Planning Your Digital Marketing Content
January 30, 2024
Today, content isn’t a “frill” ornamenting your marketing strategy; to a large extent, it is the strategy. And a content-centered strategy requires a plan.
Sprinkling random content “here and there” doesn’t constitute a content plan. It’s certainly better than nothing, but to consistently connect with and sell to customers or clients, a strategic content plan is where the smart money is now.
Companies of all sizes are putting their marketing budgets to work to create and publish content that transcends traditional advertising. Rather than just “getting the word out” to the world about their offerings, they are engaging target customers with targeted content.
Recent statistics show that around half of marketers plan to up their content marketing budgets, and that 80 percent of marketers see their content strategy as “very successful.” This growing trend means that by 2026, the content marketing industry is on track to hit 107 billion U.S. dollars.
Who Are the Customers You’re Writing Content For?
As leading multinational services firm Deloitte states, “It’s no longer about reaching as many customers as possible, but instead reaching the right ones.”
So how do you determine who the “right” ones are?
An effective approach is to build customer personas that include age, gender, education, needs, lifestyle, digital channels used, and the types of media your customers read and view.
Normally, you will need to build more than a single persona to represent your customer base; for example, say you’re marketing condos. Both young couples and retirees may desire a simple lifestyle, but for different reasons, and their online habits probably differ, too.
There are a variety of ways to go about building customer personas that represent your typical or most likely customers. Among these are:
- Using market research and data compilation available through “business intelligence” firms
- Doing your own online research
- Holding Focus Groups
- Performing surveys and getting feedback from your customers through social media, newsletters, or in person.
- Gathering insights about customer traits from your customer-facing employees
- Asking your customer-facing employees to list the most common concerns voiced by customers
Using a good mix of science-derived data with in-person impressions is your best bet for developing reliable customer personas. Statistics and personal insight each contribute valuable information the other source can’t.
It’s also important to recognize that most customers today are tech-savvy. So, whatever their demographics and tendencies, they’re looking for a smooth digital experience. They don’t want to waste time or get stuck trying to access your linked content. So, work the access and usage kinks out of every piece of customer-serving content you place before it goes live.
Your new website sales pages, social media content, or landing pages can do wonders for your engagement and sales—but only if you’ve ensured they’re easy for your customers to find, understand, and use.
Create Strategic Content to Reach Your Customers
Before we talk about specific types of content, let’s look at some general ways content can make connections with your customers.
- It can meet them “where they are” in the buying process. Have they just begun to consider investing in “X,” which you happen to offer, or are they making comparisons to zero in on a decision?
- As your customers are making decisions, your content can address their desires, requirements, and feelings.
- Your content can use the experiences of previous customers to show that your offerings have worked well for them.
- It can show your customers how to use your products or services to their best advantage.
- It can help establish your firm as a thought leader in your field.
- It can introduce your company’s team members and their expertise.
- It can provide a descriptive, pictorial tour of your facilities.
- It can provide answers to your customers’ questions and engage them in conversations.
- It can work to establish your reputation in your community, region, nation, or the world.
- It can help you know your customers or clients and their preferences better, so you can continually improve content to better speak to them.
Where Will Your Marketing Content Live?
When picking the channels that will work best for your brand and audience, first consider your overall approach.
To engage customers better, companies are turning more and more toward using content (blogs, social media, resource centers, etc.) to promote their brands and the quality of their offerings, rather than running traditional “marketing projects.”
Budgeting for production and publishing for each type of content is part of the decision-making process, too.
Possibilities for content include:
- Website Copy (Homepage, About Us, product pages, blogs, white papers, case studies)
- Ad Copy that grabs attention
- Advertorials for magazines and newspapers
- Brochures: Digital and print
- Ebooks that show your company’s expertise
- Emails—digital or print
- Landing pages that show “surfers” the features of your products and services
- Newsletters that keep your customers updated on your latest news
- Press releases that publicize your latest locations, products, and services
- Sales and data sheets that enumerate and explain the benefits of your offerings
- Social Media (Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, X, Snapchat, Pinterest, Quora, Tumblr, and others, including many audience-specific channels)
- Earned media (content written about your business by someone else, that you didn’t pay for, but earned by your reputation).
- Wikipedia articles that show authority in your industry
Generate Ideas for Brand-Perfect Written Content
Every piece of on-brand content starts with a spark that generates an idea. Below, find 23 “spark plugs” for flashes of insight that generate audience-right content ideas.
- Feature interviews of your own employees and experts.
- Share case studies that describe customer experiences and testimonials.
- Tell your company’s story. Make it personality-centered and historically interesting. This could be turned into a blog series, an e-book, or a series in your newsletters.
- Introduce your exciting new products or services.
- Canvass your audience through social media about their primary needs and concerns, then use the results as topics.
- Create seasonal content that follows inventory changes and sales.
- Promote upcoming industry gatherings or describe a recent one, highlighting what your offerings brought to the table.
- Recycle content ideas you have used successfully, approaching them from a different angle.
- Think in terms of “topic clusters.” Brainstorm about all of the topics that are connected to large, central one.
- Do some surfing to find the types of content your competitors are using.
- Write engaging digital instruction guides to your products or services. Be sure they’re never boring.
- Write about how cutting-edge and on-the-horizon technology will soon be affecting your industry.
- Ask for audience input on tricks or techniques they’ve discovered while using your offerings.
- For blogs, consider inviting an occasional expert guest blogger.
- Share attention-grabbing industry statistics and show how your company is in the center of creating (or changing) them.
- Think in terms of your target customer’s “buying journey” and write some content for each stage.
- Ask your employees and experts what they think customers would most want or need to hear about
- Do a comparison of your products or services with others on the market. Be sure the information is accurate.
- Follow the news and write content connected to major stories that impact your business (or that your business can impact).
- Use a current cultural phenomenon as a theme for transitory content like emails and newsletters.
- Show your customers how your products are made, or how your services are carried out.
- Write a press release or blog about a charity event or cause, and how your company has contributed.
- Partner with a collaborator or influencer—someone who can catch your audience’s interest—and inject their quotes, images, or videos into your content. Choose carefully.
Who Will Be Responsible for Each Piece of Written Content?
It’s time to size up the abilities of each of your potential content creators. Do you have journalistic types who are seasoned interviewers, able to churn out newsy press releases, advertorials, and newsletters?
Do you have other people who are crackerjack social media posters who love conversing with clients?
Put them to work to create posts and interact with your customers on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and the rest.
What about research “detectives” who can track down industry statistics and quantified industry trends and translate them into striking graphics?
Or tech-savvy types who can write your instruction guides or white papers?
As with any other kind of team, your content team will operate best with a defined plan and a workload that’s reasonably paced.
For each person on your content marketing team, also consider: Is the tech each person will need to produce their content available, integrated, and are they trained in it?
Put Your Content Marketing Strategy on a Schedule
If you’re going to keep everyone who’s involved in your content creation, approvals, and publication in the loop, a schedule—or content calendar—will do the job.
This tool gives all involved a big-picture view of your content strategy, keeps the content creation workflow moving, and (importantly) enables budgeting for associated costs.
A content calendar is just what it sounds like. It’s a shareable calendar that shows when each type and piece of content will be produced and go live for customers. It can be shared through your intranet, another in-house system, and/or in physical form. The main idea is to make it easily accessible and useable.
Getting your calendar together will normally require some input from all parties concerned, from executives to marketing, creatives, buyers, distribution and possibly others.
Measure the Success of Your Content Marketing Strategy
How can you know if your content plan is working? By using KPI’s—key performance indicators, that report back to you numerically to give you the specific pieces of information that spell “success” and “growth” to your organization.
KPI’s can include search engine performance (ranking), website traffic, number of shares by visitors, click-through rate, number of unique visitors, and more. Whether you keep track of a few indicators or quite a few is up to you.
You can track KPIs through software that uses business analytics to gather data and provide reports on your performance within selected indicators.
Getting Help from Content Marketing Services
Planning an entire content campaign is challenging because it usually: a) Encompasses many types of content, b) that must be coordinated to stay on-message, c) sound authentically “you,” d) be produced and released in a timely manner, e) be measured frequently for effectiveness, and f) be adjusted accordingly.
There are real advantages to hiring a marketing-savvy content planning team. This is exponentially true for large campaigns that involve many types of content.
Our teams at The Writers for Hire collaborate with your team to develop your content plan as if it were our own. A skilled team can help you see through the “forest” (your overall objective) to the “trees” (the individual pieces of content that will accomplish it) by:
- Developing your customer or client personas
- Zeroing in on the problems your customers want to solve
- Helping to define your brand and the factors that distinguish it
- Determining which KPIs can best track your campaign’s performance
- Helping pick the channels where you can best engage with your audience
- Creating your content calendar or calendars, to ensure your campaign stays on schedule
- (If desired) Writing brand-right content for all your channels
A content campaign that is fresh, ambitious, and achievable is the goal. A content marketing services team can give you a boost in all three areas, giving you a content campaign that works for your brand, 24/7.
