How to become a rock star? Traditional marketing and advertising are telling the world you are a rock star, while content marketing is showing the world that you are one. In order to succeed in that, a company should deliver the content in all the places where its audience can search for it. If you want to succeed in social media marketing, you need to create a proper plan.
Why does one need a content plan?
With an understanding of business and marketing goals and target consumer personas, it is possible to create an optimized and socialized content plan. Consumers tend to engage with information that is the most interesting, timely, and relevant to them.
Content marketing is not as simple as publishing and distributing what a company thinks potential customers want to see.
A company can translate its understanding of customer needs and business goals into a specific content plan that identifies the relevant content mix, keywords, topics and desired outcomes across the customer buying cycle. An understanding of customer groups helps to gain a sense of how they like to find and engage with online content. The better the alignment of content availability and relevance with customer interests is, the more effective content marketing efforts become at increasing sales and customer satisfaction. Again, a marketing focus on personas can also help to create a more targeted and effective content plan.
Persona-guided content is considered to be more relevant and useful, and that is why it is appealing for both search engines and customers. But good content quality is not a solution. The quantity of quality content which is relevant and easy to find inspires readers to take actions.
So, based on the needs, pain points, or goals of the ideal customer persona, a company can identify whether appropriate content already exists. If sufficient content does not exist, it should be incorporated into the content plan for creation. The point is that a company can easily map its customer needs (e.g., “How to succeed in influencer marketing in 2018?”) to specific content such as a blog entry or a service page will help this persona along in influencer marketing.
How to build a content bank?
There has to be some kind of order and strategy in place to achieve beneficial results. For example, an editorial calendar is vital for bringing together customer needs and solutions provided by the company’s products or services into a schedule of useful content and media creation. Thus, any company should create a plan for building up a content bank or inventory that will help to address many of the common themes and problems that the target audience may encounter.
The purpose of these calendars is to secure a steady stream of fresh content consistently into the future. They provide focus and planning in development efforts and remove the pressure of constantly developing content on the fly. They also ensure the content is relevant and suits the needs of content producers, readers, and advertisers.
To create one, a marketer should understand the communities and individuals the company is trying to reach. The insights from this understanding can be transformed into topics and keyword ideas. After that, relevant search keywords describing the brand, products, or services along with the relevant topics of customers’ interest on the social web are analyzed in terms of popularity and competitiveness. The results are then synthesized and organized into an editorial calendar.
How does a content plan look?
Here are some components that you might include in your content plan:
- The channel (LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.)
- The persona (Whom are you targeting?)
- The goal (Are you trying to boost sales, tell about a new product launching soon or create a better consumer experience?)
- Content type (Video, text + picture, infographics, etc.)
- Structure (How does a general post look like?)
- Tone (Playful, sarcastic, serious, etc.)
- Channel integration (How will your channel work with other channels?)
- Desire action (What do you want a reader to do? Go to your website or maybe follow your social media account?)
This way, you will be able to invest your time into actions that actually serve your marketing purpose and help you achieve your goals.
