Content marketing strategy, content plan, and content strategy. People most of the time use these terms interchangeably, but each of them is different.
What is a content marketing strategy?
At its core, your content marketing strategy is your “why.” Why you are creating the content, who are you helping, and how it will help your audiences. Typically, organizations use content marketing to attract an audience and to attain at least one of these results that include better customers, lower costs, and increased revenue.
What is content strategy?
On the contrary, content strategy delves deeper into the “formation, publication, and governance of useful content.” Not that content strategy often goes much beyond the scope of content marketing strategy, as it helps businesses to manage all the content they have.
What is a content plan?
In contrast to the other two, a content plan is strategic. It records the specifics of how you will execute the strategy, and who in your team will handle each task. It is vital to understand that you need a content marketing strategy before you develop a content plan. Think of it as a marketing plan that exclusively relates to content; therefore, it must include details like the important topic areas you will cover, what type of content you will create, how and when to share your content, and the specific call-to-action that you will use.
Importance of creating a content marketing strategy
Yes, it is important. Different studies have proved that you not only need a content marketing strategy, but you must document it too. Those with a documented content marketing strategy:
1. Are more likely to consider themselves efficient at content marketing
2. Feel less challenged with each aspect of content marketing
3. Usually, consider themselves more effective in their use of all content marketing techniques and social media channels
4. Were able to justify spending a high percentage of their marketing plan on content marketing
Points that should be included in a content marketing strategy
Consider content marketing strategy as an outline of your business and customer requirements and a detailed plan for how you will use content to address those requirements.
While there is no definitive template for creating a content marketing strategy- each one will be unique as per the business- there are mainly five components that a content marketing strategy must include. These are:
Your business case for revolutionizing with content marketing- By communicating your reasons for developing content, the risks involved, and your idea of what success will appear like, you are likely to attain executive support for your strategy- and to attain permission to make a mistake as you figure out what works best for your business.
Your business plan for content marketing- This covers the objectives you have for your content program, the special value you are planning to offer through your content, and details of your business. It must outline the opportunities and obstacles that you may come across while executing your plan.
Your content maps and audience personas- This is where you define the specific audiences for whom you will develop content, what their requirements are, and what their content engagement cycle might seem like. You may also want to create content you can deliver throughout the customer’s journey to move closer to their objectives.
Your brand story- In this, you characterize your content marketing in terms of what messages and ideas you want to communicate, how those messages are different from the competitors, and how you look at the landscape growing once you have shared them with your customer.
Your channel plan- This must include platforms that you will use to tell your story, what are your criteria, procedures, and objectives for each one, and how you will connect them so that they develop a cohesive brand conversation.
Here, we are discussing a few steps to develop and execute a content marketing plan that will help to grow your business without wasting much time and money.
ü Set your mission and goal- One of the important content marketing tips is to fix a mission statement. This is a brief statement that makes it simpler to focus on what is important- and what is not- while developing your content so that your content marketing strategy remains on track.
A content marketing mission includes:
1. Your target audience
2. The content you will use to reach your audience
3. Benefit they will achieve
Create your KPIs- One of the best ways to achieve goals is to make them measurable and specific. This means setting key performance indicators for your content marketing plan.
The KPIs will help you to know when you have attained your objectives by offering milestones you can check. They will include what you plan to attain in terms of sales, revenue, SEO, traffic, and various aspects of online marketing like social media and email marketing metrics.
Know your customers- As discussed earlier, for a successful content marketing strategy, you must be clear about who your customer is so that you can create the right content through which you can reach them. There are specifically three actions that you must take.
1. Collect demographic data
2. Achieve customer feedback
3. Develop buyer personas
Evaluate your current position- Many businesses already have content. This includes content that is on your blog and podcasts, social media account, and videos. This is the reason why the next step is to find out whether the content is helping you to meet your objectives.
ü Find out the best content marketing channel
As you work through this procedure, you will start to get a sense of where your customer is hanging out, and where you have a successful online presence. It is better to focus on what is working and expand from there, instead of trying to do everything at once.
ü Decide on different types of content
Next, think about the types of content you need to write. There are some common types of content that every content marketing strategy must include. Most successful content marketing strategies depend on having the main core of content published on your website which can be repurposed and shared on other websites.
So, blogs are an important part of your content marketing mix, and they still deliver the best results. Preferably, your blogs will be actionable, shareable, and valuable, and may include a wide range of articles.
ü Distinguish and allocate resources
Now that you know what kind of content you are planning to write, for whom it is, and where you are planning to share, it is significant to ensure that you have everything you need to deliver the best content marketing strategy. This involves answering questions like:
· Who is responsible for creating and maintaining content?
· What physical, human, or digital tools and resources do you need to develop the content?
· What will your publishing workflow look like?
What resources and tools do you need?
Next, find out how you are going to generate the content. Your content generators might include:
· Experts in podcasting, video creation, and graphic design
· In-house content generators
· Freelancers
Design a content calendar- As a part of your content marketing strategy, you must know exactly when you want to publish your content on each of the platforms you want to utilize.
Lack of planning is an important content marketing mistake, so it is important to use a content calendar to schedule your content. There are different methods to do so.
For instance, you can make use of Google Calendar and just put the due dates for each piece of content there. That works quite well, mainly if you are not publishing too much content.
These are some of the important steps involved in creating a content marketing plan. Follow these and please let us know in our comment section how the result was.