Inbound marketing is pretty much here to stay. So we decided to write you a guide, to make sure your content marketing in 2015 delivers the ROI you’re looking for.
This guide has 4 major steps:
- SWOT analysis and actionable planning
- Define objectives and KPIs
- Figure out what content you need to produce
- Create a content timeline
1. SWOT analysis + actionable planning
2015 probably isn’t your first crack at content marketing. So a good place to start your plan is to look at what you’re good at and what you’re… a little rusty on. This will inform where you’re going next.
Your SWOT might look a little like this:
- Strength: Very in-depth analysis of the industry
- Weakness: Doesn’t have very wide appeal, and traffic to the website is poor
- Opportunity: Strong email list that can be leveraged for lead generation more than it currently is
- Threats: Competition has superior SEO and web traffic – they perform better in Google searches
You then use this analysis to build actions to address your weaknesses. By using hard data and analysis, rather than a ‘gut feeling’ approach, your content is already off to a great start.
Following the example above, the actionable plan might be to
increase unique visitors to the site with more layman-friendly content.
2. Objectives + KPIs
You’ve established your goals, based on your SWOT. Great! Now, you need to know if you’re hitting them or not.One way to divide your goals is to put them into the context of your sales funnel, so everyone knows exactly how each stage of the funnel is being measured.
Taking the weakness from earlier, and the actionable plan to solve it, the objective could be to increase unique visitors to the website by 100% by the end of the year, and the KPI would be unique visitors.
This objective would naturally live at the top of a sales funnel since it’s concerned with outreach. It’s best to have an objective and KPI for each stage of the funnel, but depending on how your specific SWOT played out that may not be necessary.
So now, you have:
- Addressed a problem in your content marketing
- An actionable plan to solve it
- An objective (increase visitors by 100%)
- A way to measure the objective (unique visitors)
Your next step is to look at
what actual content you’re going to create.
3. What type content you’re going to create
This step isn’t so much a laundry list how many blog posts and whitepapers that are going to be created throughout the year. Rather, it’s
an analysis of your current content and clear look at what types of content are going to resonate with your audience, so you know where the gaps are.
Go back to our earlier example. The goal is to get more unique visitors. And one of the strengths is in-depth content, which we know only appeals to a certain type of website visitor. So a gap that we should plug in the New Year would be lighter, more layman-friendly content and free resources with more mass appeal:
- Competitions
- Viral content
- Infographics
- Streamlined, paired down list-icles
The goal here is to see what you have and what you need to create to build a watertight content marketing strategy that appeals to all of your potential clients (not just some of them).
Top tip: A good way to know where your content might be lacking is to look at competitors’ content, and see what they have that you don’t.
4. Create a content timeline
Your last step is to pull it all together in a content timeline, or calendar. The more time you have, and the earlier you cement a content calendar into place, the better your content marketing is going to be. Remember that creating quality content takes time (especially if you’re working with freelancers). So don’t leave it to the last minute to pull this together.
For your timeline, you’ll need to map:
- Your content
- Your content distribution
Content is the actual number and timing of blog posts, vlogs, interviews, infographics, whitepapers – whatever content you hope to create. Content is best organized into campaigns, with lots of content driving towards one larger piece. For example, driving people towards a case study with blog posts.
Content distribution is all the channels that you’re going to use to amplify your content. These include SEO,
social media, email lists – whatever options you have at your disposal.
The goal here is to have a clear idea (with dates!) of what campaign is going to be running, what content is going to be centre stage and what content is going to be supporting it, and how that content is going to be distributed.
To recap…
So to recap, your content marketing planning for 2015 should look something like this:
- SWOT analysis + actionable plan, so you know what you’re good at and what you need from your content in the new year
- Objectives and KPIs, so you know what you’re achieving with your content, at what stage of your funnel it’s helping, and how you’re going to measure it
- What content you’re going to create, so you know what content you actually need to achieve a nice balance
- A content timeline, so you know what pieces are going to be published, and how they’re going to be amplified.
Follows those steps and you’re all set for 2015.
