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? A documented strategy can help you align your team, streamline your work process, and drive outstanding results to strengthen your efforts.

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

1. Objectives And Goals

Consider your overall mission before digging deeper and focusing on all other nitty and gritty of your content marketing efforts.

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

Whether you aim to generate new leads or 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 create the best content for your audience until you create their personas. Hence, the second most vital thing 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, 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.

You must create educating and engaging content for the top of the funnel, 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 determining and documenting the types of content to create.

4. Process Of Content Creation

The next step should be documenting a detailed content creation process. Yes, even if you have an apparent 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.

Choosing the most effective content takes effort, time, and excellent planning. Decide on the method you will follow, the workflows you will have, and the resources you will 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 execution process. 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 stakeholders ensures you do not fall short of delivering content on time. Keep track of every tiny detail, including how perfectly you meet your deadlines, how frequently you will publish, when you will distribute the published content, etc.

Mapping and scheduling all these things become easy when you have a calendar. As a result, you can 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 massive push to your entire content marketing efforts.

7. ROI Calculation

Last but not least, jot down how you will 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 by setting a few benchmarks. These could be the amount of traffic, the number of leads generated, opportunities produced by content, and anything related to your mission.

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

Sounds intimidating? Well, it’s worth all the hard work. Follow this guide to document your content marketing strategy; it will be a fantastic start.