Early in the year is the perfect time to do plenty of planning and goal setting for your business, so you know where to direct your time, energy, and money in 2022. In particular, now is a great time to plan out your next moves regarding content marketing.
A crucial part of effective marketing operations for any venture is content such as blogs, articles, website details, advertisements, social media posts, newsletters, emails, and more. However, many entrepreneurs handle this side of their business ad hoc, working things out and trying things as they go with no clear direction.
You’ll get much better results, though, if you put together a comprehensive content marketing plan for you and your team to follow throughout the year. Here are some tips for creating an excellent strategy to help you boost traffic and leads, engage customers, showcase your expertise, generate sales, and increase profits.
Get Clear on What You Want to Achieve
First, determine what you want to achieve with the content you create. Part of developing a solid plan is clarifying where you’re trying to go with your business and how marketing content can help you get there. For instance, you may be keen to bring in new leads, get more repeat sales from current customers, boost conversion rates, or generate more referrals, among other things.
You could have many different goals in mind and varying outcomes for different content, which is fine. Just be sure to take the time to understand what you want the content to do for your business so you can keep focused on this as you develop it.
Nut Out Specific Target Markets
The next step is to confirm which target markets you’re creating content for. You need to know the prime audience for each piece and what you hope they take away from it. You might want consumers to feel inspired or motivated, become informed, get entertained, feel a connection, or have another reaction.
When you know a specific persona type to develop content for, you’ll find it easier to focus your marketing plan in a way that caters to these people. Plan out your content for the year, so it addresses the audience you’re targeting. You must understand the approximate age, occupation, location, and income level of those you want to engage with your content.
It also helps to know their shopping habits, hobbies, family structure, and other factors so you can tailor and publish content accordingly. You’ll better see which details to include or focus on and understand the best content types to opt for, such as blogs, social media posts, video tutorials, whitepapers, reports, newsletters, and the like.
Being sure about who you want to engage with each piece of content will make it simpler to decide where to distribute creations, too, such as on social media, your website, via email, in magazines or newspapers, TV, blogs, forums, etc.
Clarify Your Point of Difference
Another factor in developing a useful content marketing plan is clarifying your organization’s point of difference. You need to know how you stand out in the market and what you offer to customers that your competitors don’t. All of your content needs to, in some way, get this unique selling proposition (USP) across so that it has a greater chance of getting attention and prompting people to take action.
Your messages will stand out when you can showcase your firm’s unique viewpoint and how you can address pain points or provide benefits to shoppers. As you develop a marketing plan, think about what your venture does differently that you can highlight in content of various types. For instance, your USP could stem from the specific customers you target, where or how you sell, the products or services you offer, the price points you charge at, or the level of customer service you provide.
Anything you can do to get people noticing, reacting to, and remembering your content will make it much more effective and give you a better return on investment as a result.
Put Together Step by Step Plans and Processes
When it comes to creating the specifics of your content marketing, get into as much detail as possible. Develop step-by-step plans and thoroughly laid out processes for you and your team to follow when creating content. This will reduce the likelihood of missing vital elements or your team being on different pages in some way.
Plus, being thorough here will help you spot places where you’re going to need assistance to put your marketing plans in action. For example, you may need to hire graphic designers, writers, tech consultants, marketing or advertising agencies, professional speakers, or other external help. This need is something to plan and budget for from the start.
Your marketing plan will be a flexible document that you change and update as needed. However, spending plenty of time developing it will give you a solid basis to work from and reduce the likelihood that you don’t complete much marketing because you’re not sure where to start. It’s never too late to put together a comprehensive document, so begin as soon as you can.