You know what they say about planning right? They say that “… if you don’t plan, you’re planning to fail”. This is very true when it comes to content marketing. No one would dream of publishing a magazine or newspaper without a content marketing plan. Creating a content marketing plan requires an understanding of your goals, your products or services, and your audience.

This is a recording from a Facebook Live I did in my Facebook Community. I always bring my blogs live to this group first in addition to offering a space to collaborate, empower, support, and balance building a business in the cracks of time in mom life. You are welcome to join here: Moms Mastering Business Community 

You need a content marketing plan because you need to create cohesive content, establish your brand identity, increase productivity, improve analytics and get the most bang for your buck. Content marketing can do all of this and more if you create a content marketing plan.

#1 Create Cohesiveness

When you develop a content marketing plan, you’ll work out all the content you want to create based on the products and services that you want to promote. That doesn’t mean every piece of content is going to be promotional in nature, but it does mean that all the content you create will work together, share the same voice, and talk to the same audience.

#2 Establish Your Brand Identity

What your goal in brand identity is that when someone sees one of your posts in their social media feed they will stop their scroll to read it. Thinking about Nike. What do you think about just hearing their name? Do you think of the swoosh symbol? Do you think of the phrase Just Do It? That is their brand.

Also, when you plan the content you’ll create and share in advance, it helps with branding because you can keep everything similar. For example, you can decide on the voice, fonts, images, colors and more ahead of time. It’s a lot easier to explain to someone you’re outsourcing to what you want when you know what you want because you’ve planned it out.

#3 Increase Productivity

When you create a content marketing plan you’ll know what you need to do each day to reach your goals because it’s going to be in your calendar and schedule. You will know exactly what content you’re working on creating today, what is being published today, and most importantly why you’re doing it. That’s going to make it a lot simpler to create the content you need for all parts of your business.

#4 Improve Analytics

When you know why you’re publishing a piece of content, you’ll be able to check analytics to find out if it’s working the way you thought it would. You’ll also be able to trace what’s working and what’s not working so much better. The plan makes some assumptions and those assumptions are used as a basis for your analytics.

#5 Get the Most ROI (Return on Investment)

When you do all that you can with content marketing such as use the right keywords, find the right voice, create the content directly for your audience you’ll find out that your return on investment will be a lot higher. You’ll boost your income as you boost brand awareness because more of the right people will know about you.

To create a content marketing plan you need to understand who your target audience is, the problems you solve for them, where they hang out and much more. But, once you do the things you need to do to create an amazing content marketing plan it’s going to pay off in all aspects of your business.

Missed the first two blogs in this series check them out here:

Day 0: What Is Content Marketing?
Day 1: 6 Reasons a Content Strategy is Important for Your Business