I love St. Patrick’s Day.
I’m only about 5% Irish, but I’ve always been fascinated by Irish mythology and history, so of course I always take advantage of an excuse to celebrate the tiny bit of Irish heritage I have.
I also love the whole idea of “the luck of the Irish”. Just think: the Irish were conquered by the British, had their language and culture all but eradicated, were dealt tax laws that disadvantaged them to the point of poverty and starvation, suffered through a famine that all but wiped out the one crop the harsh tax laws let them eat, forcing many of them to flee to America, where they were discriminated against, denied jobs, and the jobs they could get were often low-paying and/or dangerous. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And yet people still brag about “the luck of the Irish,” and I find that to be the most optimistic thing I’ve ever heard.
Most small business owners don’t have to deal with such extreme bad luck (although 2020 might have felt like we were all living through Irish history), but it’s true that small business owners are inherently optimistic. Only about half of all small businesses live to see their fifth year, and only about a third live to see their tenth year. Yet small business owners continue to believe ours will among the few to survive, or even thrive.
There are a lot of factors that go into whether a company dies or thrives, but one of the biggest predictors is whether the business owner has a plan for their company. I’m not saying everyone needs to write out a business plan, but you should at least have an idea of where you want the company to go and how you’re going to get there.
The same goes for your content marketing plan. Just writing a blog post because someone told you you should be blogging for your business is not enough to get the results you need. You need a goal for that blog post, and you need a plan for how that blog post (as well as every other piece of content you create for your business) is going to achieve those goals.
If you’ve been relying on the luck of the Irish to make your content marketing efforts work for you, it’s time to put down the four-leaf clover and use these tips to create a content marketing plan for your business.
Table of Contents
- Understand What A Content Marketing Plan Is and How It Works
- Know Your Why Behind Your Content Marketing Plan
- Research Your Target Audience
- Create A Story
- Optimize Your Marketing Content for Search Engines
- Integrate Your Content Marketing Plan into Your Process
- Measure the Results of Your Content Marketing Plan
1) Understand What A Content Marketing Plan Is and How It Works
The first thing you need to do before you can get started is to make sure you have a solid understanding of what content marketing is and how it works. Too many people create content for their business for the sake of creating content without any kind of strategy behind it, and when they don’t see immediate results, they give up.
If you’re still not sure what content marketing is or how it works, this article should answer your questions.
2) Know Your Why Behind Your Content Marketing Plan
I often hear business coaches talking about the importance of “knowing your why,” meaning you should know why you’re in business. Is it just to pay the bills? Is it to create a legacy for yourself and/or your family? Is it because you love helping people? What drives you to work on your business and make sure it’s successful?
The same goes for your content marketing plan. While you need to make sure each piece of content has a goal, you also need an overarching goal that encompasses your entire content marketing plan. Just like you have (or at least you should have) a mission statement for your company, you should also have a mission statement for your content marketing plan.
Only once you know your why behind your content marketing efforts you can create a content marketing plan that will be sure to reach the goals you set for your content.
3) Research Your Target Audience
A lot of small businesses that are just starting out make the mistake of saying they can work for anyone because they’re so desperate for any kind of business they don’t take the time to think about whether a client is really a good fit for them. The result is they end up working with a lot of people who don’t pay enough and/or don’t like their work because they didn’t take the time to vet them before taking them on as a client. In the end they waste more time and effort (and money) than they would have if they had declined the offer and focused instead on working with clients who value what they have to offer and pay them what they’re worth.
The same goes for content marketing. If you don’t define your target audience, and instead try to write for everyone, you’ll end up creating content that doesn’t resonate with anyone.
There are a few ways you can research your target audience, but my favorite is social media. Identify some hashtags that describe your target audience and see who’s using those hashtags.
You can also see who’s following your competitors on social media. Your ideal client might not exactly match up with their ideal client, but there’s bound to be some overlap, so see if you can identify the prospects that are following your competitors and then look at their social media profiles. Who else are they following on social media? What do they post about? The more you know about them, the more effectively you can target them when creating marketing content for your business.
If you’ve been in business for a while and already have some clients, you can separate your favorite clients from the rest of the pack. What makes your favorite clients your favorite clients? What kind of content would resonate with them? How can you attract, engage, and convert more leads like them?
4) Create A Story
Not only does a good story make your content more engaging, but studies show people remember content 22 times better when it’s presented in the form of a story rather than just a list of facts.
When I started writing for Touhy, Touhy & Buehler, LLP, the attorney who hired me was writing the blog posts himself. It was not the best use of his time, and it wasn’t driving results for his company.
By contrast, after 6 months of paying me to write his blog posts for him, he told me I had brought in $75,000 worth of business for his law firm. The difference? Story-driven content. I took the news articles and legal updates he gave me and presented that information in the form of a story that cast his ideal client as the main character and put their pain points front and center. Then all I had to do was explain how my client could solve their pain points for them so they’d have a reason to pick up the phone.
5) Optimize Your Marketing Content for Search Engines
Showing up in online searches is a vital step towards getting in front of your target audience, not to mention getting in front of them at the right time (i.e., when they’re actively looking for you). But in order to do that, not only do you need to identify your target audience, you also need to know which keywords they’re using when they’re trying to find you.
I conduct keyword research every time I create a piece of content, not only to identify the keywords that should be used throughout that piece of content, but also to help guide me towards topics I should cover on my blog. If someone is looking for information on a particular topic, the best way to attract, engage, and convert that lead is by writing about the topics that interest them.
6) Integrate Your Content Marketing Plan into Your Process
I laid out 9 steps for your content creation process in another post, so I won’t repeat all that here, but it is worthwhile to keep in mind that your process for creating content should be systematic and repeatable.
But before you develop your process for creating and distributing content, you should develop your content marketing plan first. That way you can make sure your process supports your content marketing plan instead of accidentally derailing it. Once you have your content marketing plan and your process in place, it can help to create a checklist of everything that needs to happen during the content creation process so you don’t forget anything. The process I laid out in my earlier blog post contains 9 steps, and that can be a lot to remember on top of everything else we have to keep track of for our business, so keep a checklist to help you make sure you don’t forget anything.
7) Measure the Results of Your Content Marketing Plan
Every piece of content you create for your business needs to have a goal you want that content to achieve. It doesn’t necessarily have to be more sales (although it could be). It could be more newsletter subscribers and/or more social media followers. As long as you know where in the buyer journey prospects are likely to be when they encounter that piece of content, you can lead them to the next stage of that journey and ultimately convert them into clients.
If you know anything about goal setting, you know you have a better chance of achieving your goals when they are specific and measurable. The same goes for your content marketing goals, so if you know you wanted a blog post to increase your subscriber list by 10%, you have to be able to measure a) your newsletter subscriber list, and b) how many new subscribers came from that blog post as opposed to other sources.
Once you know the results you got (or didn’t get) from your content marketing plan, you can go back and tweak the plan accordingly so you can be sure to achieve the goals you set for your content marketing plan.
If you found this content helpful and would like to receive more of it, you can subscribe to our newsletter in the space below to make sure you never miss an update. You can also see what we’re up to by following us on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.
Whether you need help creating a content marketing plan, putting your existing plan into action (or both), we can help.
