How to Create a Winning Content Strategy Plan
Perhaps you have just created a new content strategy plan or maybe you are thinking about creating one.
Would you be interested in learning four things that will make your content stand out from your competitors?
If you are not aware just how critical it would be to have such an advantage in your market, then maybe the facts listed below will convince you:
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- 60% of all content marketers create one new piece of content every day
- Content Marketers who create unique content get 8 times more growth than those who curate the content of others
- 61% of buying decisions by online customers are driven by unique custom content
- Content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing
- Content marketing generates three times more clients than traditional marketing
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And if the above five marketing facts still hasn’t convinced you, then feel free use Google to find dozens more just like them. I could fill this entire blog post with facts that illustrate the importance of creating a powerful content strategy plan for your online business.
Getting Your Content Strategy Plan in Writing
When you create your content plans, you must document it and get it in writing.
Motivational experts have long told us that writing things down is a powerful way to commit to our intentions.
There are several benefits to be gained from writing down your goals and intentions. Let us examine some of them:
Writing down your goals attracts more of your attention. Sometimes all we need to attract a higher level of thought to our objective is to engage more of our senses to the outcome. This is one of the things that writing down objectives.
Writing down your objectives clears your mind. When you have cleared your mind, you are able to focus more on the required actions and details. You don’t waste your mental energy trying to remember what it was that you wanted to achieve.
Writing down your goals will help you stay motivated. If you review the things you have documented, then you can easily visualize and feel the results of accomplishing the desired result. https://arabmenhealth.com/generic-cialis/
There is lots of reliable precedent for writing down your objectives. People like Oprah Winfrey, Richard Branson, J.K. Rowling, Tony Robbins, and Robin Sharma have all spent their lives writing down their goals and intentions – and this is just a sampling – hundreds of other famous people have embraced this practice.
So when you create and write down your content strategy plan, you have done two things. For starters, you are doing what over 90% of your competitors are not doing – as it is well known that less than 10% of all people have written goals.
Secondly, by creating this written plan for your content, you have greatly increased the odds of success for your content marketing efforts.
Are your Content Objectives Lofty Enough?
As we indicated in the last section, having written goals is awesome simply because they’re effective and your competitors probably don’t have any.
However, there’s another element that your content marketing goals need to have – and that is vision.
You really don’t get vision from deciding what you want to achieve in the next week, month, or year. You get it from knowing where you want to be 5, 10, or even 20 years from now. This is where we learn how big our visions are and what kinds of content we will create to achieve that goal.
When you compare objectives from a project that has vision to one that only has short term goals, you will find that the one with vision has much more purpose. And this will be evident in everything you create for your market.
Others will feel more purpose from your content without having a clue why.
We are stronger marketers whenever we have the ability to feel what our customers feel, and understand the problems they suffer through. But when we have a vision for how we will serve our market, our ability to empathize with them is greatly intensified.
TD Bank recently conducted a survey of over 1100 people and over 500 small businesses in regards to vision and their visualization practices. Here are some of their findings:
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- 76% of all businesses that used visualization practices claim their businesses turned out exactly the way that they envisioned them
- 82% of all businesses that used vision boards claim they have accomplished 50% or more of their objectives
- Individuals who have a vision or use some form of visualization are twice as confident that they will accomplish their objectives
- 67% of those surveyed experience more purpose when using pictures of their goals
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This survey – and others like it – has pretty much proved how powerful visions are.
As you create your content strategy plan, never forget that the power of your vision will influence the power of your content as well.
Sharing the Ongoing Story Behind your Brand
There is one thing that every single person must feel or experience before they will ever join your mailing list or buy your products – and that is rapport. This is how we connect with them and share with them our humanity.
Your overall content marketing effort must convey some form of rapport to them – otherwise, you will totally fail as an online marketer.
The very first step in building this rapport is sharing with them how our brand was formed, and the hardships we had to endure to grow our brand to where it is today.
Let them experience all the bumps in the road and the setbacks that you have to experience in creating your online business. This is how we humans relate to one another.
Here is what happens after we build rapport with members of our target audience:
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- They trust us more than our competitors
- They give us the benefit of the doubt on anything questionable they might read or hear about us
- They will choose us when they can’t decide between our product and an equivalent product from a competitor
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There is one last thing I need to mention about sharing the story of your brand. You need to update your story often and keep it current.
If your market is like most things online, then it is evolving very quickly. So it is important that you share your experiences with updates in your market.
To make your content strategy plan more effective, you must ensure that you specify how the story of your brand will be updated and shared with your targeted audience.
Have you Invited Enough People to the Party?
You have probably already heard about the importance of creating a customer avatar. This is because it works.
Marketers who know the demographics of their primary customer are always more successful – it’s a given fact.
This is why defining your target audience is an integral part of any content strategy plan.
The key here is having the right tools that identify exactly who your customers are. You need to know their gender, their age, their education level, their marital status, and where they live – as a starting point.
Then you need to know about as many of their personal preferences as you possibly can.
Many marketing experts recommend that we create a fictional person that is a typical member of our target audience. They recommend that we give them a name so that we can relate with them more easily. This is a very good idea.
Here is where people fall short in creating customer avatars
Most businesses create and target just one customer avatar. This is a huge mistake. Every online business needs multiple customer avatars.
There are two basic reasons why most online businesses should have different customer avatars:
1)Regardless of which market you are serving, there are several product lines or services that address various issues.
2) And at the very least, there at customers who are at different skill levels of your market and have completely different needs.
If your content attempts to address every market condition with only one customer avatar, then your content will lack focus and fall way short of the mark.
One last important Note about Customer Avatars
You must understand that you cannot create this customer avatar and be done with it. You will need to review your marketing data and adjust your customer avatar as necessary. Just like you and I do, people change and so will your market. If you don’t review your customer demographics routinely, then you will find yourself out of business.