I’ve been in the blogging industry long enough to know that one must have a marketing strategy to succeed in this business. So it’s important to learn how to create a marketing plan for your blog to boost the growth of your online business.
You see, starting a blog from scratch goes beyond choosing a name for your brand, buying a domain and hosting plan, installing WordPress and creating content.
You have to create a development plan that you can use to increase your reach and establish yourself as an authority in your niche.
With a well-defined and structured marketing plan, you’ll create content faster and more consistently and get the best results without wasting your time or losing your money.
What is a Content Marketing Plan?
Content marketing is a strategic marketing technique that focuses on producing and delivering valuable and relevant content on a regular basis to attract, build, and maintain a defined audience.
With a well-defined and structured content marketing plan, you can build your blog into a resourceful, go-to platform on which people find what they need. And provided you deliver to the expectations of your audience, it won’t be difficult for you to drive profitable consumer action.
Effective content marketing isn’t about pitching your products or services. Instead of doing the hard selling, you’re helping your prospects and customers solve their problems by offering relevant and useful information they otherwise wouldn’t have found.
An effective content marketing plan for your blog can help you to:
- Cut down operation cost
- Build an audience that consistently consumes your content
- Increase sales
- Have content that acts as a source of passive revenue for your blog
Budget projections and understanding that every dollar invested will pay off in the end are also goals of a smart marketing campaign.
Elements of a Content Marketing Plan for a Blog
Before we look at how to create a content marketing strategy for your blog, let’s make sure you understand the elements of a successful marketing plan in blogging.
Primarily, your content marketing effort should focus on three things:
- Your audience
- Your product and
- Your content
1. Your Audience Has Problems
Focus on the objective you want to attain for your target audience, as well as the pain points standing in their way.
Ask yourself:
- Who is my current audience and what characteristics does my target have in common?
- What is likely to prompt my target audience to look for content similar to mine?
- What key benefits will my content creation and marketing effort offer over my competitors?
If you can answer these questions, you won’t have a difficult time creating content that attract your audience because what you write and promote will address their issues.
2. Your Product is the Solution
Your product is the solution that directly relates to your target audience’s problems.
The product is the cure to their struggle, and therefore the solution they’re more than willing to pay for.
Whether it's a physical product selling on your blog, a software subscription, a service you provide online, or a digital product for download, or a combination of these, your product has to be best solution that your target needs to solve a problem.
When you know who your target market is and how your product fits into their lives, you can launch and upgrade the products or services to include features they would want to see and utilize.
If anything, it’s important to describe and position your products and/or services in a way that your target audience can comprehend and relate to in every way possible.
3. Your Content as a Link between Problems and Solutions
Your content is what responds to the questions to which your audience seeks answers.
It’s important to understand that your target market isn't always in the market to purchase. Some of them don’t even know how to define the problems.
That’s why your content marketing plan should focus on being a complete funnel rather than just you and your products. In other words, you need to focus on creating top, middle, and bottom of the funnel content to cover your bases.
- TOFU: Your audience wants to learn about the problems they face, so it’s important to address this.
- MOFU: Readers who come to your blog are looking for solutions that can help them solve their problems.
- BOFU: Your audience are at the buying stage, ready and willing to buy your product or service to solve their problems.
Creating an Effective Marketing Plan for Your Blog
Now that you know what your content marketing efforts should focus on, it’s time to learn how to create an effective plan for your blog.
An effective content marketing plan should:
- Define your marketing goals
- Demonstrate that you’ve conducted market research
- Include topic ideas
- Have a content production calendar
- Focus on creating valuable content
1. Define Your Goals
The first step to creating an effective content marketing blog is to know what you want to achieve. In other words, you need to define your goals before you move on to the next step.
Your content marketing goals might include:
- Increasing the number of visitors who come to your website
- Boosting revenue by generating more leads, selling your services, or scaling your affiliate income
- Educating existing customers and prospect about what you do
With a clear aim in mind, you'll push through all of the other processes and easily manage all the difficult phases along the way.
Pick no more than two or three goals because you want to remain focuses. Otherwise, your blog is more than likely to fail if you go much longer.
Make your objectives clear.
For example, simply stating that you want to "increase traffic” isn’t good enough. You must specify how much traffic you want and when you want it. Being specific is better because it helps you to be more realistic about what you wish to achieve.
2. Understand Your Market
It’s pointless to think of creating a marketing plan for your blog if you don’t even understand your target market in the first place.
If you seriously want to transform your blog from an ordinary platform into a go-to platform that wins visitors and covert traffic into money, you have to understand whom you’re going to market to.
Ask yourself:
- Where does my target audience spend most of their time?
- What kind of information is my target audience likely looking for online?
Start by outlining the main issue that your readers are dealing with, exacerbate the issues by focusing on their pain points and offer a solution.
By focusing on these three areas, you’ll be able to create blog posts that accomplishes a lot more than just rack up social shares.
If anything, the key is to figure out your readers' fundamental motives and then assist them in achieving their objectives.
3. Do Search Analysis to Find Topic Ideas
Search analysis is the bread and butter of a successful blog content strategy.
Having been in the blogging business for 5+ years, I can tell you with 100% certainty you’ll have a difficult time ranking on search engines if you don’t have the right topics to target.
If you can get the topic development phrase right, you’ll have an easy time creating content that rank on Google, generate traffic, and convert to sales.
From what I understand, and what I’ve seen work well for me, topic research starts with doing keyword research. So even in the age where Google search engines have improved to understand human queries and semantic search, keyword research still forms the foundation for finding topics.
And keyword research isn’t rocket science. You can read this guide by Ahrefs to learn how to do keyword research if you don’t know how to do that yet.
Topic clustering should be the next step after doing your keyword research.
As I mentioned before, we’re in the age of semantic search, an age where you can no longer write content for a single keyword, publish the piece, and rank on Google.
You need to develop topical relevance if you want to win in the blogging game. And the best way to do that is to create topic clusters.
Topic clustering is important because it helps you demonstrate your knowledge in the niche, not to mention it can help you to stay at the top of your competition.
4. Create a Content Calendar
A content schedule keeps you on track and establishes a strategy for ensuring that write and publish content on time.
To keep things organized and simple, the finest calendars include social sharing and email marketing information.
Begin by planning your content for the coming month. Consider preparing a quarter at a time when you've completed a couple of months of writing and publishing.
Incorporate your procedure into your calendar. The research, planning, writing, editing, content approvals, revisions, publishing, and promotion are stages that should reflect in your content calendar, regardless of the number of posts you wish to work on.
Share your content calendar with every member of your team so everyone in the team is aware and familiar with the processes. If anything, you want to have easy time with your content marketing plan.
Conclusion
That’s all there is to creating a content marketing plan for your blog. What I’ve shared in this guide is the exact same process that I use to research, create, publish, and promote content for my blogs.
The most important thing in the process is consistency. You have to stay in the blogging game for long enough to succeed. And eventually, all the hard work that you put in day and night will pay off.