8 Steps For Creating Content Marketing Plan For Small Business

Posted on by solomozone Posted in Content Marketing, Social MediaTagged , , ,

Content marketing Plan is required by businesses for meeting their Marketing and business goals. Create a Content marketing plan in these eight easy steps.

Start  With Your Content Marketing Goals

Start with defining your goals. The goals could vary from building trust with your customers to raising awareness or deepening loyalty with existing customers. The goals should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Timely). Each goal should have a budget assigned to it and check your performance against the budget to achieve the best ROI.

Identify Personas

Build a buyer persona for your audience. Identify the top two personas for customers you wish to target. A buyer persona deals with your customers motivations, pains, trusted sources and process of how consumers consume your content. Based on Buyer Persona, yo can determine how you want to tell your brand’s story to them.

Keyword Research

Identify the most profitable keywords for your buyer persona. Study competition to understand the keywords they are using to target audiences. Use Free keyword research tools to identify the right keywords.

 Content Marketing Planning Sheet
Your blog posts, emails, eBooks, social media posts and podcasts need to fit into a bigger picture. Start with audience personas that you are targeting and create a plan to target each
Points to keep in mind while creating your content marketing Planning Sheet or Calendar:
What are the most often asked questions for each buyer persona? What are the different buying stages?
What is the conversation surrounding your brand or category? Collect all possible information by tracking social mentions, Google alerts and any  other source of tracking information.
What are the preferred content formats? This could be written text, images, infographics, videos, podcasts etc.
When is the best time to publish? Day, Date, Time
What is the best way to reach your audience?
Seasonality and  Holidays
Write and Optimize Your Content

Optimize your content for Search Engines, to ensure that your content can be found. This can be done by optimizing your content for SEO, following copywriting tips and a checklist for your blog posts.

Publish Your Content

Publish your content on all available platforms including blog, forums, LinkedIn and other third-party sites.

 Promote Your Content

Promote your content on Social Media sites, and brand sites. Share teasers of your content with paid search and brand sites.

Measure Refine and Repeat

Measure the performance of your content by mapping the performance for key metrics.

  1. Consumption Metrics

  2. Sharing Metrics

  3. Lead Generation Metrics

  4. Sales Metrics