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How to Create a Content Plan for Your Blog
Content marketing is one of the most effective and popular online strategies amongst companies to promote their brand. Having a well-defined content plan will help reduce stress that creeps up when we need post or plan content.
On top of this, according to an IAB’s study, 49% of users consult blogs and forums before making a purchase and 27% use social networks for the same purpose.
đź’ˇ 60% of marketing professionals say that creating content for a blog is a priority as part of an inbound marketing strategy.
What is a Content Plan?
A content plan is a technique that will assist you in defining your goals and organizing your ideas, which you will share with your target audience.
The first step is to determine which channels your brand will use whether that is creating content for your blog, new pages for your website, social media, email, etc. This is something that you should always keep in mind when you create your content plan since copywriting and content formats for social media are much different than for a website.
How to Create a Blog Content Plan
To guarantee success for your marketing strategy, it’s important to plan ahead before putting your strategies into action. There are still some companies that carry out strategies without a clear plan, limiting you from measuring your goals, and evolving your efforts.
So, in order to create a wonderful content plan simply follow these five steps:
⚡️ Conduct market research
This part involves analyzing the financial situation of your own brand or company and understanding the state of the market around it.
A good way to execute this diagnosis is completing a SWOT analysis. This is a planning method that evaluates the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threads of your brand or competitors. This analysis will help you to understand the situation of the market that your brand is in.
⚡️ Establish goals and objectives
It’s always important reconsider what you really want to achieve from your content plan. Higher traffic to your web, prestige and recognition, SEO positioning, conquer the world, etc. Once you have your ideas clear, you will be able to aim your strategy towards your goals. A content plan is unfeasible if you don’t define where you want to go. Set your objectives!
These objectives need to be attainable, and measurable. Select real percentages for goals, and see which metrics you need to view to track this information. Utilizing a website and blog analytics tool can help you view your growth without any manual calculations needed.
⚡️ Define your ideal client
When writing or creating your content, keep your ideal clients in mind and direct this message towards them. It’s important to learn more about your ideal clients before your start addressing them. What content are they searching for? What issues are they facing? Which areas do they need help? What channels do they use?
Creating buyer personas will allow you to view how multiple different groups can benefit from your brand or business. This will also allow you to step into their shoes and understand what tools and resources they need. The better you define your target, potential buyer or ideal client, the more effective and successful your plan will be.
⚡️ Define your strategy
Now that you have decided what content you will create, and across which channels now it’s time to start putting together all the pieces and create your strategy:
- Establish the type of content you are going to post (topics, primary keywords, secondary keywords)
- Choose the format(s) for your strategy (text, image, video, podcast, etc.)
- Determine the posting frequency (daily, weekly, monthly…)
- Decide where to post and share your content (blog, social networks, content sharing platforms…)
All these decisions will give shape to your content plan and act as a resource that you can come back to.
⚡️ Trial and error
Once your plan is set, it’s time to test it out. This beginning period will be a learning curve, to understand what content provides value for users, and what content isn’t performing as well. Ask your readers questions, encourage them to respond, and reply to any their comments.
The beauty of this plan is that you can constantly tweak strategies, content, and posting based on your data and analyzations. So if you’re starting from scratch, look at it as an upward curve towards improvement.
3 Blog Content Planning Tips
You have your content plan ready, and now all that’s left is to create the content and share it with your audience. To maximize your efforts, consider the following best practices:
Create quality content
It’s essential to create original and high-quality content, to resonate and connect with your audience. This may take learning from your mistakes and improving with time. Your initial content will lead you to a better and more efficient second round and so on. Generating content for a blog, website, etc. is a tedious job that requires time and dedication.
Reminder to keep in mind the following when generating content:
- Brand goals and objectives
- Ideal target audience
- Competitive analysis
Keeping an eye on your competitors will allow you to examine what has worked well for their brand. This doesn’t mean copying. A good strategy is producing content that is 80% dedicated to your clients and 20% to your brand. Focusing more on your consumers will provide very valuable and personalized information. There is not a magic formula to create an attractive and popular content but, following certain tactics can help you to reach that goal:
đź“Ś Keep your messages short, personal, and to the point.
đź“Ś Adapt content based on who you plan to target, and update periodically to stay current.
đź“Ś Adjust the content to meet your target audiences needs and preferences.
Try including call-to-action buttons that leads your client to the option to buy your product, subscribe to your website or capture more leads. Once you have clearly defined the type of content that you want to create, you will finally distribute and measure it.
Observe user feedback
Use comments, replies, reviews, and feedback to evaluate how your audience receives your content, products, or services. This feedback also gives us relevant information to help position content in search engines.
When speaking of the evolution of website content, there are three different types of categories that define this content:
- Disposable content: Content about a current topic that will lose momentum in the future.
- Timeless Content: Content that is meant to keep attracting readers with the passage of time.
- Strategic Content: Content focused on drawing attention to a specific offer, product or promotional campaign.
Measuring tools are necessary to determine what type of articles work better for the strategy and to be able to classify and group them.
Analyze and measure your content
The different methods and tools that exist for analyzing and measuring content will allow us to find out if our content is working successfully. This way, we can measure the effectiveness of our messages and check whether the communication to our client is adequate or is not reaching the expected outcome.
Being able to monitor our content marketing strategy and its results will help us correct mistakes, see how the audience reacts, and ultimately, learn whether we are close to our objectives or not. In order to make an analysis and measurement of our content strategy’s result, we should follow and make sure we fulfill the SMART criteria:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Realistic
- Time-bound
We recommend using an analysis tool to help assist you in measuring content’s performance. A few of these tools include Google Search Console, Google Looker Studio, Amplitude, and Metricool.
Because, what’s the point of creating a content plan if you don’t know whether it worked or not? If you’re looking for an easy-to-use and intuitive tool to assist you in managing and measuring all your digital content and seeing how your blog and social network metrics evolve, we have come a long way to bring you Metricool, a very complete tool that won’t let you down.
For more tips and tricks on building a content strategy, check out this video: