A well-thought-out marketing plan can help you to organise and visualise the execution of your strategy. Recognising the importance of planning content will allow you to realise what you want to achieve with your campaigns. Do you want to grow your online brand loyalty, do you want to focus on increasing your social media followers, do you want to drive-up more website visitors, do you want to increase the number of subscribers to your newsletter?
Different formats of content will produce different results, on different platforms, and a good marketing plan will help you to effectively master your campaigns, grow your audience, and increase your content engagement.
Below are a few tips on what your marketing plan should look like:
Considering content
When planning your content you need to know what content works best on which platforms. Use the platforms which you know your target audience is most likely to use. Once you have decided the best platforms to use for you, you can choose the content which works best. For LinkedIn you might choose articles, Twitter maybe infographics, for Facebook you may choose videos, and for Instagram, you might decide on using this platform as a way of curating an image gallery for your business.
Once you have chosen your content formats and know your timescales, you can then decide the frequency of which you can produce and share this content. For an article or blog post, you may choose to include this as a weekly occurrence in your marketing plan, for news posts from external sites this could be hourly and every day. You may have the capacity to design and share infographic content weekly, and maybe produce a newsletter at the end of each week or each month, depending on your content and size of your audience.
You should also, always keep in mind the aim of your content. Information which is easy to look at is informative and easy and share will have better engagement rates, than a piece of content which looks good but serves no real, deeper purpose.
Times and dates
Your marketing plan does not need to be complicated, but it does need to be detailed. Your basic plan should include public holidays and observances. It should also cover any dates which are specifically important to your business. This could be a yearly anniversary, dates which you are attending awards shows, or expositions, and can even include dates and times when your business closes for the festive holidays.
When planning your content into a schedule specifically for each platform, you should consider the frequency and amount of content expected for each platform.
According to sprout social, the best times for Facebook posts are: Wednesday, 11:00 and 13:00 – 14:00, for Instagram, it’s Wednesday at 11:00 and Friday from 10:00–11:00, and for Twitter, posts perform best on Wednesdays and Fridays at 9:00.
Software to use
The best plans do not use overly complicated software or tech. It is much more productive to use a programme like Microsoft Excel or Word, initially, to set-out your plan structure. CoSchedule have some fantastic examples of marketing plans available to download.
You may choose to start by simply planning content one week at a time. Once you have planned for a week, you can start to see patterns emerging and plan recurring content for a month. Once one month is planned, you can plan for a quarter of the year. Once a full year has passed you can re-use your marketing plan for the next, and tweak where necessary to make your new campaigns even more successful than your last.
Analytics and Adjustments
A good marketing plan is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It is important as always with content marketing to analyse your campaigns at the end of each week, and month, and adjust if something is not working as well as planned. Alternatively, you can choose to repeat something if it worked particularly well.
Platforms like Google Analytics can show you the breakdown of traffic to your site following your social media content. While it is also important to evaluate the native statistics provided by each social media platform, it can also be a good move to invest in software which can provide your with a comprehensive review of your overall marketing activity including new acquisitions and successful conversion, as opposed to just tallying up likes and comments of your social media followers.
Want the latest marketing news and updates? Subscribe to my weekly blog #Onewomanbrand to make sure you don’t miss out! Sign-up below for my exclusive weekly blog content:
pushingbuttonsmarketing 