketing for more than a decade, she is the former Editor-in-Chief of Search Engine Journal and contributor to prominent search and social blogs including Small Biz Trends and Mashable. Ann is also the frequent speaker at Pubcon and the host of regular Twitter chats #vcbuzz and #myblogu.
