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#RankWatchChat Recap – Creating a Stellar Content Marketing Plan

Shivangi Shrivastava
#RankWatchChat-Recap-:-Creating-a-Stellar-Content-Marketing-Plan

Content Marketing is the path between establishing brand awareness and generating sales leads for your business. By offering content that resonates with your target audience, you can look forward to establishing a relationship with them.

How do you determine which content will resonate with your audience?

Many marketers base their content marketing activities on a hunch of who their audience is, what type of content they should publish, which distribution channels to employ.

With content being seen as a means of commercial success online, you need a proper strategy in place to make sure your content really supports your marketing activities.

So, how should you go about creating a content marketing plan?

This was the subject of our twitter chat!

On Tuesday, 7th June, we had another #RankWatchChat on Creating a Stellar Content Marketing Plan.

What are the long-term goals that you should seek to achieve through Content Marketing?
How should you keep track of your competitor’s content performance?
Which tools can help you automate your content performance evaluation?

We discussed all of this and much more!

We were extremely happy to welcome Alexandra Tachalova as our guest speaker. Alex has been working in digital marketing for 6 years now. She helped SEMrush establish their brand presence in Europe and is constantly helping businesses advance their content marketing goals. You can spot Alex speaking at major marketing events like BrightonSEO, SMX and many more.

Needless to say, our chat received a very enthusiastic response from our community! We had bags full of valuable insights at the end of our discussion 😀

Did you miss the exciting event? Here’s a quick recap for you!

As in every content marketing plan, we started off with the goals.

What are your top 3 content marketing goals?

All the participants had their take on this question. Here are some of the goals suggested by our community:

In our list you will notice a very interesting goal – building backlinks! Unfortunately, not many marketers incorporate this in their content marketing plans.

I believe the end goal of every marketing activity is to generate revenue. You can divide this goal into separate stages. For example, by improving your brand visibility, you can increase the inbound traffic to your website. Then, you can convert your visitors into sales leads by demonstrating how your product can help them solve a problem they were facing.

Guest Speaker’s Insights:


From our Community:

Okay now that you have set your goals – “what next?”. You might think let’s get to the writing desk. But I am afraid not. First we need to be sure who are we writing for. Your content should resonate with your audience.

This brings us to our next question – how do you identify your audience personas?

Q2. How do you gather information about your audience personas?

While most of our community suggested automated tools, a few  participants mentioned manual methods including talking to your sales team and conducting test group interviews. These can provide you with a pool of information about your audience personas

Also, we saw great fans of Buzzsumo (including myself :D) here!

Guest Speaker’s Insights:

From our Community:

With this, we approached our next question – how to identify the content brands you are competing against!

Q3. How do you identify your competitors strictly in terms of content?

Internet Marketing is all about going one step ahead of your competitors. We asked our community to share the tactics they use to identify their competitors when it comes to content marketing.

Analyzing the results page for your targeted keywords is one of the widespread strategies marketers use.

Our participants also shared the various tools they use in this process. BuzzSumo topped the charts, yet again! Other tools mentioned were Socialcrawlytics and BuzzStream.

Guest Speaker’s Insights:


From our Community:

Our next question focused on the type of content you should produce that will resonate with your audience and align with your business goals.

Q4. How do you determine which pieces of content are aligned with your objectives?

The question was received well by our community. Participants suggested using Google Analytics to understand the trend of traffic with various types of content.

Also, Keyword Planner could be used to find out which keywords have a good amount of search volume.

The bottomline is that your content should reflect your brand values.

One of the participants added a very important point to the stack – the planning should be done before the content is created. Other than that, the best option would be to identify your audience, set clear goals and performance metrics in terms of content and start rolling!

Guest Speaker’s Insights:


From our Community:

https://twitter.com/digiwebsol/status/740221816053108736

Content Distribution is as important as content creation. If you cannot drive traffic to your website through your content, it is useless to you irrespective of how insightful or engaging it is.

Considering the importance, we asked our participants to share with us their personal checklist for content distribution.

Q5. What is in your content distribution checklist?

Our community suggested some great content distribution methods.

Apart from distributing your content across social media platforms, Reddit and personalized Emails can also yield awesome results, of course, if done the right away!

Notify Fox  was mentioned as another amazing tool that can help you reach your audience through web push notifications.

Guest Speaker’s Insights:


From our Community:


With this, we reached our last question for the day.

Of course, writing and distributing content is important! But, how will you determine if all these efforts have generated results? That’s where content performance evaluation comes in the picture. Doing it manually is neither practical nor possible. So we asked our participants to open their toolbox and share with us their favourite tool for analyzing content performance.

Q6. What tools do you use to evaluate content performance?

Here is a list of the tools shared by our participants:

Guest Speaker Insights:


From our Community:

https://twitter.com/digiwebsol/status/740223673144053760

Discussions

Here is a glimpse of 2 interesting discussions that popped up during our chat:

Links are important in Content Marketing:

Kevin mentioned link building as an important goal in content marketing. Most participants, including Alexandra agreed to this.

Andrew also pointed out that marketers work hard on creating content but usually miss out on promoting it for links.

Most marketers are still not entirely capitalizing on this even though Google is not reducing the importance of links anytime soon.

You can go through the thread here.

Your sales team can help you understand your Audience personas

Talking to the sales team, as mentioned by Kevin can offer us great insights about our audience – their interests, their needs, their objectives and so on.

Since they are the people who deal with customers on a daily basis, they know best how our products are received by the users.

Read through the full discussion here.

I hope you liked the recap of our Twitter Chat

Do you have any other insights on the topic? Keep the answers flowing in with the hashtag #RankWatchChat.

Subscribe to our upcoming events to receive notifications of our next twitter chat!

Related posts:

  1. Future of Content Marketing – #RankWatchChat Recap
  2. How to Fit AI in Your Content Marketing Strategy?
  3. How to Research for a Blog Post? [Updated]
  4. Have You Explored These 3 Content Marketing Dimensions for Lead Generation Yet?
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