Creating an effective content marketing plan to feed your sales pipeline by leveraging engaging content.
As a business owner or startup founder, you know that creating a successful venture requires more than just a great product or service. You need to be able to effectively communicate with your target audience and build a strong brand that resonates with them. This is where a content plan comes into play.
What is a content plan?
A content plan is a roadmap that outlines what content you will create, where you will publish it, and how you will promote it. In this blog post, we will guide you through the steps to create a content plan for your startup.
- Define your target audience
Before you start creating content, you need to understand who your target audience is.
Who are you trying to reach? What are their interests and pain points? What motivates them? Once you have a clear understanding of your target audience, you can tailor your content to their needs and preferences.
Shopify recently released a great article about six general Australian consumer profiles that can serve as a great starting point.
Previous work you’ve done to nail your niche and refine the Ideal Customer persona will prove valuable here, letting you quickly establish lookalike audiences and create messaging that speaks to core needs.
- Establish your objectives
What do you hope to achieve with your content plan? Is it to increase brand awareness? Generate leads? Educate your audience about your product or service? Knowing your objectives will help you create content that is aligned with your business goals.
Before you try to convert your audience into customers, you need to provide something of value in your content, while also educating and creating awareness. Content needs to take a more passive approach at first, and not exist purely to fill a space.
This follows the natural customer journey pipeline from awareness, to consideration, to conversion. It’s important to be aware of how your pipeline works, and map your customer journey milestones, so that you know how to position a particular piece of content within this framework.
For each persona you create, you also need to identify where that person sits in the customer journey. When you begin narrowing into a selling focus, your content should still attempt to speak to the right audience, and provide them with some kind of value beyond basic sales information.
- Determine your content topics
Once you know your target audience and objectives, you can start brainstorming content topics that will resonate with them.
Consider the questions and challenges that your audience faces, and create content that provides value and solutions.
Some examples of content topics for startups include how-to guides, case studies, customer testimonials, industry news and trends, and thought leadership pieces. Thought leadership is about both providing useful information that doesn’t necessarily lead to a sale, with the more passive aim of establishing your brand and/or business personalities as experts in the space.
You can use SEO/SEM strategy tools such as Google Trends, Google Keyword Planner and SEMRush to understand which topics are getting engagement and align your strategy. Read More…
Comments (0)