When looking at any part of your business, it's always essential to make sure you have a plan.

The trends of the modern business world are always changing, but the idea of running a business and how that works at its core always remains the same, especially when it comes to content marketing.

Whether you were building a sign for your local town decades ago, putting an ad on the radio or in the newspaper, and nowadays posting on your blog, website, and social media, you have to come up with a content marketing plan.

What's even more important is creating a plan that actually works.

In today's guide, I'm going to talk you through everything you need to know when it comes to creating a successful content marketing plan for your business. We'll be covering everything, so get ready, and let's dive in.

  • Analyze Your Past Content 🕵🏼
  • What Resources Do You Have? 🧐
  • Defining Your Purpose 👨🏾‍💻
  • Breaking Down and Setting Your Goals 🙌🏽
  • Understanding Your Audience 👥
  • Designing and Recording Your Strategy 📓
  • Create Content Around Your Audience 👩🏿‍💻
  • Generate Content Ideas 📖
  • Create a Calendar and Set a Schedule 🗓
  • Measure Your Results & Improve 🧑🏾‍🔬
  • Next Steps 👈🏽
  • Important disclosure: we're proud affiliates of some tools mentioned in this guide. If you click an affiliate link and subsequently make a purchase, we will earn a small commission at no additional cost to you (you pay nothing extra).

    Analyze Your Past Content 🕵🏼

    If you've already been producing content in the past, then the first step you'll want to take when moving forward is to:

    🔈 Analyze and evaluate your old content and do this honestly.

    If you're a new business and this is the first time you're producing content, then skip ahead to the next step.

    If not, you need to take the time to:

    🔈 Look into every piece of content you made.

    This means every video, blog post, social media post, live stream, podcast episode, and more. Look at what content performs best and what content flopped.

    What content got the most engagement, and what content delivered the best results for your business? Which content do you regret making? Don't just look at your likes and shares, however. Look at your conversion rates and your sales. Look at the hard facts, not just the vanity metrics.

    You'll also want to look at other things, like which online search terms and keywords were most popular at bringing people to your website.

    When you bring all this information together, you'll be able to see exactly what content your business succeeds at and what content you best leave behind in the previous year.

    This gives you an exact idea of what content you should be focusing on in the future, laying your content marketing plan's foundation 💁🏽‍♂️

    What Resources Do You Have? 🧐

    Before moving forward with your strategy, another important consideration you need to be thinking about is what resources you have and what foundation you've got to work with.

    Do you have people who are capable of producing high-quality video content or working with podcast-quality audio?

    Do you have writers and editors, or do you have personal skills you can bring to the table?

    With this in mind, you can then start working out who and what you need to bring in to create the kind of content you're looking to produce. Do you need to hire freelance writers, or train someone within your business up to a certain standard, or teach them need-to-know skills, such as SEO?

    As a business, it's always important that you're working to a budget and not just over-investing in content because you think it's going to pay off. Always manage your money and treat it as a resource.

    If you already have talented people within your business, then work with these people and use them for what they're capable of giving you.

    Defining Your Purpose 👨🏾‍💻

    Next up, there's no point in having a plan if you don't have a goal. Your business needs to have a defined purpose, a path to walk down where you know where you're heading and what you're trying to achieve.

    This means you need to take your time defining your goal and purpose.

    Content marketing is all about connecting your business to your business goals, so while it's easy to invest a boatload of time and resources into your content, it's important to think about 'why' you're doing this. Always figure out the why before the how.

    Are you trying to grow your social media accounts?

    Clearly. Why?

    Because you want to sell more units? Do you want to address and fund a certain cause? You want to grow to a certain number of users or subscriptions. Do you want to become the leading authority in your niche?

    Whatever it is you to do, you need to make it clear in your mind what that thing is.

    Breaking Down and Setting Your Goals 🙌🏽

    Now that you know the purpose of your content marketing strategy, it's time to set your goals. This means taking your purpose and setting actual obtainable figures to get it done.

    For example, if you're looking to grow your social media accounts, what kind of follower counts are you looking for?

    If you're looking to boost your engagement rate, what figures do you want? If you want to sell more units, what number of units are you planning to sell? You need to make sure you're as precise as possible when setting these goals for them to be effective.

    You'll also want to make sure you're making your goal as trackable as possible, so you know if and when you have achieved it and when you need to boost your efforts.

    Of course, you'll want to challenge yourself with your goal, but you also need to make sure it's realistic; but this is a balance you must discover for yourself.

    For example, you might want to sell 10,000 units of your product. This is 835 units per month.

    If you have 5,000 viewers on your website each month, with a conversion rate of 10%, you need to produce content that is boosting your conversion rate. As you can see, with a realistic goal, you can then take real action when it comes to creating your content marketing plan.

    Understanding Your Audience 👥

    No matter what article or guide or tutorial you read online when it comes to planning, making, and creating content, one of the key points you'll see again and again details that you need to take action on is understanding your audience.

    You need to know who you're marketing to and what people are interested in your business.

    Now, that's not to say that the people you think are using your business are the people in the very best possible way. This means your content will be much more direct and will be much more effective at getting results.

    Designing and Recording Your Strategy 📓

    Now you're aware of what kind of content you're making, and who it's for, you can really start working on designing a proper strategy.

    It doesn't really matter what approach you're taking; what does matter is the fact you're writing it down and recording what you're doing and the strategies you're implementing.

    This means having an official folder or document where you can write down your goals and objectives and then detail a game plan on how you're going to get there.

    You need to think about what you need to do and what aspects of content creation you're going to be focusing on, more of which we're going to be speaking out below.

    You'll also need to think about how you're going to record and analyze the results of the content you're making, thus enabling you to see how effective your strategy is, where it's falling short, and where you can make it better.

    Create Content Around Your Audience 👩🏿‍💻

    Once you know who your audience is, it's time to start thinking about what content you're creating. Where is your audience hanging out online, and what kind of content are they enjoying, consuming, and converting via?

    Are they listening to podcasts on the way to work or scrolling through Instagram late at night?

    By defining the most used content channels for your business, you can then implement what platforms you're going to be working on through your content marketing program.

    Ideally, you don't need to be everywhere, especially if you're a small business. If you're a global entity, then yes, chances are you're going to need to be on every platform because people are actively looking for you there. However, as a small business owner, choose a selection of platforms, and dedicate yourself to these platforms.

    You may choose YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and email, and that's enough, as long as your audiences are in these places. I recommend that everyone markets via email, but then you pick a maximum of three platforms that you dedicate yourself to.

    This is so you can concentrate on not spreading yourself too thinly but instead focusing on creating high-quality content on set platforms.

    Of course, this also means taking inventory of your own resources.

    If you're a solo website owner who's shifting products online, you're probably not going to want to invest a whole load of money and energy into making YouTube videos unless you're going to dedicate yourself to a review channel.

    Pick the content that's right for you and your niche. Of course, you need to spend time creating content you enjoy, but you also need to create feasible content. If your audience is is big on video, then video marketing is what you could concentrate and focus on.

    Generate Content Ideas 📖

    A key part of any content marketing strategy is generating the ideas for content you're going to use. You've already looked through past content to see what has worked and what hasn't, so this is a great starting point for finding interesting and engaging topics your audience wants to be connected to.

    However, you need to keep these ideas fresh and flowing, which means generating a ton of ideas, as many as you go, and also setting up a time to generate ideas as you move into the future.

    You also need to make sure you have an idea management system to hold all these ideas and that allows you to expand on them. Take time to brainstorm ideas, check out what your competition is up to, and see what's popular.

    Instagram recently released the Reels feature on their platform, and while this may not have been in your content marketing strategy last year, it's probably wise to jump onto the trend and start producing videos because the feature has been so popular.

    Create a Calendar and Set a Schedule 🗓

    A massive, integral part of a content marketing plan is being able to know what you're posting, as we've discussed above, and when you're posting it.

    This means implementing a content calendar into your day-to-day processes and working alongside it to manage your overall plan.

    Having a calendar is a great way, if not the best way, to ensure you're consistent with when you're posting and will help you manage the kind of content you're posting.

    If you want things to be diverse and engaging, then you'll want to spread out when you're posting your images, articles, and videos.

    It's all about posting content in the most balanced way possible

    Throughout your calendar, you'll want to post when you're uploading everything, your planning days, how long each piece of content will take to create, what resources you're using, what money you're spending, and what kind of series you can run.

    There are plenty of different and unique calendar tools out there, so all you need to do is a little research to find which one suits your needs the most.

    Measure Your Results & Improve 🧑🏾‍🔬

    Finally, the key aspect of your content marketing strategy, especially once it's in full swing, is about making sure you're taking the time to analyze your content and then improve.

    Yes, we've already spoken about doing this with your existing content, but it's essential to do this as you go for the very best results.

    For example, if you've planned out this beautiful photo series on Instagram for the next month, but it's not getting anywhere near the results you wanted, is it worth still investing your time into this content just because it's on your content plan.

    Probably not 👀

    Instead, taking the time to look at your content plan, analyzing what has performed well and what hasn't, and then making adjustments as you go is the very best way to ensure your content marketing strategy works.

    If something isn't working, you need to figure out what it is and fix it. When you create your content marketing strategy, it's not about creating a strategy and then sticking to it. It's about creating a framework that you work too and try to create content around.

    This means if there's a change in the trends or the markets, you can resort to your content marketing strategy to tell you what you need to do, and more importantly, what you're aiming for.

    When you have your goals in mind, you'll find it hard to wander mindlessly off track.

    Next Steps 👈🏽

    Well, that about wraps things up from me, and now it's over to you.

    We highly recommend going through this guide and pinpointing the bits you're using, and then compiling the content marketing strategy folder for you. Within this folder, you can highlight what you want to work on and what aspects of the strategy you want to use.

    Effective strategies aren't just made in one day but will start with building a foundation and then building up your strategy over time with what works and what doesn't work.

    Don't be afraid to experiment and think outside the box about what you want to achieve. Good luck!