Content marketing is basically a strategic marketing method focused on creating and distributing relevant and precise content to attract, engage, and retain a target audience. This approach starts with calculating the existing or predicting the potential customer needs and provides the answers for their challenges.
Unlike traditional methods, content marketing applies the “pull marketing” method, which attracts the attention of users, instead of “push marketing”. Content marketing also generates high added value at a reasonable cost, thereby providing sustainable profitability for organizations.
In this article, you will learn the key points on how to create a content marketing plan, the main content types, and some tips for you to use in your content marketing activities through our online learning platform: the Growth Marketing Hub. And don’t worry if you don’t have an established brand. The Growth Marketing Hub is designed to give you the opportunity to exercise each module and process so that you can just practice and learn.
You might need the data from your Growth Marketing Strategy input (full brand check-up, personas, positioning, etc.), in order to create your content marketing plans. Before you start, please make sure you have completed the previous stages on the Growth Marketing Hub.
For those who don’t have an established brand, or haven’t completed the previous steps, the Growth Marketing Hub can be used to simply exercise each module and process.
We start with the “Content Marketing Planning” menu at the Growth Marketing Hub panel and select the “Create a New Content Marketing Tactic” box.
With this module, you will exercise and learn the important points to consider when creating a content marketing plan.
At this step, you can either choose one of the brands/products you have created at the “Internal Analysis” phase from the dropdown menu, or you can easily create a new brand.
Select an existing brand:
Or create a new brand:
Click “NEXT STEP” to proceed.
Again, you can choose one of the personas you have created in the “Persona Creation” phase- from the dropdown menu, create a new persona, or simply choose all personas.
Choose an existing (specific) persona:
Create a new persona:
Choose all personas:
Click “NEXT STEP” to proceed.
Let’s go through the content types briefly and see in which circumstances you can serve them to your potential or existing customers.
Blog Post: Whether a business is B2B or B2C, a blog post is the most common content type that businesses use since it’s the best way to generate organic traffic with the right keywords.
Use Case: Also called “Case Study” or “Success Story”, use cases are used in B2B businesses where you can explain the benefits of your product/solution through a real experience you had with a customer. In a use case, you should address what the customer challenge or objective was, along with how you solved that problem or supported the customer to achieve their goals, preferably through real numbers. You can see a use case example here.
E-book & Whitepaper: Usually used in B2B and in some cases in B2C, these content types cover your product/solution in-depth and generally include a detailed analysis of the industry you’re in. Compared to other contents, they are similar to academic articles regarding length and language and offer solutions for a particular problem. While whitepapers are mostly for professionals and include very technical information, e-books teach the reader about something or provide a “how-to” guide with less technical and easy-to-understand content.
Infographic: Infographics briefly cover data on a particular subject through minimum text, focusing more on graphics/numbers and visuals. The main advantage of an infographic is its ease of distribution and increased likeliness of being published by 3rd party publishers. You can see an infographic example here.
Video: Businesses often use videos for short product descriptions, or to describe a product feature. They are really useful for explaining a complex subject as compared to text-based content. It is recommended that their length does not exceed 2 minutes.
Podcast: Becoming more popular every day, a podcast is basically a digital audio file that users can download or stream to listen to. A podcast episode can feature more than one host and it is a great way of having long discussions about a topic, without boring the listeners.
Try using contents in your remarketing activities (especially use cases) since they are the best way to engage and convert visitors.
Additionally, here are some content types you can write depending on the growth areas and the customer journey:
Target Keyword and Related Keywords: Keywords are the most important asset of your content for SEO (search engine optimization) activities. Depending on the business, they range from singular words to phrases and are used to attract relevant organic traffic to your website.
You need to determine keywords according to the context of your content and always think about which words your potential or existing customers use when they search for your solution. When effectively applied, keywords are the best channel for your target audience to find your brand organically.
You can see an example of what information to put in and how to fill out the remaining tactic fields above. For further information regarding content marketing, you can check out our article about the Top Content Marketing Tools and Content Marketing Guide.
Ready? Click SUBMIT!
You can see all of your created Content Marketing Tactics on this screen. The first tactic you see on the display will be the last one you created.
You can also create a new tactic, search for an existing one, copy, print, and download your plan as an excel sheet or PDFs, or remove the tactics you have completed or simply want to delete from the list.
When you click on “details”, you will access the tactic details, where you can copy or delete the tactic.
