Five Tips to Create an Integrated Content Marketing Plan

There’s no going around it anymore. Content marketing has become a core marketing strategy for businesses that want to thrive in the digital space. Great content helps create relationships, followers, shares and engagement. One of the biggest reasons more companies are drawn to it is because search and paid search have become more competitive and difficult.

While some companies are using content as a core strategy with great success, it is best to integrate it with your other marketing efforts, especially social media and SEO. By combining it with multiple marketing channels, you amplify the results all across the board. With that said, you still need to make sure that you plan to integrate a content strategy into your current strategies. Here are some tips to make it work.

1. Specify Your Core Audience

One thing that companies will realize is that their audience will differ from one channel to another. To make sure you integrate your content promotion efforts into your channels seamlessly, you need to identify your core audience. The content you produce must resonate with the biggest segment of your prospects and customers. If there is more than one sizable audience, it may be necessary to segment your audience somehow and plan on creating different types of content for each.

2. How Can You Satisfy Your Audience?

You need to ask what kind of content will satisfy your audience. Low-quality articles won’t do anymore. You have to come up with content that’s valuable, engaging, entertaining, or interesting. Something that delivers on at least two of the four should be the bare minimum. And, of course, the topics should be relevant to your audience. Content should also expand to different types, from infographics, podcasts, videos, apps, PowerPoint presentations, and audio interviews to blog posts. By delivering different types of content, you’ll keep your audience engaged.

3. Systematize Your Marketing

Creating and marketing content can get complex. That’s why you need to develop a solid plan for content creation and integration into your marketing channels. You may need to build a team of quality writers, hire a person to research content topics, connect the content director to your social media director, etc. You can build momentum, stay organized, and integrate content into your marketing channels by systematizing your whole process.

4. Connect the Dots

As the introduction mentions, content marketing works best with other marketing channels. You must figure out how to connect the dots to make everything work symbiotically. For example, your content can be linked to important pages on your website for SEO benefits. You can also push your content by announcing it on your social media pages. In order to connect the dots effectively, you need to think about your primary goals and figure out how to implement your marketing plan to meet your goals.

5. Take Metrics Seriously

One of the biggest mistakes that companies make is not taking the metrics for their content seriously. You want to find out how many subscribers your content generated, how many comments it has produced, how many times it was shared, etc. By analyzing your metrics, you’ll be able to make important changes in your web design for the content, find what types of content are the most popular, what story angles work, and more. Like any other online campaign, you want to measure it simply because you want to know what works and doesn’t.