Every marketing plan should include the basics. Think of them as building blocks for the foundation of your marketing. Make sure you outline the following essentials in your marketing plan:
Goals or Mission
What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your 2015 strategy.
If you recently started your business, avoid producing content just because you think you should. You may not be using content effectively — and you don’t have time to waste on tactics that aren’t delivering results for you.
If you’ve been in business for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in 2014. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach.
Target Audience
To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content’s target audience
This is especially important for those who’re starting out and are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to read and convert on.
If you’re an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience? Revisiting your audience parameters each year is crucial to growing your audience.
Types of Content
Most people start out with blog posts, but if you want to venture out and try producing other content pieces, consider which ones you want to make. For instance, if you’ve been doing weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an ebook for all your blog posts would be a one way to offer information in a different format.
Content Management
Have a system in place where you can manage your content. A few vital parts of content management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics
Content Ideas for Your Content Marketing Plan
Maintaining a steady stream of content that’s unique and interesting to your target audience is a challenge. But with a big dose of creativity (and a little help from content idea generators), you can create content that’s not only valuable to your market, but also stands out from the sea of information.
Brainstorming Content Ideas
List content types as this will help you determine what content pieces you want to create, coming up with topics for your content is another challenge you’ll face. Content creation takes time, lots of brainstorming, and research. To help you get started, here are a few brainstorming tips to remember:
1) Let your mind wander.
Brainstorming shouldn’t be restricted; you never know when a great idea is going to come your way. Let your mind be free and relax. Avoid stressing out during the brainstorming session. If you do, it’s time to take a break and come back to brainstorming later.
2) Brainstorm with others.
From your team to consultants, you can brainstorm with other people and bounce ideas off each other. You don’t have to come up with creative ideas on your own, and it’s best if you don’t. When you brainstorm with others, you can see your ideas at different angles as well as your team members’ ideas.
3) Use tools to help you come up with content ideas.
If you don’t have the luxury of brainstorming with others or you’d like another way to brainstorm content ideas, tons of tools are available online to help you create content topics.
Content Forest: Content Forest offers free tools, which include TopContent, KeywordKiwi, and ContentIdeator.
These tools will help you find popular content from your competitors, effective keywords to use in your content, and great content ideas all in one spot.
Important Marketing Dates to Remember
You shouldn’t ignore timely topics. While they may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you get spikes of traffic.
Most people count on incorporating popular holidays such as New Year’s and Easter in their marketing efforts, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates.
Other noteworthy holidays and dates can be included in your content marketing, and you can base your content off these special days.
Organising and Managing Your Content
Knowing how you’ll organize and manage content should be part of your marketing plan, not only the types of content you’ll create.
Another great organisation tool for content marketing is WordPress. A handy editorial calendar, CoSchedule makes it easy for you and your team to organize content and even social media posts.
Conclusion
From building the foundation of your content marketing plan to adding tools to better manage your content, setting up your strategy for the new year won’t be a hassle with this guide. Here’s to your marketing success in 2015!
