Do you have an approach for the content you are going to share on digital channels in 2019?
While social media developments come and go, one component is here to stay — content marketing.
Content is serious business. Smart marketers prioritize time to create inspiring, relevant, empowering, interesting, memorable and impactful content.— Pam Moore
If you’re serious about advertising and marketing your commercial enterprise online, you need a method and a layout to execute it.
A content advertising plan is a roadmap that now not solely tells you what you’re going to create but how you’re going to create it, when you’re going to submit it and how you’re going to promote it.
It helps you create extra meaningful, enticing and sustainable content.
Smart content strategy is fundamental to creating high-quality content — Sonia Simone
According to the Content Marketing Institute, having a documented (i.e. written down) method means:
- You’ll feel considerably less challenged by using each component of content marketing.
- You’ll generally consider yourself maintain your use of all content material advertising procedures and social media channels.
- You’ll be able to justify spending a greater percentage of your marketing budget on content marketing.
Today I choose to share with you my process for creating a content material approach with clients.
You can use this step-by-step manner for your very own marketing at some point in the coming year.
Step #1 Audit 2018 Content Marketing
A content audit permits you to evaluation the content material you have published and seem for opportunities for improvements or content material gaps to fill.
Read: How to Create Successful Content Marketing Strategy 2019
Read: How to Create Successful Content Marketing Strategy 2019
Take a look again at what labored for you this year. Which of the content material (blogs, videos, stay streams, images, etc.) that you created and shared performed the best?
What size of content worked high-quality (long-form or shorter posts?)
Which content bummed?
Pro Tip: Learn from the success of your competition. Run a competitor audit to see which kind of content they’re growing and how regularly are they sharing it.
Do some keyword research
Check Google Analytics for your website to see which key phrases added humans to your site.
If you choose to rank in Google you have to make positive that you’re the use of the right keywords. Brainstorm a listing of appropriate topics related to your business. Then create a list of ten to twenty key phrases around which to focal point your content.
One of the largest errors I come throughout is attempting to rank for customary keywords with a high search volume. Instead, attempt lengthy tail keywords.
Long tail keywords are key phrases or key phrases that are extra specific — and commonly longer — than extra usually searched for keywords. Long tail keywords get less search traffic, however, will commonly have a greater conversion value, as they are greater specific. They allow you step by step to get extra site visitors and to be found by way of new and stimulated audiences.
Pro Tip: Use a device like Keywords Everywhere, a Chrome extension which returns a host of long-tail phrases based on what people are searching for the usage of particular keywords. The Google Keyword Planner inside Adwords is another beneficial device to locate thoughts for content-based totally on key-word search.
Step #2 Identify Your Purpose
Your content method is what connects your business targets and content material marketing. Whichever formats your content material takes, it desires to align with your long-term marketing and enterprise goals.
Without a strategy, you risk developing content on random matters at random times with no clear purpose in mind.
It’s easy to get caught up in the methods of content material marketing, but besides understanding why you’re growing content, you can’t surely recognize what to create for the most effect.
Why Before How
It’s all too effortless to get caught up in the HOW of social media and overlook about the WHY.
I certainly like how Danny Iny describes it.
Which comes first: the photograph or the paint?
It appears like a no-brainer. You need paint to make a picture, so you’d suppose the paint comes first.
But when you want to paint a picture, do you without delay grab your favorite paint color and then attempt to assume of something that you may want to paint the use of that unique color? Or do you determine what need to be in your image first, then pick out the proper shades to paint it with?
Without a vision and a strategy, equipment and strategies are just exclusive paint colors.
Step #3 Set Clear Goals
Arising out of your purpose, placing clear dreams will now not solely propel your method forward, but they will also serve as defined metrics when it comes to measuring your progress.
Describe the specific dreams and outcomes you’re in search of to accomplish with your social media activity. These should be aligned with your commercial enterprise goals.
Read: Types of Content Marketing
Read: Types of Content Marketing
Whichever aim you wish to pursue, make it as certain and unique as possible. The extra trackable your intention is, the less difficult it’ll be in a few months to see if you have carried out it.
Step #4 Know Your Audience
Once you have a clear why your subsequent step is to discover exactly who is going to eat the content you create.
If you prefer to stand out, don’t attempt to attain everyone. Work out the goal target market you can most credibly assist and most without problems reach, and drill into their issues and goals so you apprehend them nearly higher than they apprehend themselves — Chris Garrett
Start through finding facts on your existing audience. Use the Demographics and Interests sections of Google Analytics and the audience analytics aspects contained within Facebook Insights and Twitter to assist you.
Every piece of content that you create have a supposed audience.
When producing content, your quantity one aim need to be to add cost for your community. Content doesn’t work unless it’s targeted. All profitable companies are based totally on their capacity to meet the wants of their audience and content material advertising is no different.
Break your target market personas down into demographics as well as psychographics. Their demographics may also include, their gender, their age, geographic location, income, and maybe their ethnic or religious background. The psychographic side represents their feelings and thoughts.
The key here is to really comprehend your target audience and their pain-points. Start speaking their language when it comes to the trouble you’re solving, and how they relate to their ache points. Write content that especially solutions their particular wants and the types of solutions they’re searching for.
Step #5 Determine Your Content Format
This is a two-part strategy. Firstly, you want to go to the place your target audience is consuming content.
Once you’ve identified who your target audience is, map this information to social media behavior.
Identify how, when, and where they like to have interaction with content, and then diagram to create content material on your audience’s desired platform (each platform lends itself greater naturally to precise types of content) and preferred way of consuming content.
Secondly, you want to take inventory of your very own resources.
What interior and external assets will you want to run your content material marketing engine? Do you have time to write normally for a blog? Can you create videos or podcasts? Which of your already high-performing content material can you repurpose?
Pro Tip: Consider publishing content material on Medium. This has been a significant source of readers for me as you can see from the stats below. These are some of my top-performing articles on Medium over the past 12 months.
Step #7 Build A Content Calendar
A content planner or calendar defines your publishing schedule for weeks or months in advance, giving you a quick overview of your content material schedule. — Constant ContentA content material calendar helps you hold a constant content material production schedule, enabling you to design for seasonal content and annual campaigns.
It additionally helps you supply an extra balanced combine of content formats, such as articles, videos, and social posts.
Create a calendar to map out content ideas aligned with 2019 vacation trips and seasonal trends and events. Use vacations as hooks for content and promotions. Often, this content is evergreen so that you can use it yr after year.
Add your keywords from Step #1 to keep you focused.
Pro Tip: Google Trends which will exhibit you a plan of how interest has increased/decreased over time for a topic in your area or city.
Step #8 Plan Your Promotion
Content has no value except it’s shared. You want to format for how you will connect your content with the proper audience at the right time.Instead of treating content amplification as something you solely do after the content is created and published, you ought to contain advertising strategies into the content planning and creation process.
Rand Fishkin, the co-author of Art of SEO, goes so some distance as to say: Before you ever create content, I urge you to ask the crucial question: Who will assist increase this and why? If you don’t have a great answer, a precise list of people, don’t create it.Pro Tip: You will need to price range for paid advertising, in particular, if you want to make an effect on Facebook where organic attain has steadily declined over the previous few years.
Step #9 Measure Results
How do you comprehend if all the time you’re investing in social media advertising is paying off?You don’t recognize unless you put a system in the region to measure to analyze your efforts.
Use built-in equipment such as Facebook Insights and Twitter Analytics, third-party tools, and measurement of social visitors and conversion with Google Analytics to tune and measure your progress.
- Traffic. How many weblog or website site visitors did you obtain from social media?
- Engagement. How many likes, clicks, and shares are your posts receiving?
- Conversions. How many blog or internet site visitors are completing conversion steps?
