How to Create a Content Marketing Plan in 10 Simple Steps

Content marketing requires proper planning. Talented creators and writers creator can produce fantastic and engaging content all day long, but without clear planning behind its distribution, its audience, and its purpose, their efforts are likely wasted.

Each piece of content you produce should have a clear and specific purpose, based on data, as part of a strategy with measurable short-term and long-term targets.

At the end of the day, it’s about getting results. This article shows you how to create and implement an effective marketing content plan for your own brand, or as a content marketer.

Why do you need a content marketing plan?

Just like building a house, you need to start from the foundations before building the walls and finally a roof. What’s more, the effort you put in t the planning stage will pay off with a sturdy and well-built content strategy.

A content marketing plan is a well-documented strategy for reaching the target audience, with any of the following goals:

• Brand awareness
• Audience education and PR information
• Lead nurturing
• Lead conversion
• Improved sales

Learning how to create a content plan and implementing the strategy is fundamental for accomplishing business goals, from brand awareness to lead conversion.

What’s more, creating a content plan is crucial for building a sustainable and profitable business that precisely addresses your prospects’ pain points. When your target audience feels connected to your content, they’ll make decisions that favor your marketing goals.  

Implementing your plan using a content marketing planner will help make your business’s marketing easier and more efficient. You’ll be able to identify where your audience is in the content funnel and tailor content to meet their needs.

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10 steps to Create an effective content marketing plan

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With more than 62 percent relying on content to make buying decisions, it is imperative to learn how to create a content marketing strategy. These 10 content amplification tips will go a long way in improving your overall content marketing program.

1. Set goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

The first step in content marketing planning is setting goals, mainly because it takes out the typical hurdles many marketers are unable to cross. For instance, creating content marketing campaigns without a definite goal will lead to quick burnout and insignificant ROIs.

To set goals specific to your business and develop your content creation plan, you can take a cue from the example content marketing plan and goals below:

• Brand awareness via content distribution channels relevant to your business niche
• Lead generation and customer acquisition
• Building trust and loyalty to your brand
• Planting your flag on search engines, since SEO offers a form of “winner takes all” advantage.
• Better customer engagement
• Increased content ROI and more sales of products and services

2. Spell out the basics (Audience and keywords)

After defining your goals clearly, you need to pinpoint your target audience even if you already know how to write a content plan. Identifying your audience helps you focus on what works for your specific target market.

These tips can help you identify your audience quicker:

• What are their pain points?
• What are their interests?
• What is their age range and behavior?
• Which content formats most appeal to them?
• When are they most active?
• Have they used a similar product as yours, and how did they react to such products?

Aside from knowing your specific audience, you need to determine the keyword that best describes your offer to your target audience. For instance, if you sell gift baskets, you would want to use keywords like:

• Gift basket for sale
• Affordable gift basket for sale
• Buy a quality gift basket
• Where to find a high-quality gift basket

If your target audience is in a specific location, you may use keywords that mention the precise area. For example, if your target audience lives in Miami, your keywords may be

• Gift basket in Miami.
• Buy gift bags in Miami
• Discounted gift basket in Miami
• Buy a gift basket in Miami for less than $40

3. Research competitors’ content

Competitor research involves analyzing your competitor’s content strategy to discover its content marketing strengths and weaknesses. But first, you need to identify your main competitors and analyze their content.

You can pinpoint your competition by searching for keywords that relate to your business. The results that turn up are most likely competitors in your industry. You can then study their strategy using content analytics tools.

Preferably, use an SEO tool , which provides multiple content metrics that can reveal your competitors’ content marketing strengths or weaknesses. You can build on the information derived to supersede your competitors’ content marketing.

4. Audit your existing content

The typical blog lifetime value is about two years. The lifetime values for social media posts, emails, and other forms of content are smaller. Based on these facts, it makes sense to review your content regularly.

But aside from the lifetime value, it’s vital to also check the relevance of your posts to your business. It’s possible you may have created content without paying attention to the content marketing strategy template you’re using.

When auditing your content, you may have to delete some of your old content that offers zero value to your business. In most cases, however, you might only need to tweak existing content to meet basic demands, such as SEO, accuracy of information, and alignment with your audience’s pain points.

5. Identify the best content channels and content types

You must determine the content format most effective for reaching your desired audience.

This will naturally come easy if you have researched and understood your audience’s behavior, interests, and preferences. 

Apart from understanding what is a content plan for your desired audience, your business niche can also significantly affect the correct channels for marketing.

For instance, if you are a product review company, you will be better off using YouTube videos, listicles, comparison articles, and social media posts.

If you have determined the appropriate channels, developing a content marketing strategy for your business becomes relatively easy and also guarantees that your marketing will achieve results.

6. Determine budget, tools, and resources

In content marketing planning, you must prepare your marketing budget ahead and determine the tools and resources you’ll allocate your budget to for maximum results.

See some areas you can allocate your content marketing budget to below:

• Blog maintenance (paying writers, subscription to AI tools, etc.)
• SEO tools (Ahrefs, Semrush, Moz, etc.)
• Content scheduling and management tools
• Social media marketing tools (Mandala AI – we’ll take a closer look at this shortly)
• Video production and graphic design tools

Sneak peek at Mandala AI

Mandala AI is a social media tool helpful for creating content that resonates with your social media audience and gets results. Built into two tailored services, Mandala Cosmos and Mandala Analytics, the platform helps you stay ahead of your competitors by giving you insights into trending titles, content ideas, competitor performance, and AI-driven analytics to measure and take control of your social media growth.

7. Create a content calendar

A content calendar helps you plan, organize, and schedule content creation for your marketing campaigns, making it essential in learning how to create a content marketing strategy. 

High-performing marketers prepare their content calendar weekly, monthly, or even quarterly. By preparing the contents of a marketing plan ahead of time, these marketers make it look easy to generate content consistently and achieve astounding results.

Typically, a content calendar should contain the following information:

• Date
• Topic/Title
• Content description
• Content type (blog, social media post, email newsletter, PR, landing page content, etc)
• Author/Creator
• Target audience
• Distribution channels
• Status/Progress
• Keywords/Tags
• Notes/Comments

Access multiple content marketing examples to help you build an effective content calendar.

8. Craft creative content

The most important part of your content marketing ‘how to’ is writing content creatively. Some marketers have deep copywriting experience and are able to craft contagious content that moves the audience into action.

However, you might need a writer’s help to do all the content creation for you if you don’t have experience with writing engaging, high-quality content. Find a writer within your budget with a track record of getting the job done and delegate the content creation process to them.

In this AI-driven age, you might want to implement AI writing tools in your content creation process. However, note that you’d still need a human writer to give the content a better feel and context.

9. Publish and promote

After editing and proofreading your content, publish it and then dive deeply into promoting the content through relevant platforms. If your content thrives on social media, you can leverage social media ads to boost your content and become more visible to your potential audience.

Another promotion technique you can use is PPC marketing, such as Google Ads, which puts your products at the top of search engines when users make searches related to your keywords.

Although not as effective as paid promotion, you can also encourage internal sharing among your employees to boost visibility to their network also. Plus, you can work with a PR agency to publish your brand when there’s a new offer or service.

10. Track your progress

Measuring your progress and results is an exciting way to keep your marketing on the increase. The best analytics tools will give you insights into where you are falling behind or making progress.

You can use the insights to make quick and informed changes to improve your marketing. It’s even better to use analytics tools like Mandala Analytics, which also gives you insights into your competitors’ performance, allowing you the opportunity to be one step ahead of them in your industry.

Ready to Step Up Your Marketing Content Plan

The discussion on how to content marketing strategy is vital for marketers and business owners to achieve results. As outlined in this article, you can build a solid content marketing plan by setting goals, profiling your audience, determining keywords, leveraging content marketing tools, creating high-quality content, promoting your content, and more.

You are good to go if you implement our recommendations in this post. However, should you need help with your social media marketing strategy, our tools are built to help you win. Mandala Cosmos and Mandala Analytics have helped thousands of businesses in Asia and Europe ace their social media marketing and accomplish desirable results.

You can contact us today to learn how we can help you!