How and Why to make a Strategic Plan in Content Marketing

 Why is the definition of a strategic plan of fundamental importance for effective and successful content marketing? What should be kept in mind?

Every good content manager must have a clear answer to the question: how and why to make a strategic plan in content marketing? For content marketing, the preparation of a strategic plan is in fact of primary importance.

Creating content for the web can be a pleasant and very fun activity, but if writing is to be aimed at contributing to the varied art of online marketing, mere creativity is not enough. It is not enough to type random characters and give shape to imaginative ideas to fill the infamous blank sheet on the monitor, but it necessarily requires a plan, a preliminary work that precedes the actual writing phase.

It is clear that the precondition for the success of the content marketing activity is to be truly expert in writing, but it is not enough: it is essential to have good marketing skills. 

The production of effective content, when it is inserted in a business communication context, must have as its ultimate goal the increase in sales, direct or indirect, so it is also necessary to have an optimal knowledge of the best marketing logics that allow to discern good ideas from bad ones and guide the construction of truly useful and effective pieces for corporate communication.

A survey carried out by Sirius Decisions highlights how 65% of the content produced for a brand fails to work either because it fails to reach the target audience or because it is of poor quality, precisely under the absence of an adequate plan marketing strategy behind.

Further support of this thesis is the survey carried out by Contently Survey in 2017, but still very topical: 98% of content marketers say that having a strategic plan for the creation of content is crucial to achieving the objectives. 

One of the fundamental aspects of creating preliminary planning is that it is shared and visible by each member of the marketing team, to implement an integrated action between the various digital marketing activities implemented. It has been observed that the communication plan for content is essential in both B2B marketing and B2C.

How to make a strategic content marketing plan? Let's see what the most important points are.

Identify the target and the reader/buyer persona

When creating content, it is essential to identify the right audience to which one refers and to define the so-called buyer persona, i.e. the possible typical customer whose age, level of education, place of residence, main interests, and other distinctive traits that identify him. 

In content marketing the buyer persona almost always coincides with the reader persona, that is the ideal reader of a content that is published. Preliminarily and clearly define one or more reader/buyer personas is essential because the conception of the contents, their elaboration, and the very objectives for which each content is published are related to the characteristics of the ideal reader.

Look for the most suitable style

The style of communication is not always the same, rather it is fluid, dynamic, iridescent like the skin of a chameleon that must adapt to the different type of reader. Writing for a person over 50 requires a different style than the one to adopt in a communication aimed at a teenager. 

To choose the perfect style with which to elaborate content, you must start from the reader persona. Based on its characteristics, the most suitable stylistic formulas are determined to be convincing and engaging, thus achieving the communication objectives.

 

Know in-depth the platforms where you publish

 

This can be the writing of blog posts or launches and content for social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram services at (buy real Instagram likes UK), Linked in, or others. In any case, it must be considered that each platform has its own particular communication rules, which must be thoroughly understood to best adapt the expressive form to the habits of use of typical contents of the users of each site or social network. 

For example, when you decide to publish a tweet you will have to pay great attention to the choice of hashtags (in Twitter a couple of them are enough per tweet). On the contrary, if you publish a post on Facebook, hashtags do not serve to improve the visibility and the quality of communication of the post, indeed in some cases, they even denote carelessness and amateurism.

 

Focus on the objectives to be achieved

Why is some content being posted? What results do you want to achieve? A piece designed to encourage the reader to buy a specific product is constructed differently from a piece that wants to let the public know that the company has espoused a certain humanitarian cause. 

Depending on the communication objectives to be achieved, the writing - and in general the elaboration of the content - will be articulated differently. For the communication effect to be maximum, the objectives must be clear and focused before starting to create the content.

 

Identify the key issues

Know what are the main topics that characterize the brand to be promoted it is essential to know what to write. The most experienced copywriters and editors know that before starting to work on the production of content for a company they must know as much as possible about its characteristics and specificities. 

The same goes for the products and services that the company offers on the market. The aim is to find those distinctive traits that allow you to create communication-based on original content. If these traits are not clear, the content manager should consult with the managers of the client company or with the accounts of their agency to get more information about the brand and its products. Furthermore, he must know what marketing and communication strategy the company has decided to implement, to be perfectly consistent.

 

Research the most suitable SEO keywords

If you want to allow web users to find the published content, it must contain those keywords that coincide with the search that a person can do in search engines when he wants to find information on the topic covered in the content itself. 

In the past, it was essential to fill the text with iterations of the same keyword string considered most significant, to lead the search engine algorithms to associate the content with the searches containing those keywords. 

The evolution of algorithms has changed the rules, so a piece in which the same keyword is repeated over and over again will be downgraded becoming practically invisible. On the contrary, it is appropriate to use synonyms and variants of the same concept, because algorithms tend to be more and more semantic and inclined to favor writing that appears as fluid and natural as possible. In general, however, when preparing the content for publication, you must be careful to insert the right keywords by applying the most effective SEO techniques.