Surely you have heard about content marketing so far. You may have had several attempts to apply it for the needs of your business. But in most cases, the results did not justify the resources spent. The reason for this: the success of each content marketing campaign is based on the sum of well-planned activities (solid plan).
In addition we offer you a series of four steps, which if you follow and perform correctly, you will get maximum results.
Investigate
Before you begin to search for content and create a calendar of announcements, you must do research and ask yourself a few questions:
What kind of questions do my clients have? What is their biggest pain right now?
What is my competition?
What types of posts have the best attendance, etc?
How can my posts be better?
Are there any educational gaps in my industry?
Which topics are always “IN” in my area?
What is the basis for which my clients will always be interested?
In order to help you get better answers to previous questions, you can use several tools and strategies:
Buzzsumo – lets you find popular social media announcements, follow and connect with the people they share.
Quora – Search for popular and frequent questions for your industry.
Do you have remarks and a few ideas? Leave them for a moment, because the first thing you will need to do is …
Develop a plan for different channels
Many people link content marketing exclusively to blogging, but it’s not nearly as close to the truth. A solid content marketing plan covers several channels:
Blog posts
Interviews with experts
Webinars
Video content – tutorials, guides, webinar
Case studies
Industry researches and presentations
Contests / Giveaways
Infographics
Resource libraries
Online communities / forums / Q & A platforms
Guest posting, outreach campaigns
Podcasts / audio recordings
You see? There are various options other than blog posts.
But that does not mean that you need to use everyone, unless you have enough resources, of course. For best results, focus on 3-5 that are relevant to your industry and business. To identify the correct ones, ask yourself the following questions:
What does my competition do?
What types of content works best for them?
Which channels do they use? Why?
What goal can be achieved with this channel? What benefits does it offer – traffic, leads, income, additional authority in the industry, etc.?
What would people want to do after they come into contact with the content that is published?
Add these remarks to the previous ones, and you can proceed with the next step.
Make brainstorm for the right ideas
From the components you have “what” and “where”, now it’s time to give them a proper form.
Take a large sheet of paper and a pen and write at least 20 content ideas for each channel you plan to activate.
At the beginning, you may have few ideas that you can write down, but as time goes by you will enlarge the list. In addition we offer you several tools that can help you with the creative part:
HubSpot Topic Generator helps you come up with interesting ideas and topics for further writing.
Banjo finds the most talked / commented / top-ranked news and posts across social networks and the Internet, based on a particular location.
Help Me Write is a community of people who write and share their ideas with others for which a certain ranking is based on the interest of reading. You have to admit that this is a great way to test your ideas and imagine.
Plan the performance of the content
To perfect the ideal content conversion calendar, you need to consider several things:
What time period do you intend to plan ahead? This largely depends on your industry / branch. In many cases, certain topics remain attractive after several months, but if you manage an online marketing agency then SEO strategies will change very often.
Who will perform your strategy? Do you have an in-house team or do you plan to give the performance of an external agency? Make a good analysis of the strengths and weaknesses in both cases.
Combine the information with your previous notes in order to align the overall strategy, and let yourself in action.
Last, but not least, make sure that each team is aware of the deadlines and make sure everyone understands their role. Once you publish your articles, promote the content in every possible way in order to reach the maximum possible reach for potential customers and remember: no one will know how cool content you have, if you do not tell them!