Here are a few tips on creating the perfect content marketing plan:

1. Don’t overcomplicate it

If you’re really stuck when you start out, you are likely to Google. However, one ‘content marketing template’ site promised me that if I answered their quick 100 questions, they’d produce me a 41 page content marketing plan tailored specifically for my needs. Amazing! Whatever next? This was only one example of the many content marketing templates or questionnaires out there that made me stop and think. Is this the right course of action for marketers? Of course, it’s not so much the format that matters, but the thinking that is important.

2. Conduct an audit

Our advice firstly would be to conduct an audit of your messages versus your competition, to map out your messages and positioning. How much of this is topical (for you to maximise opportunities) and how much can you drive the market and media agenda with new ideas and angles?

3. Seek input from the top

Speak to intelligent people (importantly, include the C-suite) at your company to see which are the relevant topics you really may be able to own. Any big statements, calls to action and soundbites? There will be plenty if you go looking for them as well as planting some ideas yourself. Go equipped with relevant questions and themes.

4. What are your customer pain points?

Are you really thinking from outside the company? Any content marketing plan should be a journey for customers and prospects to engage with, with relevant and useful pieces of content or calls to action at each stage. Regardless of the channel, you should think about who will be receiving the marketing and this should cause you to consider new pieces of content and also how segmented your plan needs to be. What groups live in your database? Do they want different pieces of content?

5. Content first, channel second

Now you have your content, you can consider your content distribution methods.

Each of your campaigns needs to be optimised for both outbound Marketing Automation programmes, and inbound PR and social media activities specifically. You will also need to consider which social media channels you will be using and what types of content work on each of those accordingly. Which channels are your competitors using to distribute content? It may sound lazy, but it’s a quick way of augmenting your list and making sure you’re not missing out on anything.

6. Regional differences

Further to the previous point, what regions should you be considering? Are there specific pieces of content you should be developing for specific regions?

7. What about campaign timing?

Firstly, think about the outside world – are there calendar or industry events that will act as milestones or relevant points to carry your content even further? Alternatively, are there events to avoid for drowning out your message?

Your campaigns will tend to be led by PR – for obvious exclusivity reasons. However, the more everything can happen together beyond that, the stronger the momentum you will create.

8. Mapping campaigns

As well as putting pen to paper and using spreadsheets, at some point you are going to want a visual representation of how campaigns will flow – especially if you’re using Marketing Automation. This is probably where all the fancy mindmapping and flowchart tools come in; we tend to use Visio or Prezi.

One of our larger clients has created a Content Wheel, by channel, event, month, customer segment, product launch, etc - it’s pretty impressive stuff. You can do equally well creating a ‘matrix’ via an Excel spreadsheet with rows specifying content type/delivery channel and columns, which provide essential information about each row. For example, for each type of content you can define attributes including author, region and proposed delivery date. Your attributes will be different and more relevant to your business.

9. Share your plan, but don’t let it be death by democracy

Share the plan once written with your management and marketing team – send as an FYI with a deadline for urgent ideas, amends or edits. However, don’t allow it to become a dog’s dinner with everyone’s input – someone has to be in charge. The worst happens in content marketing when everybody wants to have their say, and the worst outcomes here can be either FrankenContent (too much input and butchering and watering down of previously strong ideas and messages) or Death by Delay, where it takes so long to get stuff approved, that by the time it is ready, it is no longer topical.

10. And finally, set KPIs and benchmarks!

How else could you tell if your content marketing plan was a success?

Ideally you will start with a set of existing metrics from previous campaigns so you can show healthy progress. Otherwise, take some industry standard benchmarks (email open rates, Klout scores, PR metrics) and measure against them. You will also need to discuss with the sales team the anticipated outcome from your content marketing efforts, and negotiate what constitutes success.

Ideally you will work it back to the minutiae of detail such as which activities, messages and papers have the most traction (desired outcomes per piece of content), which campaigns led to marketing qualified leads, and which campaign MQLs converted to sales.

This is the important part, and hopefully the piece that will justify your increased investment for the years to come…

 

By Ilona Hitel, MD of The CommsCo. 

Do you have any additional top tips for writing a content marketing plan? Let us know below! 

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