Need inspiration to create your content in 2023? Here is how to create a content marketing plan and successfully reuse your existing content.
Summary
- Establish a plan
- Focus on your personas
- Multi-channel and multi-use creation
- Templating content
- Outsource content production
- Leverage existing content
- Update and reformat content the right way
Why is content creation important?
Creating content allows you to emerge from the anonymity of the internet and into the spotlight.
Content production should be an integral aspect of your inbound marketing strategy, as opposed to outbound marketing, which includes cold calls, emails, and paid advertising.
Inbound Marketing and Outbound Marketing, what is the difference?
Instead of conducting outbound marketing activities, in which you go to potential clients and consumers to find them where they already are (outbound marketing), you will engage in inbound marketing activities, which involve attracting clients and clients with the content you provide.
You can reach an audience and provide them with free and helpful information, news, analysis, comments, educational video, and so on when you create content on the internet. You entice prospective clients to visit your website or social media page so that they may learn more about your company.
What are the benefits of content creation?
Your leads and customers will see you regularly in their everyday life.
Developing web content allows you to retain existing customers and prospects, who make up your audience or community, and engage with them. If they follow you on social media, they will see your posts in their news feed. If they visit your website or sign up for your email list, they will also see your posts often.
The creation of content gives you the opportunity to bolster the trust of your leads by demonstrating that you have a command of a topic, an industry, or some other area of expertise and that you are able to express yourself on it.
At a trade show, on a discovery call, or during negotiations, the likelihood that a lead will engage with you is significantly increased if they are already familiar with your brand and have had prior interaction with your business.
You are not dealing with cold leads, in which the potential customer is unfamiliar with you, but rather with warm or even hot leads, in which the customer is familiar with your work and will initiate contact with you on their own.
Content marketing strategy in 2022
Content marketing is at its most effective when you have a well-thought-out strategy and plan. If you post relevant and entertaining material, it will bring more people to your website, which will, in turn, increase your sales. On the other hand, if you haven’t given any thought to your strategy, you could end up squandering your time and money.
The definition of marketing goals and the establishment of priorities can be aided by content strategy. When you plan your work and marketing efforts in this way, you’ll be able to keep your attention on the goals you’ve set for yourself.
Every single piece of content that you create will be an integral element of a larger whole that will achieve a measurable marketing objective and real-world results.
With that said, let’s look at how you can create content and reuse existing content.
- Establish a plan with topics that appeal to your personas and audience.
What is the content marketing plan in the marketing plan?
The content marketing plan is a document that clarifies the roadmap of the content to be created in order to reach the goal set in the marketing strategy.
It can be represented as an editorial calendar.
From writing to sharing and analysis of the results, each element is indicated to know what needs to happen and when.
Why is a content marketing plan important?
You won’t be able to analyze and improve the effectiveness of your marketing activities if you don’t have a plan.
For example, if you share content on social media at the incorrect moment, the impact may be significantly less than you anticipated.
If you don’t have a strategy, you face the risk of not having any newly written material for a number of months, and as a result, you get no results.
What should appear in your content marketing plan?
Goals:
They must be SMART.
- Increase SEO traffic by 20% with the blog content within 6 months.
- Improve these 3-keyword positioning to be in the top 20 Google searches
- Develop an audience of 10,000 people on LinkedIn with our content calendar within the 6 months
- Have an email list of 100,000 subscribers for the new product launch before December
KPIs:
Nicolas Delignieres, Co-founder at Sales Odyssey, suggests focusing on 3 main KPIs in your content strategy.
“A good practice is to set three key performance indicators as a first step. Why three? In the digital world, you can have hundreds of indicators, and depending on the maturity of your strategy, they are not always relevant.” Source
- Email engagement: email opens, clicks, number of subscribers, number of downloads
- Website performance: page views, bounce rate, average time spent on pages
- Social media engagement likes, comments, shares, followers
- SEO: where the content ranks organically on the search engine, what keywords we are ranked on in Google, how many people visited our blog during the month
- Conversion: traffic from subscribers, sales, number of qualified leads
Type of content:
- Timeless (evergreen)
- Trendy (current events, news)
- Transactional (sales)
- Engaging (virality, reach more people)
- Establish the customer journey of your different personas to reach them everywhere with your content
Ask the right questions.
Establish several persona profile cards.
Focus on where the different personas spend their time.
Position yourself on the right keywords and hashtags for SEO.
Tool:
The ideal customer map
You can create it in 5 minutes with the Hubspot tool, for example, https://www.hubspot.com/make-my-persona
- Creation of multi-channel and multi-use marketing content
Why do multi-channel content marketing?
According to content marketing expert Danilo, in his article Content Marketing: 6 creative ways to repurpose your content (and gain visibility).
“It takes an average of 7 touch points before a complete stranger becomes a customer with you. You can’t depend on a single platform to get those 7 touch points.
For example, your ideal customer may need to read a few articles on your blog, read customer reviews on your site, and be exposed to retargeting ads on Facebook multiple times before they decide to buy from you.”
Danilo
Create a content map
You will be able to design and apply your content map once you have your “persona” map of your ideal customer and have determined where you will position yourself to best target that customer.
- Build an automated system with templates for editing your content
Once you have completed these steps:
- Audit the current marketing content strategy and everything that is online about your brand
- Define the customer personas
- Type in the goals and KPIs of the content creation
- Schedule your work with a timeline
You need to create a system to automate the creation of your marketing content with templates to gain efficiency.
Here are examples of content templates to make based on your content format:
- Visual content: use Canva Figma or adobe photoshop with a template on multi-format for distribution on all platforms.
- Written content: use blog categories and sub-categories to organize an article structure and summaries written in advance to optimize the production. You can use Evernote or Notion to take notes and organize.
- Video/podcast content: have a framework with a plan that will allow the podcast or video to be split into several sub-parts and reuse each of them.
- Automated and systemized outsourced content production
If you have an influencer marketing strategy, you will need to generate your content in collaboration with external partners and resources in order to be successful.
External resources and partnerships can be with freelancers, production and creative agencies, Instagrammers, YouTubers, and TikTokers.
When you prepare your content marketing plan using your personas, you are able to know precisely which audience you want to address, as well as what kind of material you want to produce and in what format you want to offer it.
If you have a content creation team working for you in-house, you can ask that team to design a briefing, production, and post-production process for you.
If you don’t have the resources or you also want to outsource the production of branded content, for example, to influencers in your industry, the advice given here is to know exactly how many pieces of content you need per month, on what platform, and about what topic. This is especially important if you want to outsource the production of branded content.
Because of this, locating creative agencies, Instagram influencers, YouTubers, or public influencers to market your company will be much simpler for you.
The negotiation leverage will be much more in your favor if you offer long-term partnerships.
With techniques 1 to 3, you know exactly what you want, and you can quantify your request. This demonstrates your commitment to professionalism with the people you communicate with.
After that, you are in a position to propose a long-term collaboration because you are aware of your goals, your financial limitations, and an estimate of the amount of content to be delivered each month.
Working with external partners who are people who own businesses over the long term will provide you more negotiating power because these partners will be able to send you invoices on a recurrent basis if you want to work with them.
Additionally, they will be more responsive to your demands and work to develop a long-term relationship with you.
Finally, they have the potential to one day become brand advocates, consultants, or even partners in your enterprise.
- Leverage what exists before creating something new
Take a piece of content you’ve created, give it a new twist and a new life.
What are the benefits of republishing content?
When you republish an Instagram post, you are providing users who were unable to view it the first time around with another opportunity to do so.
When you republish content on social media, you have the opportunity to reach a new audience that was not previously exposed to the content you originally published because of the way algorithms work.
The message that you are trying to convey will be bolstered if you republish the information multiple times, each time in a slightly modified version.
You will be able to increase the organic visibility of your content, which is beneficial not only for blogging but also for search engine optimization (SEO), as Google favors websites that consistently publish new information.
Change the format of your content to have new content without producing from scratch.
- Republish your blog articles on LinkedIn or Medium
- Cut up your article to make posts on social media
- Create a Twitter feed from the main ideas of a blog post
- Turn an article into a list of infographic designs, then
- Create a carousel infographic for your social media from a blog post or newsletter
- Create a visual presentation from a market study
- Use an infographic to turn it into a detailed blog article
- Compile your best content on a topic into a white paper
- Turn a blog post into a podcast
- Turn blog posts into a newsletter
- Use your internal data to create a case study
- Compile your best content into an eBook on a specific vertical and sell it
- Use customer reviews for social media posts
- Update your blog posts to improve SEO
- Extend an existing blog post
Tool for change and improvement of written content: https://www.jasper.ai/
Jasper makes it possible to edit content with artificial intelligence
Amazon publishes eBooks for free: https://kdp.amazon.com/
Example of eBook https://www.hubspot.com/resources/ebook
Turn your written content into a visual: https://www.visme.co/
A tool that allows you to transform written content into a visual.
If you want to switch to a video content marketing strategy
- Reuse written content from an existing SEO article and make it into an animated video that is made of images, mini-clips, and text.
- Cut a long video/podcast into mini-clips and republish them on social platforms as a video post and real IG.
- Turn your blog post into an animated video.
Tool for creating video from the text: https://lumen5.com/
Lumen5 allows you to create videos from text using AI.
Some tips if you decide to create this type of video:
Keep your videos short (max. 60 seconds).
Grab the attention in the first 3 seconds; otherwise, the user will move on to the next post in their news feed.
Go straight to the message and turn your video into a short story (when you can).
Go for the square format. The square format takes up 78% more space in the Facebook News Feed.
What content should you transform or republish first?
Use the available data to make the decision of which content you should rework and republish first.
The content that performed best according to the KPIs set up in your strategy.
The number of backlinks for blog posts.
The articles that generate the most web traffic in SEO.
Posts that generated the most engagement and clicks if linked to.
Content that is trending or makes sense with your content strategy or the keywords you want to rank for.
- 3 best practices for updating your marketing content and republishing or changing formats
Reuse the same article and keep the same URL
Instead of starting from scratch and potentially having duplicate content identified on your website by Google, modify the original content instead.
Keep the keywords in the title.
These keywords allowed you to position yourself in Google; changing them would be like a new start for the search engine.
Add a note from the editor.
Example:
This article was published in December 2021 and has been modified and updated.
