If you are involved in content marketing activities, you need a decent strategy to deliver the results. But, how would you make a content plan or strategy? Here in the article, 7 points will be discussed for you to achieve the target.
1. Your Main Goal
It is essential that you are clear about what you want to achieve from content marketing. Is it aimed to draw traffic, conversions, leads or might be something as simple as encouraging emails, etc. Whatever it is, think about where you want to go.
In doing so, you can align your titles and plans with these goals. This is the key thing to do at first. So, consider your goal and then set for achieving it.
2. Competitors Position
You must think and reflect on what your competitors are doing. Put your business in the hierarchy of the industry or the market you work within so that you know what the companies that are above you and companies below you are. You must know what type of content activities they are engaging people in.
This will tell you what thing will work in your industry and what will not. Therefore, spend time in researching and see what your competitors have to offer to attract and draw people into content marketing and what difference you can do.
3. Previous Techniques You Used
Obviously, if you are new in content marketing, then you have not done anything before. But, if you have done something previously, such as, you had a blog that you used to maintain, but it is not updated regularly anymore so you might want to boost the blog even further.
Alternately, you might be looking at things like video promotion, etc. So, just as it is essential to look at what your competitors are doing, it is equally important to see what you have done in the past, what worked well, etc. This will give you the foundation or the basis to put the best work into your new content marketing plan. Try to recall what activities you used in the past and what activities you loved to use to improve it.
4. Importance of Audience View Point
As any business, small, medium or large, it is very important to take yourself out of the mindset of someone who works for that company. Also, try to visit your site with fresh eyes if you can. This can be a little bit tricky because you have been working in the industry for a long time.
If you can, take a step back and pick yourself up in customer shoes, go to your website, take a look and see what content marketing can do for your site. Therefore, you have to decide that if your customer is visiting your website for the first time and what exactly you want them to see.
Another thing to take care of is that if you are delivering your message clearly or not. Because, content marketing can have a couple of things, such as pages, videos, etc. The key things of your business can also be mentioned on the site through these mediums.
So, it is always important to take a step back and look at your site as if you are a customer and see if you are providing them with the information they need or not.
5. Channel That You Use
After thinking about the above-given points, you must decide where this content is going to go once you have created it. There could be on page stuff, such as blog posts, etc. and off page stuff, such as guest posts, etc.
The type of channel to be used is referred to that would you be promoting the content to social properties and other similar things. How you are going to tie in the strategic because it is not all about the plan, but you must seriously think about what you are going to do with the content once it is created and where it is going to go.
At this stage, it is important to link back to the stage one. The place where it is going to be promoted or where it will lie needs a proper plan. So, what channels you will use is also worth considering.
6. Create Optimized Titles
Once you are done with the above steps, you need to create titles. This is obviously giving the foundation to what you need to then pick for creating your titles. Get in a room with a couple of your colleagues and people with whom you are carrying out this project.
Sit down for a good brainstorming session. Basically, through this session, you can work out the whole list of titles. It will make easy to create ideas through this practice. You can decide what the things that you want to write about are and then create the titles in a way that they are optimized.
It means that if you have keywords for that title, you must focus on them and their use in your title. Focus on what you need and get it done. It is important to come up with a solid content marketing plan.
7. Map out your Titles
Finally, after creating the titles put them in your excel document. From there you can divide it into portions and make targets to achieve. Just map out the whole process of the content. This is how the entire plan goes in place.
It is easier when you can visualize it in your excel table. You know what is coming up and how much you have to do right now. You have the list of titles, and you take off. This will also be available when you are creating and placing them on channels.
This is how you can make an outstanding content strategy if you are running a blog site. Content strategy is very important for every type of social media and entertainment or information website also. Here we will discuss YouTube only.
YouTube Content Organizational Strategies
It is very important for you to create the type of content that YouTube specifically like you to create so that you are successful in whatever you are creating.
The Hero Content
These are the big videos that people are talking about and are the viral videos. The content creators of big channels are creating such videos. They put a lot of money, effort and time on them. You can build your videos around popular events at that time.
Hero content is very good, and it should be done very strategically after every few days or months. It is not a type of content that you can do every week. You can do it even when a certain type of video is already trending up.
You get opportunities to make such videos on Halloween, valentine's day, Christmas, etc. There are also events, such as Football World Cup, Elections, Baseball World Series, etc. This is the type of events and festivals that you can take advantage of for making your videos get popular.
Typically, you know when these events or festivals are going to happen, such as, you know Christmas comes at the same time each year a Thanksgiving as comes at the same time. Therefore, you do have time to plan of how to create that content, especially, when you have high production value, and it will take time to shoot the video to get that mega-hit hero video.
Remember that you should not create a channel that produces only hero content.
The Help Content
This type of content has an evergreen strategy. It means that you can access it 24 hours a day and seven days a week. It will be good for as long as it is relevant to people. You get a lot of reviews every day.
The help content is a gift that keeps on giving. Some new people are learning about new things every day and get the benefit. They go to YouTube and find them relevant.