How do brands and businesses capture people’s attention nowadays? They go online, set up social media accounts, develop an e-commerce site, and leverage different online marketing practices, such as SEO (search engine optimisation), email marketing, social media ads, and PPC (pay-per-click). These digital technologies fall under digital marketing and work collaboratively with content marketing, which is “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, drive profitable customer action,” as defined by the Content Marketing Institute. The right content marketing plan makes it possible for brands and businesses to deliver the right message (valuable, relevant, and consistent content) to the right people (clearly-defined audience) at the right time (digital marketing technologies and practices).
However, not all organisations have in-house experts in digital marketing and content marketing. Fortunately, outsourcing to a third party allows firms to benefit from the latest digital marketing tools, economies of scale, and current trends and changes in customer behaviour. Companies also benefit from a content marketing specialist’s experience and knowledge of a content marketing strategy and its essential elements like the ones listed below.
1. Your brand’s personality, voice, tone, and language.
Brand guidelines are rules and standards for your content. The guidelines ensure consistency in brand personality, voice, tone, and language. These guidelines also advise your in-house or outsourced Content Marketer on how to express your brand’s identity properly through content.
2. Your market research.
Historial data (e.g., website traffic), customer feedback, competitive analysis, and the like, provide indispensable insights to your business. Research also helps you and your team prioritise resources and distribution channels where they are most effective.
3. Your target audience profiles or customer personas.
Backed up by your market research and historical data, profiles and personas highlight your customers’ demographics, brand preferences, pain points (i.e., a specific problem that prospective and existing customers experience with your brand or service), and purchase behaviour. Well-crafted profiles help your team produce relevant campaigns and content that resonate well with the intended target audience.
4. Your digital marketing goals and objectives.
Content marketing goals can be as specific as “to set up long-term lead generation” or as broad as “to increase brand authority.” But more often than not, the SMART framework works best where each goal is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Your goals and objectives can also include solutions for the pain points identified in the target audience profiles.
5. Your content production process.
Content can do more than just win attention–it can drive digital sales. But a supercharged content or campaign that drives sales can only happen when an effective production process is in place. The content creation workflow in your content marketing strategy should itemise and detail the budget, people’s roles, production teams, responsibilities of third-party agencies, team competencies, and digital marketing technologies and practices.
6. Your content calendar.
A content calendar is your brand’s editorial calendar. It also identifies the content format (video or photo), the accompanying captions, time of posting, and social media channels. In short, it answers the ‘what,’ ‘when,’ and ‘where’ of past and upcoming content.
7. Your content matrix.
There are different types of content: Core, the best one that showcases your brand’s strengths; Evergreen, content that remains relevant regardless of the season; User-generated, shareable content from fans and followers; and Promotional or Campaign-based, content that uses a mix of push and pull marketing. Each one should be optimised for web search, social media discovery, desktop and mobile devices, and user engagement. Your content marketing strategy should also categorize and schedule these types of content on the content calendar.
8. Your data collection and analysis.
Data points and analysis results pinpoint which content marketing objective needs to be tweaked and which part of the content marketing plan needs improvement. The goal is to collect as much data as possible. This way, you and your team can understand your audience better, study your content performance, and create better content.
Creating content to attract, engage, sell, and inspire brand loyalty always needs a plan and the right person to execute said plan. The right person also knows how all of the essential elements of a content marketing strategy work together. When all parts come together, a content marketing plan provides your business with the best content opportunities that build authentic relationships with prospects and customers.
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