How to create consistent, clear content to achieve your business and marketing objectives
If you want to get serious about marketing your business, it’s time to turn to your content marketing plan for 2019. Reading that sentence might set alarm bells off, ‘where will I find the time for that?’ ‘what even is content marketing?’ ‘does my business really need it?’. But it’s okay, we’re here to help. Content marketing is vital in promoting your business. Content can be anything from a blog post, a Facebook status or Instagram post, email newsletter, brochure, purchase confirmation email, your website content, and much more. What messages is your business sending out into the world? Are they consistent? Do they really represent your brand, values, goals? We’re here to dig deeper and allow you to develop a clear-cut view, ready to create your 2019 content marketing plan.
Content marketing is the connection between your product or service, and the rest of the world. How you are communicating your brand to audiences. If you want a clear, consistent message, it seems obvious that you need a well thought out plan when it comes to content. Rather than sporadic social media posts and the once a year email newsletter, it’s time to put more thought into content: planning, creating, and promoting.
Planning Your Content
So, where do you find this content?
Before you begin planning your 2019 content marketing plan, you should complete an audit of your existing content. This may be your website content, social media posts, email newsletters, physical marketing material, any way you communicate the message of your brand to the world. By analysing your existing content, you’ll be able to see which content has worked better for your audience, did you receive a better response from a photo of your team with a short, fun, caption, or a long-form educational blog post that you shared? Determine which type of media performed best: text, images, video, gifs, stories or posts. Doing this will help you understand your existing audience, what they respond positively to, and gives an indication of what you should focus on for 2019.
A content audit allows you to see where there’s room for improvement or content gaps that need filling. Perhaps there are forms of content that you’re yet to consider.
There are many different types of content marketing, including:
- Blog Posts
- E-books
- Case Studies
- Templates
- Infographics
- Videos
- Podcasts
- Social Media
Look at your competitors and see the content they’re promoting and how often they’re sharing it.
Do some keyword research
You can check Google Analytics to discover which keywords are bringing people to your website.
While it’s more complex than simply using keywords, one of the many elements influencing your ranking in Google is whether you’re using the right keywords. Create a list of suitable topics related to your business, then turn this into a list of 10-20 keywords around which to focus your content.
Know Your Purpose
Your content marketing plan is the connection between your business objectives and marketing strategy. The content you produce and promote should align with your long-term marketing and business goals.
If you don’t set aside time to create a content marketing plan, you run the risk of producing random content with no clear intention. It doesn’t benefit you or your business as it doesn’t really move any closer to achieving business or marketing goals. The content you create should all have a purpose and that purpose needs to align with your business objectives. If you create a content marketing plan, you can understand how much easier it is for consistency.
Once you’ve identified your purpose, you can set clear goals.
Setting goals can launch your strategy into action. Whichever goals you set, ensure they’re as specific as possible, this allows the goals to be measurable, tracking your progress.
Set SMART goals:
Specific — be specific about what you want to accomplish.
Measurable — how will you measure your success?
Attainable — is your goal attainable and realistic?
Relevant — a relevant goal is aligned closely to your business objectives.
Time Specific — give your goal a deadline. Providing time deadlines creates a sense of urgency.
Once your goals are set, you should revisit them frequently to determine whether you’re on track or if something needs adjusting.
Create Content with Your Target Audience in Mind
Who is going to consume the content you create?
Don’t try to reach everyone. When creating content, you should have your target audience in mind. Each piece of content created should be for an intended audience- it won’t work unless it is targeted.
When creating content, your aim is to add value to the audience. What can you offer them in turn for their time? Why should they choose to consume your content over the endless amount of other content out there? What are you doing to solve their problems?
All successful businesses are based on their ability to meet the needs of their audience and content marketing is no exception.
Break down your audience by creating marketing personas. By doing this, you can create content that is most relevant and useful to your audience.
Here is what to include in your marketing persona template:
Name of the persona
Job title
- Key information about their company (size, type, etc.)
- Details about their role
Demographics
- Age
- Gender
- Salary / household income
- Location: urban / suburban / rural
- Education
- Family
Goals and challenges
- Primary goal
- Secondary goal
- How you help achieve these goals
- Primary challenge
- Secondary challenge
- How you help solve these problems
Values / fears
- Primary values
- Common objections during sales process
Marketing message
Elevator pitch
You may also want to consider things such as:
- Hobbies
- Real quotes from interviews with customers
- Computer literacy
- Where they get their news
- Blogs they read
Creating marketing personas using this template will allow you to better understand your audience and therefore, create purposeful content, based on your content marketing plan, that can propel your business objectives.
You can fill out the marketing persona template using information from Google Analytics, talking to your team, looking at social media research, and by asking your audience questions.
Determine Your Formats
Now that you have a clearer understanding of your audience, you can look at where they go to consume content and direct your energy towards those platforms.
You also need to evaluate the internal and external resources needed to implement your content marketing plan. Is there someone that can regularly write blog posts? Create videos or podcasts? Schedule and post on social media? Do you need to outsource this?
You may already have high-performing content that can be repurposed, say a high-performing blog post on a particular topic that you can repurpose into a video for social media.
Always Gather Ideas
Whether you note them on a notepad, in Google Docs, a spreadsheet, or in your phone notes, create a place for the ideas you gather. Here you can add links to interesting articles, videos, studies, ideas or content to share. You can revisit this for inspiration or as a resource.
Here are a few places to find inspiration when creating content:
Flipboard
Buzzsumo
Keyword Planner
Ubersuggest (keywords)
For headlines or post titles, Impactbnd.com and coschedule.com are useful resources to use.
Create a Content Calendar
A content calendar allows you to keep track of your content. You can add important holidays relevant to your business and plan seasonal content and annual campaigns.
A content calendar also allows you to create a mix of content types, including blog posts, videos, and social media posts.
There are many different content calendar templates available that you can use, or you can create your own. One we find simple to use is the Hootsuite editorial calendar spreadsheet. It’s a basic editorial calendar template, which you can add to as needed. There are plenty of other social media templates available.
How to create an effective 2019 content marketing strategy:
- Complete a content audit of existing content.
- Do some keyword research.
- Know your purpose, set SMART goals.
- Create content with your target audience in mind. Create marketing personas.
- Determine your content formats, use a variety.
- Always gather ideas and inspiration.
- Create a content calendar to manage content effectively.
- Promote content and measure results.
Jezweb Can Create Your 2019 Content Marketing Plan for You
If this is overwhelming, and you’d rather focus on your actual business rather than the promotion of it, we’re here to help. We offer content writing and marketing services, taking care of your content marketing plan for you so that you have more time to focus on your business. From email newsletters and website copy to social media posts, we can create words and imagery that align with your business objectives and engage your audience.
If you’d like to boost your 2019 content marketing strategy, give us a call on (02) 4951 5267.