Build a Content Marketing Plan in 10 Steps

As a marketer, you are aware of content marketing, but are you aware of its potential effectiveness across the entire client journey? Although many marketers write blogs, landing pages, or social media post copy, effective content marketing necessitates a multifaceted, strategic approach—and, most importantly, it depends on knowing your target audience.

After discussing what content marketing is, we’ll go over 10 steps to help you create a winning strategy, and how collaborating with an SEO company in London can help you with content marketing strategy.

Content marketing: What is it?

Creating and disseminating material that your audience finds valuable is the foundation of content marketing, a strategic marketing technique.

1. Establish goals

Setting goals that consider every stage of the funnel is the way forward in this situation. This will enable you to identify what information is needed to push them to the next level and comprehend the motivation at each stage. Establish KPIs that are pertinent and significant to your company for every step.

2. Recognize your target audience

You must know who you are speaking to and what they require before you can create any content. You must create target buyer personas in order to do it. This kind of data is available in Google Analytics (GA4) to help you analyze your audience.

After identifying your target personas, you must determine their need states, which might be logical (money gain), social (FOMO or vanity), or emotive (desire or fear). You can then start producing content to meet their needs.

3. Be relevant

The sweet spot for information is relevance! It’s the meeting point of your audience’s desires and your own ideas.

Being an infographic: Many brands struggle to understand this aspect of the content strategy. Instead of concentrating on what the customer needs and wants to hear, they talk about what they want to say.

However, how can you know how to be audience-relevant? Here are a few places to start:

Research on keywords
Listening to others
Make use of leverage SEO
Examine internal data and do A/B testing on the content.
Consult your clients
Monitor rivals

4. To increase sales, use the content marketing funnel

The customer journey can be significantly impacted by content marketing. According to the McKinsey model, the four phases in a cycle as consumers choose what to buy.

You should employ several channels and material at every point of the journey:

Take into account: Increase brand awareness and interaction with interesting content and well-optimized SEO.
Evaluation: Encourage influencer participation and consumer endorsements to increase brand advocacy.
Purchase: A more well-known brand may result in more brand-led searches, a higher click-through rate, and a lower cost per click.
Post-purchase: Use captivating content to increase upsells and renewals by delivering the appropriate message to the right audience at the right moment.

5. Determine the cornerstones of your content.

Both brand and commercial drivers must be incorporated into the content pillars. Using a hub-and-spoke arrangement to increase website traffic could be one pillar and raise metrics like leads and sales as well as keyword rankings.

6. Create a push-and-pull strategy

Brands find the push-and-pull method to be an effective way to interact with customers. Combining the two can influence clients to buy from you, but you must strike a balance: If you push too hard, you risk turning off potential buyers; if you pull too softly, they won’t ever stop to read your material. What are some good ways to employ the Push-Pull strategy?

Push: The goal of this tactic is for a brand to brag about a product or service. For instance, promoting your content on all of your social media platforms and through your podcast or webinar series. The objective is to record information by downloading, registering, or gaining followers.

KPI = Community development or advocacy.

Pull: The goal is to draw visitors to your website, product, or service and cultivate devoted clients who will promote you. This depends on referrals that point to your material (blog or otherwise), as well as website and SEO optimization. KPIs include data collection, domain authority, page rank, and website traffic.

7. Employ a hub-and-spoke architecture

You can create targeted material around a wide topic by using the hub-and-spoke paradigm. In addition to helping you improve search ranks, traffic, and KPIs like conversions, leads, and sales, it’s a fantastic method to establish authority and relevance on a topic or topics.

8. Produce material for data capture

Content that requests information from users is known as data capture content. Promoting worthwhile and pertinent material on high-performing websites or blogs is crucial since you can be sure that traffic will be directed there.

Data capture content types include:

Infographics and E-books
Expert-led webinars based on original research
Real-time videos
Comprehensive manuals
Models
Toolkit Examinations

9. Use advocates to boost your brand popularity

Advocates, or ambassadors, are a potent approach to break through the clutter and draw attention to your brand because consumers are less likely to trust advertising (64% of consumers take steps to avoid adverts on free and ad-supported video services).

You may increase brand awareness with three different kinds of advocates:

Influencers: While many brands cannot afford well-known celebrity influencers, micro-influencers or small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs) might be useful because of their greater and more genuine engagement rates.
Devoted clients: Because they have used the product, use customers to promote the brand through reviews or testimonials. Employees may also be excellent brand ambassadors.
Referrals: Because they come from a reliable source, referrals are quite effective. Reward clients who recommend friends.

10. Establish KPIs to gauge success

Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is crucial for tracking the effectiveness of your content marketing. It’s the only way to find out what material is generating revenue and determine whether your content marketing approach is effective.

KPIs for content include, for example:

Traffic to the website: New versus recurring visitors
Spending time at home
Sign-ups or downloads (data capture)
Bounce Rate
Conversions
Backlinks
Shares

Bottom Line

In conclusion, content marketing is a powerful tool that can drive meaningful engagement and conversions when applied strategically across the customer journey. Partnering with a digital marketing agency can further enhance your efforts, providing expertise in crafting and executing comprehensive content strategies tailored to your business needs.