reading time: 3 minutes Content marketing drives sales – so why aren’t you using it? When you use content – like blog posts, videos and white papers – to reach out to your audience, you’re creating a very rare situation in advertising: you’re creating information that your prospects are excited to receive. When was the last time you hear someone say they enjoyed a piece of direct mail or they looked forward to pop up ads? Social content marketing can help you find more prospects, convert those prospects into fans and develop lifelong customers. However, starting a blog and getting active on Twitter isn’t a guaranteed recipe for content marketing success. You’ve got to have a plan. And with that in mind, here are our top five content planning tips that make content marketing easier and more effective. Define your core message. Think back – way back – to your high school or college days. Remember term papers? Remember how you needed to have a thesis statement? Your core message is a lot like that. It’s the thread that weaves all of your content marketing together.What are you trying to say with your content? What is the message of your business? Write a two to three sentence core message to guide your content creation. You’ll keep a more unified front across the multiple social and content channels. Create a detailed customer profile. A customer profile – or client persona – is the cornerstone of great content marketing. Your profile defines your audience and helps you understand their problems and concerns with regards to your industry. You have to have a detailed customer profile, or series of profiles, in order to reach out to your audience in a way that has impact.Understanding the demographics and psychographics of your audience will help you crate content that answers their biggest questions, helps them define the problem and allows them to see your product or service as the natural solution. Craft an editorial calendar. In order to see success with content marketing, you have to embrace your role as a publisher. Successful brands publish consistently – and in order to do that you need an editorial calendar.Whether you use a simple Excel file to collect topic ideas and schedule posts, or opt for a more robust system, you have to have a publication plan in place. Your calendar should include regular blog posts and larger content pieces scheduled on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis. Pay attention to the competition. Companies of all sizes are blogging and publishing content now, and that makes it easy to keep tabs on what the competition is trying out. You can plan for content marketing success by observing what works – and what doesn’t – for your competition in terms of topics, frequency and format. Regularly review your analytics. Content marketing and social media are extremely trackable. With the right tools in place, you can see how your content performed with your audience – from views to clicks to shares.However, many companies collect this data but don’t use it to its fullest extent. Which post is most popular with your audience? What topics are resonating best across social media? This data and more can help you make the right content marketing decisions moving forward. Be sure to work analytics reviews in your content marketing plan. With these planning steps, you can plan for success with your content marketing. And when you work with a plan, you’ll maximize your results without maxing out your marketing budget. photo credit: Dricker94 via photopin cc Share this:FacebookX