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content marketing plan for 2020. How to effectively plan content strategy

How To Create An Effective Content Marketing Strategy

Results-oriented businesses take their content marketing very seriously. This is because content marketing has proven to produce great results. Research has also shown that digital content marketing generates three times more leads at a 62% lower cost than traditional marketing. However, the competition is getting tougher and most people get bored easily and move on to new content if you can’t keep them interested long enough.

Now the big question is how do you run content marketing campaigns that catch the right attention, push you to the top in your industry and convert? We’ll answer all that so that you plan just right for your business in the coming year. In this post, we’ll be sharing with you how to create an effective and result-oriented content marketing strategy.

1. Audit Your Current Content

For your content marketing plan for this year to be perfect, you’ll need to look into your content for the past year and the previous years.

You need to find out what worked and what didn’t work. What kind of content yielded more engagements and which had a high conversion rate? Note them down.

Knowing this will help you prepare and plan your content marketing strategy for 2020. The more understanding you have of the previous content that worked, the higher your chances of doing better in 2020.

2. Set SMART Content Marketing Goals.

Do you want effective and measurable results for your Content Marketing? Set GOALS.

Goals help your content marketing to remain focused and helps you to easy to determine success or failure. Any of these can be your goals for content marketing:

  1. Sales
  2. Brand awareness
  3. Lead acquisition
  4. Lead nurturing
  5. Customer acquisition
  6. Customer Retention.

However, your goals need to be SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) for them to be effective.

3. Know Your Audience

Source: Influitive

Knowing your target audience is very vital for your content marketing to be effective. You’ll need to answer these questions:

  1. Who are you trying to reach out to with your content?
  2. What are their favorite contents?
  3. What content format resonates with them?
  4. Which platform do they frequent?

All of this information and more can be captured by carrying out extensive research on your target audience.

 When you’re done with the research, you should have as many details about your audience so that you can put together targeted and true buyer personas for your audience.

4. Find Out And Pick The Right Format

The format of your content should be largely dependent on your target audience and what resonates with them. Below are a few examples of content formats that work.

  1. Infographics – great for the marketing industry and especially great when dealing with lots of data
  2. Written – Good for short and long content. When the content is longer than two paragraphs, ensure that there are graphics
  3. Pictures – ensure that they are showing the message
  4. Videos – perfectly perfect. Most people are engaged because they can get the message in a short time and are entertained. Keep it short, sweet, and engaging
  5. Podcasts – work for a good number of industries
  6. Webinars – same with podcasts
  7. Presentations – can never be overrated, especially when dealing with professionals. Try SlideShare, LinkedIn, and co.

It is advisable to use content formats that perform best with your target audience. When you know your audience as advised in point three, you should know the platform that works for them as well as the content type. Remember; look at older content that worked for tips too.

5. Develop A Content Calendar.

Nothing beats consistency when it comes to content marketing. For you to get your desired results with content marketing, you have to consistently give out valuable content to your audience.

One of the most effective ways to stay consistent is to have a content calendar that you have to judiciously follow. Click To Tweet

Your content calendar also gives you an overview of your content marketing activities and helps everyone on the team understand the content marketing goals per time.

Click here to get the template

6. Promote Your Content

To create powerful content is one aspect of content marketing but it’s only creation and not truly marketing if it isn’t rightly promoted.

Spend time on creating the right content, but spend even more time on marketing that content. Some people advise that you use the 20/80 rule. Meaning, use 20% of the time to create and 80% to promote. Regardless of what you use, ensure you promote them hard.

There are many platforms to promote your content and you should choose the most effective for your target audience. Some of these platforms are

  1. Social media
  2. Google Ads
  3. Emails
  4. Your website/blog – SEO

7.  Measure Your Success And ROI

Results in content marketing come from executing your campaigns. Regardless of what happens, you’ll get results. The difference is if they are good or bad. That’s why you must put in the right efforts, tools, and content strategy to ensure that you get good results.

One way to improve your success is actually tracking your results. After starting out your campaign, you also need to track the performance of your campaign.

You need to check different metrics such as engagements, reach, volume, influence, etc. to track performance for your campaigns. Your goal for your content marketing campaign determines the metrics that will be used to measure the success of your campaign

Take note of these metrics in your campaign plan because this way, you can start following the results as soon as you start your campaign.

 If something isn’t working as it should, you’ll be able to detect it if you follow your metrics, and you’ll also be able to optimize your campaign to improve your results and ultimately, achieve your set goals.

Ps. We’re here to help if you are unsure of where to start. Just send an email to [email protected], call +2349086160358, send us a message via our live chat button, or chat us up on our various social media platforms.

Regardless of which you use, we’ll help you get to where you need to in your content marketing in 2020.

Bonus tip: it might help to protect your content as well, especially if it’s on your website. Plagiarism is real and we just discovered that we’ve been victims of it.

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The Brand Ally is a web design and digital marketing company. We provide great website designs, mobile app development, SEO, social media marketing, and Google Ads.

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