10 Easy Steps to Create an Effective Content Marketing Plan

Content marketing is a marketing technique that involves the development and distribution of valuable and relevant digital content; video, blogs, social media posts with the aim of attracting and acquiring a targeted audience. The achievement of these goals will obviously require the development of an effective content marketing plan.

Having a strategy is critical in coming up with effective content marketing plan, as without a strategy, success or failure will just be a matter of luck.

According to marketing charts, 64% of businesses say that learning how to build a content strategy is one of their greatest educational needs.

Below are 10 steps that will guide you on creating an effective content marketing plan.

Step 1: Define Your Goals

Having a mission statement sets the tone of what you want to achieve, by focusing on what is important. Your content marketing mission statement should outline who your target audience is, the type of content you’ll use to reach them, and the benefits they’ll get.

Follow this template to write a good content marketing mission statement.

We provide [target audience] with [type of content] to help them [business goals]

Your mission statement typically covers what your target audience will get from you. However, you will still need to outline what your business will get from it, and this is where your business goals come in.

Example of business goals include;

• Garnering more sales and quality leads
• Reduction of your marketing costs
• Improving revenue – as a result of your content marketing strategy
• Increased social media engagement - leading to increased web traffic towards your website
• Public visibility and positive perception – due to the delivery of high-quality content

Step 2: Establish Your Key Point Indicators (KPIs)

It is only by making your goals specific and measurable, will you then be able to achieve them. This requires setting KPIs for your content marketing strategy.

KPIs make it possible to know whether you have achieved your goals by providing milestones you can easily check off when you attain them. These milestones can be specific targets on revenue, sales, web traffic, including and analytics from digital marketing strategies such as email marketing and social media metrics.

Your social media metrics would include indicators on the following over a specific period of time; month, quarter, or year.

• Hitting specific revenue targets
• Signups from your lead generation strategies
• Google SERPs on specific keywords or search terms.
• Invitation to specific key industry events

Step 3: Know Your Audience

Creating an effective content marketing plan requires knowing your target audience, which leads to crafting the most relevant content that converts them. To achieve this, you’ll need:

• Collection of demographic data; email subscribers, social media followers, and website visitors which include: Age, Gender, Education, and Income level
• Receiving and analyzing customer feedback which helps you better understand them
• Creating buyer personas which helps you know the kind of content that resonates with them

Step 4: Perform A Content Audit & Scale up your best content Channel

If your business already has a website or blog that is already populated with content such as; blog posts, podcasts, videos among others, it is advisable that you perform a content audit that will assist you in knowing whether or not it is serving its purpose.

Your content audit process should include comparing your content with that of your competitors to identify gaps and opportunities you would fill. Once you have established where your target audience hangs, you can then proceed to scale it up multiple times.

You can use web analytics applications such as Google Analytics and Buzzsumo for providing analytical data and software applications such as Piktochart and Canva can be used to repurpose content into infographics.

Step 5: Identify Resources and Allocate Tasks

Once you have figured out which content and format is most appropriate, the next logical step is to identify which resources are required and the allocation of tasks. It is at this stage, where you evaluate whether content development and its delivery to relevant platforms will be done in-house or outsourced, physical and digital tools required and the content scheduling process.

There are a number of work platforms where you can source for quality content developers, like Upwork, contently, Fiverr, People per hour among others.

Step 6: Create a Content Calendar

A content calendar is an extremely essential component in creating an effective content marketing plan as it outlines the nature of content to be created and when it will be published on online platforms. There are a couple of ways you would do this. These include:

• Google calendar – simply insert the due date of each individual content piece.
• Productivity and task management tools such as Asana and CoSchedule.

Step 7: Content Development

We have already seen that there are a couple of steps you’ll need to go before embarking on the actual process of creating content. At this step, you’ll already have done your research to know which type of content to create.

The process of content development typically goes through the following stages:

• Researching your content. The skyscraper technique is usually recommended.
• Performing keyword research to identify the focus keywords to use for better SEO
• Choosing your writing style; professional, casual, conversational, etc

Step 8: Distribution and Marketing of Your Content

It's’ at this stage of your content marketing plan that you strategize how your content will be distributed and marketed to your target audience. The following are the number of processes that you would ideally require to perform:

• Setup a content distribution schedule that outlines when and on which social media platform your content will be published.
• Set up an email marketing application such as Mailchimp to distribute the content to your subscribers.
• Use content distribution platforms such as OptinMonster which are extremely effective in distributing content.

Step 9: Measure Results

It is only when you measure results of any strategy, that you get to know if you’re achieving your targets or not. Measuring results will require checking your data against your KPIs for specific milestones, to see whether you’re hitting your targets.

Measuring your results can effectively be done using analytics applications such as Google Analytics, sharing activities using Buzzsumo and OptinMonster’s dashboard will show you the status of your marketing campaigns. Tools such as SEMRush can provide you with your search ranking targets.

Step 10: Revisit and Revise

It doesn’t make sense to measure and track your data if you aren’t going to utilize the results. It is recommended that you set a specific time frame, perhaps quarterly where all those involved in the content marketing processes come together and evaluate the progress so far.

Take note of what worked, what didn’t work, and suggest new strategies to implement in order to be successful next time around.

Wrapping up

Creating an effective content marketing plan or strategy roadmap can be the difference between the success or downfall of your business. The 10 easy steps outlined in this blog post will greatly boost your chances in the creation of an effective content marketing plan.

However, this isn’t an exhaustive list, and I will be glad to hear your thoughts on how to create an effective content marketing plan, which I may have left out.

Share your comments and thoughts with me by commenting in the comments box below.

Abuzar Khan is a web developer, SEO expert, and the founder of SEO Basics. He has over 8 years of web development and SEO experience, working across various businesses.