Content marketing should always be a tool to take your business forward, and never a burden. While it’s great that you decided to give content marketing a try, you won’t get to see its full potential without a clear-cut plan. Because content marketing is not only about a social media post here, a blog there – but it should take into consideration a constellation of facts, and build a consistent message and brand voice across multiple channels. This way you can become noticeable in an ever growing market.
In this article we’ll go into details about the benefits of creating a content plan for your cannabis business, and how you can put it in action and get ready to reap the benefits.
Why Create a Content Plan?
A content marketing plan is a documented strategy that answers a series of questions crucial for the shape your content will take. Details such as what kind of content fits, when is the content published, where it’s distributed, and how the data is gathered and analyzed. Once you have the answer to these questions, your content marketing efforts will have a direction, a reasoning behind them.Â
The benefits behind having created a content marketing plan go beyond saving time on deciding what to post next. This plan can be drafted into supporting your business goals, and as a result improve your return on investment (ROI). By helping you publish consistent, quality content, in a concerted manner across multiple channels you become a noticeable voice in the industry. And if something is not working, the mechanism of a content plan can point out what is not working, and could be improved. Perhaps you are not targeting the quite right demographics, or the tone is not the best. But what if the solution was as easy as choosing different posting times? A content plan could provide such answers.Â
A content plan is valuable to multiple departments in your business. For instance the sales department can use the product information to further refine the leads, while the marketing department can rely on the same information to send out newsletters, and write blogs aimed at creating loyal customers.
How to Create a Content Plan: a Step-by-step guide
Set a purpose
Any strategy is aimed at achieving a set of goals. This is the moment when you establish what dreams you want to see come true. With a clear set of key performance indicators (KPIs), you maintain focus over your content plan action items. The KPIs are measurable, quantifiable indicators of progress towards achieving a purpose. Some examples of KPIs include customer satisfaction (measured through reviews and returns), or number of new customers per month. These should support your plan in the sense of guiding your activities into achieving your goal.
Respondents to a survey assessing the usefulness of content marketing revealed that it helped 80% of them achieve the goal of creating brand awareness, 75% for building credibility and trust, and 70% for educating their audiences.
Establish a target audience
If you aim to sell to everyone, you will end up selling to no one. Nobody wants a solution fit for everybody, they are looking for a solution to solve their own problems. That is why it’s important to decide on who the target audience is. This can be the same with your brand’s buying persona or avatar. The idea is to know who you address.
Review your current content
…that is if you already have some.Â
There are a few questions to answer in this case. Look at the topics of your posts, at the types of content you have, and where it is shared. Lastly, try and review how your content is performing. Perhaps even take a glance at what your competitors’ situation looks like. How can you do better?
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Pick the content types and channels
Think back to your target audience – where do they like to hang out, where can you meet them halfway? Is it in their email inbox, or is it on social media. Thinking along the lines of content types, video is very much en vogue nowadays, but depending on the channel you pick, you can opt for an effective combination between text and photographs.
And even more interestingly, you can make small tweaks between your tone on different channels, to address the differences between your audiences.
Fix a calendar
It’s important to know the deadlines of who will create what and by when – this goes both for the text and for the visual aids. Thankfully, there are numerous tools you can use for a bird’s eye overview and planning
Create your content
The last and most fun part of the process is actually getting to do it. The best part is that if you’ve completed all the preparation steps thoroughly, actually creating content should be easy, because at this point you know whom you are addressing, on what platform, in what form, but also and significantly, what you are looking to achieve out of it.
In Closing
While it may appear daunting at first, because there are so many questions to answer, once you have your answers, a content plan will be a major support in your business from multiple points of view and for multiple parties involved. For all your content marketing needs and questions, you can confidently contact the Clout Brands team, and we’ll find the best solution for you!
