How to Create a Content Strategy Plan for Your Brand

1. Intro: Content is the Only Thing that Markets: Hey there. You probably heard of the phrase content Is King well in this digital age, content is definitely King, however, is increasingly becoming the only thing that market content not only increases brand awareness, it also enhanced this brand loyalty and strengthens customer relationships. Hi, my name is Joanna, Dustin and I am the self employed copywriter and content strategist. I am also the founder of Career Ambition, Growth, my content development firm and inspirational blogged. I specialize in promotional copy writing, like writing an email campaign for a new product or service launch, lady pages and industry specific block posts. I also coach still a preneurs at small business owners like myself on how to leverage content Market E to create effective contest driving plants that increased conversions. You will logically from this course with three things. One. You'll understand that key concepts of Cotton Market E two. You'll understand how to create a balanced content mix, and three you'll be able to measure and benchmark your contact performances. After that, you'll use all of these skills to create your very own contest strategy plan. As a beginner's course, this class is great for anyone in marketing whether you're a marketing professional abruption directly with a content development team or your soul open your were like myself . Where's many? Maybe a small business owner who's looking to kind of wrap their head around this thing called Contact Marketing and really understand the contest static plans that are being presented to you as a class project. This class utilizes an interactive worksheets, and progress to the course will be using this worksheet to complete Serve inspects. That will end up be your very old effective contact Dr Plan. So by and of course, will not only have a plan in place, but she'll also have the tools and resource is unique in order to create a contact planning template that will allow you to track all of the content ideas that you're going to come up with law taking this course. So let's get started. Class is now in session 2. The Fundamentals of Content Marketing Part 1: before we dive into learning how to leverage content marketing to increase your brands, customer base and profits, we first have to understand the fundamentals of the. There are several ways to define content marketing as it functions as an engine with various elements working together to produce powerful results. Let's first bring it back to basics. Since the dawn of time, people have leverage storytelling to not only provide information but, most importantly, to distribute back vital information. The act of storytelling started off, were believed, then moved to a picture format and eventually writing in language was invented. Content marketing at its core is a combination of all of the above. So it comes to no surprise that storytelling is the tea to driving all types of marketing and sales funnels. The Content Marketing Institute defines content marketing as a strategic marketing approach , focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent contact to attract here, retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately to drive profitable customer action. Although a concise definition, the core freeze to pull out of it in relation to your brand strategy. Is this worth wild, useful content that is dependable for your target? market and proves and drives profitable customer action. Essentially, supplying your target audience was relevant and useful information that helps to enhance their day to day lives will build trust and eventually, loyalty. Loyalty leads to conversion every Pete business. This is why numerous brands today allocate large amounts of their time and money into their content marketing efforts. As mentioned earlier content marketing functions like a well going to object. The six elements of content marketing listed here all work together in their individual marketing blades to create the strategy that yields high brand awareness and high engagement. In the next few flights, we will be so diving into each of these court allies in order to attract new customers, your brand needs to be visible and accessible to back. The most dependable place to get in front of your potential customers is the Internet. With the use of the Internet and technologies like search engines, the purchasing power has now completely shifted to be 100% in the hands of the buyer. Why is that? Well, today's buyer is much more infirmed. They not only know about your brand specific product or service, they also know about your competitors, your customers experiences Andrew. Industry standards taken. Discover all of this there a simple search. In addition, toe arming your potential customers with knowledge. The Internet has also increased your competition. You are no longer competing with the business down the street. You are now competing with businesses across international waters. You need to make sure that your brand stands out, and that is where brand awareness comes in to brand means. To mark as a brand, you need to leave a positive mark and trail on the Internet. You do this by providing your prospects with valuable information that positions your brand as a thought leader and one stop shop for both knowledge and solutions through your products or services. As you curate your content ideas, make sure that you were considering your brand identity and value proposition. Brand awareness is a business goal that is achieved their content and should be at the forefront of your content strategy plan. This needs us toe online contact. This is essentially the type of content that your prospect of customers will come across as they utilize the Internet to solve for their problems. The type of content associated with this category includes informational block posts, infographics e books and downloadable marketing. One. Pagers. The business goal here is to provide our customers with valuable information that also supports the usage of your products and services. These are examples of soft cells. Social media platforms are community based platforms. People leveraged, um, to keep up with the people and things they like. They also engage in several conversations they're sharing and commenting on these topics as a brand, you should be using social media as a way to further humanized your brand. As you work through your content mix, take the opportunity to find ways to relate to your customers and followers by showing them that your brand is all about people. I'm sure you've heard the phrase put a face to a name. This doesn't only apply to people. It arguably applies to businesses and brands as well. From a content perspective, you can achieve this by sharing videos and high quality images of behind the scenes projects for team building activity, where your followers will see the people that are behind the brand. As you work through your content ideas, make sure that you take into consideration each social media platforms, rules and regulations. You cannot create one piece of content and just share it, as is on every social platform, the contact, purpose and concept. He remained the same. However, the presentation of the information should be tailored to each individual social platforms to avoid the lazy blanket coverage approach. 3. The Fundamentals of Content Marketing Part 2: email. Marketing is permission based marketing. Consumers have toe often or subscribe to your email list. Most brands use email management software that requires a double often, which is a two step process where a consumer can sign up on your embedded form on your website and then have to confirm their subscription through clicking. Confirm in the automatic email sent to them before they can be officially added to your list. Email marketing is a crucial component to your contents driving plan because it is the one marketing element where you mostly have control over how and when you communicate with your customers with social media. All users are tied down by the platform's preferred algorithm, which frequently changes, and it controls when your followers see your contact. This is typically an issue with brands who are promoting discounts with a deadline. Just like any content you share with your customers, your email content needs to be relevant and useful. Think of her email list as your living room were typically host a gathering with each email you sent. Think of all your subscribers sitting in your living room, waiting to hear what you have to say. If this were an actual gathering. While crafting what you would share, you would most likely consider the fact that some people commuted from far away. Or maybe they had to make adjustments to their schedules so he wouldn't make sure that what you're presenting is worth wild content. Pieces that are relevant and useful include quick wins, industry bust knows, promotional information and all important dates or deadlines. When creating your email marketing contact calendar, make sure toe organize your content in a way that allows you to give back to your customers first before doing something like axing them to purchase or filling out a survey. This is called the Give Give Get map It give your quick when content first like a three resource or Davey tip and then acts for something in return. A subset of email marketing is nurture Market E, which is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and through every step of the buyers journey. If focuses marketing and communication efforts, I'm listening to the knees of prospects and providing the information and answers they need . This is a data driven method that allows brands to identify its customers content needs to achieve. Nurture murky many brands to use segmentation, which is where they send specific messages to the subset of their overall email list, who have demonstrated interest in a specific product or service. For example, let's say you have a subset customers who clicked on the link to your new product feature and made it through the entire process until they abandoned their cart, which means they didn't purchase the product. Maybe these customers need some more convincing. You can nurture their buyer process by sending just those customers to a specific email that includes a short video on how to use the product and its overall benefits. This may push the needle toe, have them complete the purchase. People believe their peers over brands and businesses. As we discussed in the brand awareness section, Consumer spend a large portion of their buyer journey studying pure reviews and client testimonials prior to making a purchasing decisions. They want to see if Mary from Chicago was actually satisfied with your product or service, and if everything amazing except about it on your website is actually true. Once Mary confirms, then it's Riel used this idea to your advantage. Many brands today are using influencers to sponsor their brands. They're conducting reviews on their products and services and sharing those reviews with their communities. These were people a specific industries whose opinions air well respected and have very large followings. This method has been coined influential marketing several brands today or allocating portions of their content marketing budget to establish the strategic partnerships. Using this method allows many brands to curate what we call user generated contact. This is essentially content about a brand shared from someone outside of the brand. This strategy has enabled several brands to gain exposure and visibility to individuals who could find value in their products or services. 4. Where does your brand fit in the Content Strategy Mix?: the type of content that in share is a direct representation of your Brit. If you take a look at the definition for brand, you'll see that it means to mark. So as you're working through your content, ideas and content planning, make sure that you're taking consideration This really important question. What impression do you want to leave on your prospects and customers through your brand messaging before we dive in? Please take this moment to pull up the class project work she. If you don't know where to access it, you can find it in the Project Description section of this course as an attack. Once you have that up ready, you can continue this video first things first. You enter team need to get on the same page about who you are as a brand. Ah, lot of her messaging has to do with your core values as a business and as a break once you sit down together, a couple of things that you can discuss have to do with your bread characteristics, such as personality type and brand voice or tongue. A way to get around getting these answers would be to ask yourself this question. If your brand is a person, who would this person be? Where do they go shop? What are they interested in? How did they navigate the world? Once you've done to buy this information, you can then move towards creating your customer persona. What is the next piece? Your customer? Per Sonett is your ideal customer. A lot of her brand messaging is going to have to do with who you're talking Teoh. So afternoon craft in your messages, you need tohave the picture of your ideal customer in your mind. So let's take a moment toe were through. Question two on the worksheet and question to you. You'll be able to answer a few questions about your ideal customer is and then you have the opportunity to actually draft out of description. For this person was identified. This person you've created your target audience, and she can that leverage this information to craft their content in a way to speak directly to this person. So I haven't take a moment to complete exercises, wanted to off the worksheet, and then I'll see you in the Max Vidia 5. The Customer Journey: congratulations. You've just received the notification for a you purchase on one of your products for services. Did you know that content marketing played a huge role in that online purchase? Let's go ahead and dive in. Before that Consumer made their purchasing decision. They left a trail of digital footprints. This is what we call the customer journey. The customer journey consists of three contents stages, awareness, consideration and decision in the awareness stage. This is where consumer has identified a problem that they need to be resolved through purchasing a product or service. For instance, someone may be having an issue with their skin, so they may be looking for a product that can help resolve the blackheads that they're experiencing. Using that example, let's go ahead and dive into the awareness stage. The consumer, as I doesn't buy the problem, is they immediately moved into what we call research mode. They pull up a search engine and they start typing in questions and then that question populace. A plethora of websites that includes a lot of informative content pieces such a feat books , blood post or infographics. The customer then starts looking through this information, and this information presents brands that could potentially solve their problems with their product or service. So once they've gathered the information that they need, they then move into what we call the consideration stage. This is when a consumer has created a short list, typically between 3 to 5 brands, and they now live a little bit deeper into those Brennan specifically. So this looks like taking a look at the Breeder's website, looking at their social media presence to see the lifestyle that's associated with bacteria and and also taking a look at the content that the brand specifically provides in relation to their product or service. So this could be informational blog's webinars or how to videos. What's The consumer has received all this information, and they've picked one brand that they really want to purchase a product or service from. They move into the decision stage. This is where the consumer takes one last act before making that actual purchase, and that's that is taking over that pure ravines and client testimonials. This is really important in this day in age. A lot of people the lie appeared, appeared reviews to make a final decision, so if you have that content available for your brilliant. It could be an advantage, especially if it's positive. Once the customer was a consumer dissatisfied, then make the purchase. That's a customer journey. So as you work through your content strategy plan and you're coming up with different content beans and creating your unique balance contact mix, make sure that you're including content consists in the awareness and consideration of stage, as this is the stage that completely fill the top of your file. Now, please take the time to go ahead and complete exercise three, and I'll see you in the next yet. 6. The Importance of a Balanced Content Mix: constant. Marketers understand that the magic is in the minutes. The goal is to say, develop it and keep your audience of gate as a breed. You can achieve this by mixing different types of content to keep your birds and fresh. A content mix is comprised of a content being as then a business objectives and a contact visual, as in the method of presenting your message with the bull of delivering a brand Mastic. When considering your heart testy, ask yourself. What purpose do I want the party to serve? Essentially? What is the business full behind this piece of cartilage? Some examples of continent names are a part of demo, a promotion, a sale of a specific product or service, it thought leadership inspired and a contact. He's with the hope of invoking up on your reaction. Your contact visual is the visual representation of your brand's message. A few visual options include a high quality photo and info graphic, a video, I guess, or a high quality image with tax overlay like an inspirational quotes. The following brands have demonstrated an effective use of a balance content mix under slide. We have ideas you can see through their content mix that they utilized influenced ER promotion. They also have lifestyle shots and use high quality images in addition to video and images with text over less on this lad, we have birth play part. Now they're specializing in thought leadership concept. They also utilize lifestyle images and lifestyle content through their industry specific blob. On this slide here we have class pass last past of the great job of using everything is covered. They have videos as well as high poli images and lifestyle shots. They also utilize funny quotes and from the images through their gloves. They provide thought. Leadership inspired. Caught last year, uses high quality images, funny images and also has video to promote their products on their blood. These lifestyle shots and lifestyle. Ehlvest does a fantastic job of combining lifestyle content and spot leadership. They also use high quality photos, videos, blog's and downloadable e books. On this final slide, you can see that Old Spice does a phenomenal job of using high quality video to promote their products. It's also an extremely funny city up 7. Establishing a Content Cadence that Yields High Engagement: the number one rule to creating a successful content marketing plan is to keep your contact fresh. How do you do that with their two ways? The first way is to create and curate content that resonates with your target audience. And then, secondly, you need to make sure that you are evaluating those content by making sure that it take a look at what types of contact are performing well. And when are they performing? At their best? That leads us to contact cave ins on time. Cadence can be broken down into T different elements, the first element being time of day and the second element being frequency. This is taking a look at when you post your content and how often you posted based off of the channel that we're using. Husband actually identifies content cadence as delivering the right content to the right audience at the right time. Some may even argue that this is a great destination for content strategy. Utilizing data optimized content will increase your consumer engagement, so make sure that you take the time Children of you how your customers react just certain types of content and then used those findings to apply to future contact planning that a strategy at its best content cadence provides three things. First, it provides structure for your content, claiming second, it creates expectations for your consumers and thirdly, it to maintains brand relevancy. 8. How to Measure the Success of Your Content: success and staying relevant are ongoing processes. In order to remain successful in your content marketing efforts, you have to measure your contact performance. Business success is often measured in our oh I return on investment. The formula to measure this is as followed amount of revenue gained, meaning the leaves converted into sales in comparison to the dollar spent to create and distribute the content as in in house costs paid average Heismans etcetera equate to your are away in order to determine your r A Y. You first need to establish your business goals. Doing this will enable you to categorise your content and then apply a content aim or goal . The first question to ask yourself when completing this exercise is what do I want my content to accomplish? Do you want your content to drive more traffic to your website? Do you want people to learn more about your brand, or do you want to promote more of your products or services with the goal of increasing your sales? A few examples of business goals are brand awareness Lee generation engagement, customer retention in sales. Once you've determined your overall business goals, you can then establish your KP eyes. Key performance indicators, which is immeasurable value that demonstrates how effectively a company or brand is achieving key business objectives. KP eyes allow brands to evaluate their success at reaching targets. They are essentially benchmarking tools. Your business goals and KP eyes should consider your customers buying journey. The buying journey consists of three contents. Stages. Awareness. Consideration in decision. Each of these customer lifestyle changes include opportunities toe leverage, your brand content to drive a specific, profitable action. The business goals are toe one. Reach your customers to encourage them toe. Act on your content. Three. Persuade them to comfort by making a purchase, and four continue to engage them so that they come back for more. As you build your content strategy plan, make sure to include the following KP eyes in your benchmark section. First, we'll dive into brand awareness the KP eyes that are associated with this business goal. Our website traffic, video views, document views, page views, social chatter and referral length. These are essentially any interaction with your content where the customer is consuming information about your brand. Next we have the generation. This is when content converts users into perspective. customers their informational content pieces, such as blog's e mails, webinars, etcetera. The KP eyes associated with this business goal our form completions, email and block subscriptions, landing page metrics, bounce rates and conversion rates up max is engagement. This is a measurement of your audience interactions with your content. The KP eyes associate it with this business goal are blocked. Comments likes shares, hands retweets well words, inbound links followers and fans and applause rate nexus customer retention. This refers to reducing the number of customer defect Shin's This is typically achieved your customer loyalty and brand loyalty initiatives in the form of rewards programs. The KP I disassociated with this business goal are open right click rate, click through rate from the email, marketing benchmarks, renewals, promotions and social chatter. And lastly, but certainly not least, we have sales, a k a. Revenue. The KP ice associated with this business goal Our online and offline sales product affinity , meaning the identification of products or services that are often purchased together. Shopping CART abandonment rate sales growth. An average border value 9. Content Planning Template Demo: in this lesson, we're going to be reviewing a content planning template. This template is comprised of calendars and email schedule. In a social media schedule, we will go over the elements of each of these different components. The 1st 1 up is a counter. This gives you an overview of what the month looks like. In this particular example, we have the month at the top as well as the year. You also have a color key on the right hand side that includes the different business objectives or content themes. In this case, we have holiday email instagram as far as a social media post and a block post each day is listed here in the calendar. Within each day, you can see what different types of content is being posted. Another thing that you can see is that we also include a holiday. It's great to remain relevant in the type of content that you're sharing by pairing it with some type of holiday as the national Do Something Nice day. These can always increase our brand visibility through the use of hashtags for that particular national holiday. The same goes for this month as well as this month. Now we're going to take a look at how you can organize content for a blogger. As you can see here, we have different columns that indicate when an outline is due for the particular block, when a draft is due and when the post status. This information is more relevant for your content development team, and it provides structure around the deadline for the post date. You also have a blood category, the title of the blogged. If your blog's included in your email communication and if it is included in that email communication, you also have the email Sunday On the right hand side, there is also a color code key that is listed. This tells us that the green means that the block has already been posted and the yellow means that the block isn't draft. You can also include your content cadence. Was he gone to the email marketing section? There are a couple things that are listed here. Were first going to go through the top section for your email marketing content planning. You should include the day that the email is going to be sent. This allows you to track what days of the week work best. You should also include the email send date, the time of day. The marketing tactic, as in, isn't give tactic. Get tactic the subject line the email content itself. If there's a call to action included, if there's a black post included, and even if there's a secondary call that action included, you then can include a key. As for the other sections for what each color means, So in this case, Green means that the email has already been sent. Pill blue means that the email is scheduled. Yellow means that there's a draft for that Imo content in process. Now again, this is specifically for your content planning to schedule out all the different text of content. But you're going to be executing throughout the month or, you know throughout the quarter the way that you plan on setting it up. This does not include any KP eyes or engagement tracking. A lot of companies use that as a separate document. However, if you would like to also include me to the open rate in the click rate in this section, you're more than welcome to do that. Moving on to the social movie s section in this up social media section, we're using instagram as this tab. Some of the same information applies that you'll want to include the day again. This is going to allow you to benchmark later on to Steve. What days worked best for your content. We'll include the date, the time of day that you'll post it. What the actual messages in the description section, the link that you included in your bio to promote this particular post. If that's the case and then the campaign that disassociated with as well as the image and any photo credits that you need. In this example, we have Facebook. Some of the scene requirements are included here. You have the day, the date, the time, what the content is the message itself, Excepting Facebook. There isn't a Bottle Lake. There's just a link in general, and that's only if it's relevant to the particular post. And, of course, the campaign. If this is for a webinar pushing new product launch and if there is an image, the file name for that image or the description of that image, as well as any photo credit than used to be applied to the actual post. For Pinterest, we have the same requirements except here because you have different boards and Pinterest. We've also included what board it is. If it's a quotes board, you can also add if it's from one of your boards for your blog's or any types of tips. This would be a great area to kind of include that, and that's the basis of a car 10 planning template. This will allow your team to stay organized as you go through your content strategy planning. You can also build a list of content ideas and have that housed in the section and then add to the actual calendar as things pop up. 10. Next Steps: How to put your new Content Strategy Plan into action: Congratulations. You've completed the class. Now let's recap and take a look at how you can put your new contest strategy plan into action. First, make sure you develop your branch portfolio. Take a look at those brand guidelines and customer persona activities from the worksheet. Also, make sure that you map out your customer journey. Identify content pieces for each of the stages that we discussed. Awareness consideration in decision. Remember awareness and consideration or the two major buckets that you want to focus on. Determine your content goals. Take a look at some of your business objectives and see what type of content aligned with them. Some of those business objectives are brand awareness, sales and consumer engagement. Also, you want to track, so identify your content. KP eyes Consider each customer life cycle, stage, reach, act, convert and engage. Finally, you want to develop your content planning template so you can schedule and organize all of your content ideas. Before you go, make sure that you upload your class project to the Project Gallery. You have two options you can print, complete the worksheet and then scan and upload it, or you can download and completed digitally and upload directly to the Project gallery. Thank you for taking the time to take this class. I hope that it was helpful. And I hope that you've learned the nitty gritty of content, marketing and content strategy.