Content marketing may seem to have a diminished role, however, when properly done it can greatly assist your overall marketing strategy. To have it done in a well-organized way, you will need to document your content marketing strategy.
It will help you set realistic goals, understand your audience and plan the perfect content to serve the needs of your audience, and if promoted accordingly, you will see the results of your strategy sooner.
Down below, you will find 4 steps to document your content marketing strategy to best serve in achieving your marketing goals.
1. Set SMART goals
Setting goals is an important step to complete while preparing your content marketing strategy. It is important that your goals follow the SMART protocol, meaning that those are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-based. In other words, the goals to set for the strategy should be precise, realistic, and manageable for the given time frame. It will help your stay focused on your strategy and achieving the goals would be possible.
By documenting the goals you will explicitly see what is necessary to be done to achieve those goals. Every time your marketing team may seem that they lost the track of their work, sparing a quick glimpse at the document will immediately bring them back to what their essence of work should be.
2. Understand your audience and their interests
Do your due diligence by thoroughly observing your target audience. Reveal their demographics, interests, and backgrounds.
You need to know who your audience is, male/female, aged 18-35, or 35- 65, people mainly busy at work or doing work from home, current location or traveling, enjoying movie-time with family or playing board games, and so on.
Creating the buyer persona based on the thorough target research will help you both stay close to the goals as well as plan the perfect content for your audience. All in all, this detailed audience research will help you further to plan the content and get you ready for achieving your SMART goals.
3. Plan content based on your audience’s interests
As you have accomplished the first two steps of documenting your content marketing strategy you will end up setting up the content plan based on those.
If your audience is a business type, you will need to create a content plan that will be informative to people interested in business. If your audience likes to travel, then your content should meet the interests of travelers, letting them know the top airfare deals or the best hotel options in Europe or Asia.
Planning content might be difficult, as it is one of the most important “ingredients” in your content marketing strategy. However, the documentation of this and the previous steps will greatly assist you in putting together the set of blog posts, articles, and social media posts that interest your target audience.
4. Promote your content through different channels
To make sure you reach the desired goals, you will need to promote the content on different channels. Be it on social media platforms or different forums, your job should include letting as many people as possible know about your suggestions and recommendations through your content.
To make sure you can measure the results, documenting this step is also highly advisable. This is to let you know that documenting does not mean it is set in stone. But it is rather for you and your marketing team to have the access to the initial documents when it time comes to see how the marketing strategy goes.
Wrapping up
A well-document content marketing strategy is a big plus for your marketing department. It will allow you to see what was initially planned in the strategy and later measure how much of it was accomplished. That is why you will need to document the strategy goals, target audience specifics, content plan, and promotion. follow these steps to properly manage your content marketing strategy documentation, as well as the implementation of the marketing tasks.
