How to Build an Unbeatable Content Marketing Plan

Whether you're just starting out with content marketing or you've been using the same content marketing strategies for a while, your content marketing plan needs to be better than ever for 2015. Why? This year, you've got even more competition -- according to Content Marketing Institute, 70% of surveyed marketers say they are creating more content than they did a year ago. The first step to getting a leg up on the competition is to have a solid, social media marketing for dummies smart content marketing plan in place. If you're having trouble planning for next year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read on. What's your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and you'll have an easier time determining what's best for your 2015 strategy. (Want help figuring out the right goals? Download this goal planning template.) If you recently started your business, avoid producing content just because you think you should. You may not be using content effectively -- and you don't have time to waste on tactics that aren't delivering results for you. If you've been in business for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in 2014. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach. (Pro tip: Now is a great time to align your team's goals with the rest of your organization's goals.) To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content's target audience -- also known as your "buyer persona." This is especially important for those who're starting social media marketing definition out and are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they'll want to read and convert on. If you're an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience? Revisiting your audience parameters each year is crucial to growing your audience.

Important Marketing Dates to Remember

After you've come up with a bunch of ideas, you need to slot them on an editorial calendar. Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen -- they're just as relevant months from now as they are today. That being said, you shouldn't ignore timely topics either. While they may not be social media marketing firm the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you get spikes of traffic. Most people count on incorporating popular holidays such as New Year's and Thanksgiving in their marketing efforts, but you don't have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates. Other noteworthy holidays and dates can be included in your content marketing, and you can base your content off these special days. Knowing how you'll organize and manage content should be part of your marketing plan, not only the types of content you'll create. If you're a HubSpot customer, you can plan, produce, publish, and measure your results all in one place using HubSpot. If you aren't, another option you can use to organize content and manage your campaigns is Workado -- this is a product I built to manage social media marketing firms multiple marketing campaigns. If you're working with a team, everyone can be part of this platform, stay on top of assignments for projects, and communicate with each other regularly.

Social media marketing strategy

Whereas a sales strategy focuses on how to sell your product, the social media marketing strategy goes a step further and draws attention towards what the customer thinks about your product or service and how customer requirements can be taken to development. The techniques to be considered here are from Search Engine Optimisation such as keyword research, monitoring trends to gain a wider image of what is happening in the market using Google Trends. You should also consider using information from your website analytics, for instance, which pages are visited most and in which product customers are more interested. Hence, social media marketing books this gives a clear reason why a marketing strategy should be included in Search and Social Media. Search and Social Media Marketing is now becoming a standard subject in European Business Schools curricula. An additional opportunity social media marketing strategy gives is that you can ask customers directly how you can improve a product that some customers have experienced a problem with. By improving your product based on customer expectation, you are automatically promoting your product for more sales. Social media also provides a great platform for market research. Social Media Marketing from a business point of view is a means to understanding prospective customers through feedback on products and services. Social Media Marketing cannot be separated from other marketing activities. To maximise the effectiveness of social media marketing, integrate other marketing tools such as television, search engine marketing, print etc. As discussed above every business is unique and has a different social media strategy depending on the business sector social media in marketing they are in. However, one factor that should be determined by every business is that whether you are running a marketing or sales experiment, your strategy decision should be tested with a small project to access whether it is effective or not.