We’re often asked: what is the difference between a content marketing strategy and a content plan? The way we think about it is this: the strategy dictates the plan. A well-considered content marketing strategy helps to define your goals, set priorities and allows you to plan and react accordingly to get the right results. From the strategy, you can construct a plan and assess the content that needs to be generated to achieve the strategy and set up the tactics needed to meet your goals. Here are some tips on what’s needed for both the strategy and planning stages.
CONTENT STRATEGY
1. What are the results you want to achieve?
Set your goals, such as raised brand awareness, increased loyalty, more organic traffic.
2. Insight
What’s your message? Who’s it for? Why are you creating this content? As well as competitor analysis to identify opportunities, research the content your target audience prefers and where they hang out online to consume it. This will allow you to plan your content marketing specifically for them. Tools like Google’s Keyword Planner or Google Trends can prove incredibly useful to get insight into what’s going on with your audience.
3. Measure success
Measurement and accountability are crucial to understanding what has worked. Look to set metrics and KPIs for your strategy that will help achieve overall business goals, and fit with the wider digital marketing strategy. In turn, this information will feed and shape future activity, setting in motion a continuous improvement cycle, and ensuring the best ROI. Continual performance monitoring of all your content assets, e.g. webpages, blogs, social media posts, videos etc. allows their success to be analysed and if necessary realigned to match your goals.
CONTENT PLANNING
1. Refer back to strategy
Does the content you produce fit with the goals you identified in your strategy? The strategy you set out should be your guide for content creation and implementation. If it doesn’t fit in with this, ask yourself if it should really be part of what you publish or if it can be used in the future instead.
2. Content calendar
The content plan should take into account what your customers need, how it’s delivered over a multitude of platforms, and how it will affect your search engine rankings. Where will it be posted? How is it going to be written? When will it be posted? Planning will enable you to generate reusable content such as imagery and video, ensuring you are getting maximum value for your efforts and adapting your message for your audiences and their needs.
3. Engagement
Making sure the content you produce is meaningful, whether that’s words, graphics or video, creates trust with your audience, establishes you as a thought leader and generates business.
And finally…
With your great strategy and content plan in place, it’s time to start creating that killer content!
If you’d like to find out more about creating a successful content management strategy and plan for your business, get in touch.
