A Step-By-Step Guide To Documenting Content Marketing Strategy

As a marketer, you already know that ‘content is king’, and you are leaving no stone unturned to make your content marketing strategy win. But have you ever thought of documenting it? Well, a documented strategy can help you align your team, streamline your work process, and drive great results to make your efforts stronger.

Here is a step-by-step guide to documenting your content marketing strategy that will actually work for you:

1. Objectives And Goals

Before digging deeper and focusing on all other nitty and gritty of your content marketing efforts, take your overall mission into account.

Content marketing is a critical investment that consumes a lot of time and creates significant value. However, not everyone investing in content has the same objectives and goals. It is important to figure out why you are putting your efforts and money into it to become successful with your strategy.

Whether you aim at generating new leads or plan to build brand awareness, once you write it down in the first place, it becomes easy for you to follow the rest of the plan religiously at the time of implementation.

2. Target Market Personas

You can never come up with the best content for your audience until you create their personas. Hence, the second most vital thing to do is to analyze your target market and write about it in detail.

While documenting your content marketing goals, you must have already mentioned who you are trying to reach. This should be a thorough and all-inclusive rendition of that brief general idea. Research very well to identify and assess those specific individuals who can engage with your content and contribute to your goals eventually.

Outlining detailed audience personas will help you craft the best pieces of content and facilitate their distribution, thereby making it a success.

3. Types Of Content To Create

Now, as you are already aware of why you are developing content and targeting, it is time to define the types of content you need to craft and document a perfect content mix plan accordingly.

Start with a close look at your marketing funnel and find out which sort of content could promote the movement of your prospects through it. These could be owned, earned, or even paid content and can take a variety of forms including visual content such as audio files, video files, Infographics, text write-ups such as PPTs, PDFs, articles, guest posts, PRs white papers, newsletters, sales materials, and many more.

For the top of the funnel, you must create educating and engaging content, while for the bottom, your content should address particular queries, issues, etc. Seeking the help of an experienced SEO Consultant can also be extremely helpful in both determining and documenting the types of content to create.

4. Process Of Content Creation

The right next step should be the documentation of a detailed content creation process. Yes, even if you have an obvious idea about your overall marketing mission, your target audience personas, and the types of content you need to develop, you can find the actual task of writing the toughest one.

Churning out the most effective content takes lots of effort, a considerable amount of time, and great planning. Decide on the method you will follow, workflows you are going to have, and resources you are going to utilize. Once you are ready with a foolproof plan, write it down.

Keeping a content creation plan in hand will help your team to a large extent during the process of execution. Thus, your company leaders will never become unsuccessful as ‘content creators’, and your marketing strategy will run smoothly.

5. Editorial Calendar

When it comes to content marketing, consistency is everything, and nothing is as powerful as an editorial calendar for this. So, after outlining a robust content development plan, shift your focus to designing a precise editorial calendar.

Building a calendar around your content contributors and other stakeholders ensures that you do not fall short of delivering content on time. Keep track of every small detail, including how perfectly you are meeting your deadlines, how frequently you will publish, when you are going to distribute the published content, etc.

Mapping and scheduling all these things become really easy when you have a calendar in place. As a result, you become able to engage your audience and build trust with them efficiently.

6. Plan For Distribution

Even a surefire content development plan may fail miserably if a strong distribution plan does not accompany it. Hence, the next step in documenting your strategy should include reaching the right people at the right time through your published content.

No matter how well-thought-out your content creation part is, knowing where to distribute all those pieces of your hard work and how to do it are essential to make that work. You can leverage your email network, publish them in popular publications, seek the help of paid social plans, and so forth.

Thinking through the ways of distribution can give a huge push to your entire content marketing efforts.

7. ROI Calculation

Last but not least, jot down the ways you are going to calculate your return on investment (ROI) in the end. In fact, this is another reason why we emphasized identifying the objectives and goals of your content marketing efforts.

Develop a clear path to measure your success right from the beginning by setting a few benchmarks. These could be the amount of traffic, the number of leads generated, opportunities produced by content, and anything else related to your mission.

This will help you match the metrics with your goals gauge how well your content is performing and how close you are to your mission.

Sounds intimidating? Well, it’s worth all the hard work. Just follow this guide for documenting your content marketing strategy, and it will be an amazing start for you.