Marketing is a lot like a battle. To win that battle, you need an effective strategy. When you need to win that battle in a month’s time, you need a KILLER strategy. Here’s 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. But here’s some context to help you understand what’s in it, and how to use it effectively.
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 does everyone from the janitor to the C-suite? If not, it’s time to bring everyone on board.
After all, employee-shared content gets eight times the engagement and seven times the conversion rate than does the content your team shares. Call the public a little jaded, but they just trust ordinary people more than marketers.
And, employee-created posts get even more action. People share their posts 24 times more than they do yours. Even more shocking, your average employee probably has ten times the social media followers than your *official* account.
Those kinds of numbers are even more critical when you’re strapped for time. So, it’s important to bring everyone in on the action.
Here’s where a template comes in. With a content marketing strategy that spells everything out in writing, it’s easier for employees to share – or even post. All they need to do is follow the directions.
With a template, you needn’t worry about employee shares and posts going off-brand. You can provide brand guidelines within the template itself.
With a comprehensive content marketing platform, your employees who want to share or create content can collaborate with your experienced content team. And, you can use those interactions to educate them on the “why” as well as the “how” you’ve constructed your strategy. You might even get some valuable feedback that can help you tweak your strategy to become even more effective.
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 all the rest of the content creation process easier. 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 plan allows you to execute at the highest level, no matter whether it’s down to the last seconds.
With an easy-to-use template, you’re ahead of the pack the moment you start. Here are some key areas to address as you work your way through the development of your strategy.
- Start with your target customers: When you revolve your content around their needs, it becomes easy to create content that meets those needs. When you have something to shoot for, it’s easier to hit the mark. 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. Knowing the question helps you locate the information that will provide them with the answer. Knowing what outcome your content will help your audience achieve will help you narrow down topics.
- Pick the team that will work on each piece of content: If you need a subject matter expert to add his or her 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. If it’s a video post, you’ll need your video team to participate.
- 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.
- 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 can help you optimize your content for SEO and audience interest.
Part 2: Execute Flawlessly
We know you’re only human. But the more you use your template to collaborate, create, and check, the less likely a mistake will rear its ugly head.
Document your research sources and your collaborators’ insights. Doing so can help you add 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. Editors, I’ve discovered from personal experience, are a content creator’s best friend.
Part 3: Distribute Sensibly
Content distribution is crucial to get right for content marketing success no matter what your timeline. But if you have only 30 days, it’s critical to get your content into the right hands at the right time.
Here’s where the audience research you did in the first steps of your template pays off. When you publish and promote your content where your target audience will find it easily, you’ll be more likely to catch their attention – and get their business.
A mix of organic and paid promotion will likely be required if expectations are high. You can lean on organic channels when you have a large, owned audience. But short of that, you may need to rely heavily on paid promotion and social boosts to get the impressions needed to reach your goals.
Part 4: Measure Accurately
In the first part of your 30-day content template, defining what success would look like was a huge part of your planning process. Now, you’ll 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. Look at where you went off the path. Then make whatever changes you need to get it back on track.
Using this simple formula, you’ll see improvement in your numbers within a month’s time. Having a content marketing strategy template that you can follow step-by-step is the key to success.
If you want to experience that kind of success, we have an eBook (and you’ll get the accompanying template) that will walk you through this entire process. Download it today!