Content planning is an important phase for your marketing campaign. It’s the basis for the rest of your online marketing efforts, so any error in your content planning will recur in your execution. To get started on the right path, we recommend that you spend a good amount of time considering these factors:
Who is your target audience? How you can you address it online?
Identifying your target audience will always be the first step in regard to your marketing campaign. None of this will matter if you’re talking to the wrong demographic.
When it comes to content planning, identifying your target audience also requires that you consider which platforms you’ll market on. If you’re marketing to teens, for example, then you might find Snapchat more effective than Facebook or Twitter. Likewise, if you’re targeting an older demographic, then you might want to focus more on email marketing than social media.
How will you test your content?
Testing is an incredibly important aspect of online marketing that many businesses still skip over. How will you know if you’re posting an engaging Tweet or Facebook status if you don’t test it beforehand? You can’t, and approaching marketing this way is like playing poker for fun against a professional gambler.
There are a few ways you can test your content. A recent Search Engine Land article suggests using tools that provide statistical reports regarding your content:
“Tools like BuzzSumo help you predict if your content ideas will work by studying how they worked for others. Use it to find out what kind of content about a specific topic or keyword is more engaging to your audience. Look at statistics to see how many times it has been shared with others on social media like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or LinkedIn. That information helps you plan future content.”
Then there’s the issue of what you should test. In relation to content planning, you can test short vs. long form content, written vs. visual vs. interactive content, informative vs. promotional content, and serious vs. light-hearted content. A lot of this will depend on your business and your target audience, so don’t be surprised if your friend’s content plan looks completely different from yours.
How will you scale your efforts?
Early success isn’t always indicative of an effective content plan in the long-run. In fact, it’s common for businesses to have success early on with their content and then give up when diminishing returns set in.
The problem here is that not all businesses consider their strategies in the long-run. For example, you might be able to handle content creation on your own at the beginning, but will you be able to a year from now? Will you have enough time to write blogs, emails, and ebooks all by yourself and still run your business as normal?
In all likelihood, you won’t. That’s why this recent Small Business Trends article suggests considering how you’ll scale your marketing efforts.
“When attempting to increase traffic, most businesses focus on increasing the volume of their content marketing strategies. Small enterprises may be better off scaling their reach, though. This ensures you’re making the most of current creation strategies without increasing staff demands.”
You can scale your efforts by curating content, repurposing your original content, and getting outside help for content creation. All of these tactics will save you time and increase the ROI of your online marketing campaign.
If your content plan is unsustainable, inaccurate, or misaligned, then your marketing campaign will be too. Taking care of the factors mentioned above will fix imbalances in your strategy. To talk more about content planning, or anything else, contact us today.
