How to Create a Content Marketing Plan
Content for the sake of content, while it might initially attract some attention, ultimately won’t be effective. Your content marketing plan should be considered a strategic activity. It needs to complement your other forms of marketing. If your other marketing tactics are driving traffic to your website, then a good, relevant content will keep that traffic engaged. If your content isn’t relevant to your potential leads, those readers will quickly bounce from your website. That means they’re going to click on something else, most likely one of your competitors. Ultimately, you should view your content marketing plan as a strategic asset for engaging readers.
Creating a content marketing plan is certainly different than more traditional approaches. However, it allows you to drive traffic from multiple avenues simultaneously. A good content marketing plan helps you build relationships with your potential leads. That creates consistent brand awareness and loyalty. Additionally, it sets your business apart from your competitors as a trusted authority in your industry.
The foundation of strong content is consistency. First, you need to decide the story that you want to tell. Who is your target demographic, and what appeals to them the most? Is the content that you’re building around that story unique and valuable? Identify the storytelling aspect of your brand first. This is fundamental to engaging that target demographic because it appeals to people’s emotions. That emotional appeal keeps them coming back for more.
Create a Content Marketing Plan That Works With SEO Strategy
After you’ve decided on your content marketing plan, you should be ready to apply that strategy to your search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. While SEO is a constantly evolving, some of the fundamental aspects essentially remain the same. However, it is important to remember that what worked last year, or even just a few months ago, might not work anymore. Thus, SEO is something you should be looking at daily.
The first step for a strong SEO strategy, as mentioned above, is consistently creating unique, engaging, quality content. For each piece of content that you publish, you need to focus on the most searchable keywords. Using the same terminology, as well as similar keywords, throughout multiple pieces of content helps search engine algorithms recognize what topics your website addresses more easily. This, in turn, helps you rank higher and allows your target demographic to find you more easily.
Building in links to social media and social media also increase your search engine rankings. Consistent and frequent postings to social media assets such as a blog helps to keep your content fresh. This helps search engine algorithms to recognize that your content and SEO keywords are currently relevant.
Use a Content Marketing Plan for Social Media Marketing
Once you understand and develop your content marketing plan and SEO strategy, you can begin to build a solid social media presence. However, in order to effectively implement social media strategy, you need to understand some of the fundamentals that govern social media marketing.
First and foremost, you need to do some research. Once you’ve identified your target audience, seek out their content. Learn what they value, what’s most important to them. Once you’ve established the type of content your target audience is consuming, you can tailor your own content to suit their needs.
It’s very important to remember that your content needs to brand focused. A haphazard mix of anything and everything that applies to your business is ineffective. Don’t forget about the story that you want to tell. Keep your content focused and relevant to the most important aspects of your business.
Social media marketing strategies and content marketing really rely on the quality of your content. While having a lot of content is certainly helpful, the quality of your content is simply more important than the quantity. It’s preferable to have 500 readers who frequently engage with you and share your content on their own social platforms than it is to have 1,000 readers who connect with you once and then never come back.
Ensure you have a Content Marketing Plan for PPC Marketing
Pay-Per-Click marketing is a form of marketing through which you pay a fee every time someone clicks on one of your ads. Instead of acquiring visitors to your website organically, you’re paying to increase the visitors to your website.
Google AdWords is the most popular platform for PPC marketing. Users bid on the keywords that are most relevant to their business They ideally pay a fairly trivial fee each time someone clicks on one of their ads. It’s important to understand that Google selects bid “winners” based on a combination of factors. This includes the relevance and the quality of their ad campaigns, the foundation of which depends on keywords. Basically, Google is assigning a quality score based on the relevance and quality of the advertising that you pursue using the AdWords platform. This quality score increases your rankings on Google. That should increase the click through rate to your website while simultaneously decreasing the cost of each click.
Your Content Plan Should Consider Inbound Marketing
Inbound marketing combines content marketing plan, social media marketing strategy, and search engine optimization strategy to repeatedly engage your leads. This combination approach to your content marketing plan builds credibility and trust in your brand. It entices your ideal prospective leads by offering quality content that emphasizes your products or services.
For inbound marketing to be effective, you need to develop a specific strategy. First you create and publish the targeted content. Next, you need to consider the life cycle of your inbound marketing campaigns. How are you planning to transition prospects to visitors, visitors to contacts, and contacts to customers? This essentially allows you to learn more about your leads. That way you can tailor your content to better appeal to them.
A content marketing plan, SEO strategy, social media marketing, PPC marketing, and inbound marketing ultimately work together to create a systematic approach to your overall marketing plan. You can start by learning the basics of these five approaches. Once you master these basics, you can refine your methods. This refinement makes it far easier to keep up with changes and current trends in the digital marketing world. A cohesive and comprehensive digital marketing strategy will increase your results and your profits. That’s what your business needs to be successful.
If your business feels this is to much to bear then consider MicroD on of the best content marketing agencies to help! Contact us today.
