Content marketing has come to stay. We’ve seen totally unknown companies move from obscurity to limelight, we’ve seen businesses turbo-charge their revenue from a meager double digit figures to seven digits using the power of contents. These and other stories confirm to us that content marketing works, but to a newbie – it is a daunting task deciding how to start.
The reason is not far-fetched – there are several wheels to the content marketing machine and most often than not the beginner gets intimidated on mastering these different aspects of the process. But with detailed marketing plans, such as this social media plan template your journey becomes a lot easier.
To help you take your first step in content marketing, here is some guide to follow:
Clearly Define Your Reason
Why do you want to do content marketing? By answering this question you are setting yourself up for some measurably results – since you know what you’re aiming to achieve with your efforts. The benefit of this is that you’re able to direct your attention on those activities that are relevant to your business goals.
Identify Who Your Content is For
It doesn’t make sense providing contents nobody wants- it would just amount to a wasted effort. What to do?
Clearly define who your ideal audience is; in the marketing parlance this is called building out reader persona. To help you started you can answer these questions:
Who would want to read my contents?
Why would they want to read it?
What are they struggling with?
Where can I find them?
Getting as specific as you can with your answers places you in a better position to develop contents that resonates with your audience which gets them to return to you over and over again.
Create an Editorial Calendar
The aim of the calendar is to have some form of structure about your content marketing efforts. It doesn’t have to be perfect initially. However it should provide you with a birds-eye-view of what you should be working on, when you’re due to publish content, the format of the content, topic ideas, platforms to publish what to, and links to those contents.
Figure Out The Best Type Of Content To Produce
The type of content you produce should be dependent on your audience preference. To figure this out monitor the performance of each content type and produce more of the formats that seem to drive more engagements. Content formats include:
- Blog posts
- Inforgraphics
- Podcasts
- Videos
- E-books
- Slideshows
- Pictures
Also, you should note that certain services/products lend themselves more to a particular form of content than others. For instance, a home décor owner will be more interested in pictures than in text-base blog posts.
Outline Your Content Structure
Why is this important? Remember you’ve done your research on the content idea to produce, you have your data, and you are ready to start typing away. Then you forgot something. It happens even to the best of us.
How to deal with this? Define a content structure that lists all important points you want to cover.
Develop, Publish, and Syndicate Contents
After developing your contents and publishing, it’s time to promote and syndicate those contents to your social media channels. Ensuring to maintain a consistent voice over these platforms.
Measure, and Iterate
One thing you must never forget about content marketing is the need to always learn. And to do this you must pay close attention the result you’re getting with your efforts. Measure them, improve where needs to be improved on and repeat what seems to be working.
Content marketing has many parts which must align seamlessly to achieve your marketing objectives and one of them is social media marketing. To make this task easier we have developed a social media plan template you can download for free.
