If you are among the 60% of content operations teams without a documented strategy, it’s time to change that to gain ground over the competition. You can’t count on luck.
Marketing is a lot like a battle. To win that battle, you need an effective strategy, not a coin toss. However, if your competition is breathing down your neck, and you need to win that battle fast, nothing but a KILLER strategy will do.
Don’t worry. We’re on your side and have your secret weapon: a content marketing strategy template that will save you time so you can start #WINNING faster.
If you’re ready to get our free template immediately, feel free to skip to the end. Otherwise, read on for some context to help you understand what’s in it and how to use it effectively.
Completing Your Content Marketing Strategy Template: All Hands on Deck
When time is of the essence, you need all hands on deck. You and your team might know how vital content strategy is to your company, but what about the C-suite or the other departments within you company that need and use content? If not, it’s time to bring everyone on board.
Why You Should Expand Your Team
Expanding your team to include employees from other areas of your company is an effective approach when developing your content marketing strategy. After all, employee-shared content gets eight times the engagement and seven times the conversion rate than a brand’s marketing content. Call the public a little jaded, but they just trust ordinary people more than marketers.
Employee-generated posts get even more action. People share employee posts on social media 24 times more than those posted by a brand. Even more shocking, your average employee probably has 10 times more social media followers than your company’s official account.
These stats are even more critical when you’re strapped for time. Bringing more of your business’s employees in on the action gives you an advantage in the battle.
Source: PostBeyond
Why a Template Is Invaluable
To pull off a win with a larger company on the battlefield, you need a content marketing strategy template to provide focus for creating an effective strategy. A content marketing strategy that spells everything out in writing makes it easier for employees to share or post. All they need to do is follow the directions.
A template ensures you include all necessary elements for a content asset, including brand guidelines. Every time you create or revise a strategy, your team will address branding, so you needn’t worry so much about employee shares and posts going off-brand.
A comprehensive content marketing platform allows employees who want to share or create content to collaborate with your experienced content team. Additionally, you can use those interactions to educate them on the “why” and the “how” of your strategy structure. You might even get valuable feedback that can help you tweak your strategy to become even more effective.
Unveiling Your 30-Day Content Marketing Strategy Template: The Critical Components
When your strategy is time-critical, simplicity is essential. So, we’ve broken down our 30-day content marketing template into simple, easy-to-understand parts.
Part 1: Plan To Succeed
When you get content planning right, it makes the rest of the content creation process more manageable. Unfortunately, many teams skim over the planning process when they have tight deadlines.
That’s the worst mistake you could make. Without a clear-cut plan, your content process will be less efficient, and the output may be off-target.
It’s the plan that you go to when you’re under pressure. Ask any football player, high school or pro. A well-thought-out plan allows you to execute at the highest level, even if the game is down to the last seconds.
With an easy-to-use content marketing strategy template, you’re ahead of the pack the moment you start. Here are some key areas to address as you work your way through strategy development.
- Start with your target customers: When you revolve your content around their needs, it becomes easy to create relevant content. It’s easier to hit the mark when you have something to shoot for. Having customer personas already in place helps. You already know what messages and benefits resonate with them, what their buying journey looks like, and where they hang out online. Now, all you have to do is nail down where and when to publish with that information in mind.
- Choose the challenge you’ll solve with each piece of content: Again, specifics help when you’re on a tight schedule. Include target audience challenges in your content marketing strategy template. Knowing the question allows you to hone in on the information that will give them the answer. With an eye on the outcome your audience seeks, the path to your content goal becomes more apparent.
- Pick the team that will work on each piece of content: If you need a subject matter expert to add insight on a technical problem, put them on the team. Similarly, if your content is a white paper or blog post, you’ll need an experienced writer. You’ll need your video team to participate if it’s a video post.
- Select topics, titles, and even outlines for each post: Giving your content structure in advance will help your customers solve each problem or answer each question. Generative AI software such as Writer enables you to hammer out an outline in record time.
- Define what success looks like: Before you delve too deeply into the content creation process, you need to lay out what metrics you want to hit. Doing so helps you optimize your content for SEO, search intent, and audience interest.
Focusing on these areas will help you reach your target audience across platforms.
Source: SproutSocial
Part 2: Execute Flawlessly
We know you’re only human. But the more you use your content marketing strategy template to collaborate, create, and check, the less likely a mistake will rear its ugly head.
Documenting your research sources and collaborators’ insight adds rich detail to your content while avoiding plagiarism and other snafus. State your brand guidelines in the execution part of the template so writers and other content creators can check their work against the brand voice.
Make sure you have a dedicated editor to look over the finished product before you click “Submit.” They can catch errors that escape even an experienced eye. I’ve discovered from personal experience that editors are a content creator’s best friend.
Part 3: Distribute Sensibly
Effective content distribution is crucial for content marketing success, no matter your timeline. However, if you have only 30 days, getting your content into the right hands at the right time is even more critical.
Here’s where the audience research you did in the first steps of your content marketing strategy template pays off. When you publish and promote your content where your target audience will find it easily, you’ll be more likely to capture their attention and get their business.
If short-term outcome expectations are high, you may need a mix of organic and paid promotion. Lean on organic channels when you have a large, owned audience. However, you may need to rely heavily on paid advertising and social boosts to get the impressions required to reach your goals.
Part 4: Measure Accurately
Defining what success looks like is a significant component of the planning process in the first section of your 30-day content marketing strategy template. Now, in this final stage, you use your content analytics program to see whether your content did what it was supposed to do.
Use the metrics that define success for each piece of content to measure the results. Promote your best performers and tweak those that didn’t hit the mark.
Adjusting your content battalion’s maneuvers is essential to winning the battle against your opponents. Determine where your content veered from the battle plan. Then, make whatever changes you need to get it back on track.
Using this simple formula, you should see improvement in your numbers within a month. Having a template that you can follow step-by-step is the key to success.
Implementing Your Content Marketing Strategy Template
If you want to experience that kind of success, download our eBook (and you’ll get the accompanying template), and we will walk you through this entire process.
Developing the template helps you move your content’s performance needle fast. However, when it comes time to implement it, you need an efficient content production process.
Your content marketing strategy template provides you with a battle plan; we clear the obstacle from the field, making it easier for your team to execute the content creation process.
Divvy’s platform removes your team’s process barriers. We give them the collaboration, ideation, scheduling, creation, and analysis tools to out-maneuver your opponents in one central hub. Request a demo today and start winning your battles!
