Content marketing is the biggest “trend” in digital marketing today. Ninety-three percent of B2B companies claim they use some sort of content marketing strategy in their marketing efforts. What’s surprising? Of these businesses, less than 10 percent say their content marketing is very effective in producing the results they expected.
Why is that? The most common reason is simple: There’s no strategy.
Anyone can write a blog post and put it on the company website. With tools like WordPress, blogging has become pretty easy to manage. But that’s not enough. You need a strategy that helps you create unique content to serve your audience well. That takes time and diligence.
There are three steps to creating a content marketing plan:
- Determine how you’re going to create content.
- Decide how you will promote that content.
- And then identify what resources you’ll need.
Many companies think content marketing is as simple as posting a weekly blog and sharing it on social media. But for your content marketing strategy to produce the results you want, you’ll need to do much more.
When creating your content plan, you need to determine what topics you want to cover, how many pieces of content you want to post every month, and what platforms or mediums you want to use to share those ideas. Think outside the box to ensure you’re creating fresh content that’s both informative and entertaining to your followers.
Promoting your content is the next step, and the most important. It’s better for you to have less content and promote it well than to have a wide variety of content with no strategy to promote it. You can use social media, email campaigns, influencer partnerships, and other tactics to engage your audience.
Finally, you need to allocate the right resources to your content strategy. Will you be spending more on digital ads to get more clicks or social engagement? Will you want to hire a person or team to manage your content marketing, or will you outsource it to another company? Content marketing isn’t free, and it isn’t easy. You need to prepare for the extra expense and effort if you want to be successful.
A strong, well-informed content marketing plan will do wonders for your overall brand awareness and consumer engagement. To learn more about content marketing strategies, visit our Resource Center.
