Written by Market My Market’s content team, with contributions from McKenzie Fox, Ryan Klein, Tyesha Ferron, and Lindsay Bennett
With over three billion searches every day, Google is the number one search engine in the world. Sistrix, a search engine optimization platform that studied over 80 million keywords and billions of search results to understand Google’s click rates, found that over 25% of Google users click on the first organic result. They noted that the results following the number one position receive significantly less traffic.
What distinguishes the first and second results? While the answer is complicated, it can be boiled down to well-developed, thought-provoking content. Brands that have a strong online presence, including trending topics and fundamental keywords, rise in Google’s results. However, coming up with consistent, high-quality content on your website comes with its challenges. In order to have a clear schedule for your website’s blogs and pages, you’ll need to create a content plan.
Contributed by McKenzie Fox, Content Writer
What Is a Content Plan?
A content plan is an organized, clear roadmap to the quantity and type of content you’ll produce for your website on a regular basis. Generally, for a B2C service-based website (and others), you’ll have a breakdown of the pages and blogs that will be added to your website every month, with the plan extending out either quarterly or annually.
The reason pages and blogs should be the centerpiece of the content plan is that pages will capture your short-tail keywords, while blogs will blanket the long ones. For example, let’s say your business is a gym in a metropolitan area. In that case, your page strategy will work to capture local high-intent keywords:
- (your city) gym
- (your city) fitness center
- (your city) bootcamp
- (your city) personal trainers
Your blogs will do much of the rest:
- What are the best parks in (your city) for joggers?
- Does (your city) have beginner-level personal trainers?
Of course, other content can make its way into the plan, like long-form articles, FAQs, DIY pages, etc. But pages and blogs will often be consistent, with the value of blogs being indefinite because the questions for which people search are always changing and inherently infinite.
What makes a content plan so valuable is it allows you and your team to organize your topics and apply a level of accountability and structure in its execution. Content plans ensure there are deadlines and set expectations for your content to be developed and delivered on your website. This content will ideally have a high degree of transparency as well as benchmarks that can be observed for the website’s content growth and progress.
Contributed by Ryan Klein, Managing Partner
Why Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy
To succeed at anything, you need a strategy guiding your way. Everything works better when a plan is in place, and content marketing is no different. Marketers who develop a content marketing strategy are more likely to believe their efforts are successful.
With an effective strategy guiding their way, successful marketers can:
- Establish a strong, cohesive brand identity
- Produce content that enhances conversion
- Set concrete goals and track their progress
- Analyze patterns to reveal opportunities for improvement
- Optimize their team, increasing productivity and maximizing ROI
- Use their social media channels more effectively
- Justify allocating more resources to content marketing
- Feel prepared when approaching new challenges
Essentially, your content marketing strategy will allow you to outline why you are producing content, who you are serving, and how you will do so.
Contributed by Tyesha Ferron, Content Writer
7 Steps for Crafting a Valuable Content Plan
An effective and valuable content plan can be a boon to your business and can boost sales and traffic to your website. However, if your strategy is not meticulously planned, you could be wasting both time and money. Before you rush to post new content, make sure you do your research and craft a detailed plan. The following are seven essential steps for creating a robust content plan:
- Determine concrete goals: The first step of any content strategy is determining what you hope to accomplish. Are you trying to generate more sales leads or establish more brand awareness? These questions are essential to consider when determining your “why.”
- Understand your target audience: It is essential to understand your audience and how to tailor your content to that specific group. Research your audience’s likes, dislikes, needs, and habits to write content with which they will be compelled to engage.
- Examine the competition: Researching your competitors provides valuable inspiration for your own content and can help you see what is missing from the pool of topics and how you can provide something unique to your audience.
- Conduct keyword research: After identifying your audience, it is critical to understand what they are searching for online. Start by researching keywords you think may apply to your audience and goals. The results of your research may surprise you!
- Plan a consistent schedule: An effective content schedule includes specific dates for when content is to be completed and posted, as well as which individuals in your organization are assigned to these tasks. This schedule will help your content be consistent and effective.
- Create high-quality content: It may be tempting to rush through your content to meet your schedule. However, content must be high-quality to meet your objective. Be sure to take your time and craft each page or blog with your specific goals in mind.
- Refine over time: It is essential to track how your content performs after publishing. Try to isolate what is working and not working so you can refine your strategy over time and create the best content possible for your target audience.
It is essential to remember that an effective content plan is not a one-off task but a process to be implemented and repeated consistently. As you develop your business’ content plan over time, your strategy will become more refined, efficient, and profitable.
Contributed by Lindsay Bennett, Content Writer
Get Expert Content Planning Guidance From Market My Market
Without a plan, success or failure is entirely up to chance, and you risk wasting your hard work on endeavors that offer no insight. However, planning poorly is often worse than not planning at all. While doing everything yourself may seem like a good idea, some aspects of your business may be overlooked. Strategy development requires time and resources you may not have in-house.
Businesses can develop an effective content plan with help from Market My Market. Our skilled team is dedicated to helping you reach your goals through a tailored marketing approach. By combining decades of in-house knowledge in a number of industries, we can assist you in developing a unique strategy for your brand. To book a discovery call with one of our content marketing specialists, contact us here or call us at (866) 270-2250.
Contributed by Tyesha Ferron, Content Writer