Creating Your Content Marketing Plan

Knowing you need to do content marketing is just the beginning of the next creative project in your business. You didn’t think you could manage another project right now, but trust us, you want to launch this one right away.

Content marketing is a fancy way of saying you are going to use content, copy, words to market your business. Now, marketing is different from selling, but you already knew that. Selling is a short term process: you make a call or offer a discount, the customer likes your offer and makes the purchase. 

Marketing is like playing the long game. You reach out to would-be clients, educate them about your brand, encourage them to connect. You let the world know what you do and why you should do it for them. You make connections for people between your services and their lives, their problems and your solutions.

Selling makes sales; marketing makes customers. Customers are worth more!

Scheduling is Important
You can’t market your business when you have time. If you wake up one morning with a great marketing idea, you can’t just implement it that day. There is a flow, a schedule, a cadence to marketing your business. You need to make a plan for content marketing.

For example, your next big project would provide excellent material for a blog or case study to promote your business’ capabilities. However, as you are wrapping up that project, you will be focused on your punch list items, getting the work done on schedule, and making the customer happy with those final details. You won’t have time to worry about scheduling blogs or social posts. The whole project might get finished and turned over to the owner with you even stopping to shoot some photos.

Content marketing moves the online world, but it happens slowly. Your content marketing needs a lot of lead time to show results. Get your schedule right and start now!

Week by Week
Creating content for your business can be overwhelming, so look at it one week at a time. When the long range outlook seems bleak, it’s time to focus on the day to day. Don’t worry about how to create 30 chunks of interesting and engaging content encompassing at least 15,000 words. Just concentrate on the 7 items for this week.

Break your content marketing down by week, and it will build itself. (Well, not really, but we want to say something encouraging.) Decide what the theme or topic will be for each week. That makes it easier to create marketing content each day. You can lay out your plan for the whole month at one time, and then execute day by day.

Duplication
Each piece of content you publish on your business blog needs to be unique to get the most SEO value. You can use the same content on various platforms, though. The content you write for your newsletter can later be posted to your website business blog. Excerpts of that content can be used as social media posts or even marketing copy for landing pages or lead magnets.

All of these uses for your content should be planned out in advance. Tracking them on a spreadsheet will make it easier to stay organized throughout the week. Certain topics can be scheduled in the weeks before a new product launch. Write those topics into the appropriate weeks on your marketing plan, so there is no last minute scrambling.

Once you have your marketing plan created, you’re going to need some help executing. Check out our Content Connection service for a pleasant alternative to staying up all night writing your own marketing content.