You have business goals that you’re working toward, but does your content marketing plan align with those goals. (Heck, do you have a content marketing plan?) If you’re hiding behind a face-palm right now, it’s time to get your plan together before you start publishing content in the next month or quarter.
Putting together a plan for your content and marketing isn’t rocket science, but it does take a bit of research and thought. Here’s what you need to do as you get started:
Survey your audience
Nothing is more helpful when creating content than finding out what it is your audience wants and needs. An audience survey is a great way to get that information, so you know you’re creating content that your audience will actually find helpful. But don’t stop there. You can gather some great feedback by keeping an eye on posts in Facebook groups and comments on your own social posts. One place that gave me loads of information recently was my free content hub because I ask for feedback from subscribers regularly. Anywhere your ideal audience is talking, that’s where to find out their needs and wants.
Know your business goals
You can’t create quality, strategic content if you don’t know what you want to accomplish with it. Know what’s coming down the path for your business so you know what ideas to create content around. I recommend looking 12 weeks ahead and backing up your content from there. So if you’re launching a new program in a few months, one of your goals is likely to sell X number of seats to that program. You’ll need content to help educate your audience about the ideas you’ll cover in that program. If you want to spotlight a certain service you offer, you’ll want to create content around that.
Review current content
What kind of content is your audience consuming right now? It’s one thing to survey your audience, but you’ll want to look at their behavior too. Take a look at your Google Analytics, social insights and email open rates to get an idea of what your audience is interested in. If something isn’t resonating with your audience at all, rethink the feeling that you have to continue creating similar content. (You don’t.)
[click_to_tweet tweet=”Survey your audience for content ideas, but also look at their behavior. What content are they consuming?” quote=”Survey your audience for content ideas, but also look at their behavior. What content are they consuming?”]
Do your research
Yep, you’re an expert in your industry, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t still learn something new. Before I sit down to batch create content, I do my research. I look at what others are saying about similar topics and if there’s anything new I need to address. I also try to take a different approach than others have taken because I don’t need to recreate the wheel. I want to stand out and do something different.
Have a plan in place
Nothing is going to happen without a plan. Just like you can’t train for a marathon without knowing how many miles you need to run each day–and when you get to take a rest day–leading up to it. If you have a launch coming up, if you want to spotlight a certain part of your business, you need to have a plan that you can follow. Publishing content willy-nilly for the sake of putting something out there isn’t going to get you where you want to be.
Set up a time to batch
It’s so hard to find time to work on your business when you’re trying to work in it too. But without time set aside on a regular basis, it’s just not going to happen. Just like training for that marathon–if you don’t put your training runs on your calendar, they’re not going to happen. You need to decide what batching looks like for you. Maybe it’s one day a week, two half days a month or some other time you can dedicate to your own content. Whatever it looks like, block it on your calendar and make it happen.
Regular, consistent content is what will keep you top-of-mind for your audience and it’s a necessity in any growing business. But it takes time and dedication to do it right.
If batching is on your to-do list, grab my downloadable batching guide below. Then let me know how it goes!
