You know creating content is essential to your inbound marketing strategy. Do you have a plan for the creation, delivery, and management of your content to optimize its effectiveness? Like puzzle pieces, individual content needs to fit with the content around it to reach its full potential and complete the image you’re working to create for your business. You need a content marketing plan within your marketing strategy to ensure the content pieces you place create a cohesive image.
1) Timing
A content marketing plan allows you to schedule the creation, delivery, and management of content. You don’t want to deliver large amounts of content and then disappear for weeks; alternating binging on content and disappearing can make you look unreliable and you’ll lose people as they go to more reliable sources. Build trust and entice people to keep coming back for more by delivering great content regularly. It’s much easier to be regular when you have it planned out.
Another reason providing timely content is “Google Juice”. Google juice is given when the awesome little Google bots crawl your site and see that you are continuously providing helpful information to the online community. Relaying this info on a timely schedule gives great rewards!
2) Cohesion
You see a fantastic movie trailer. You eagerly anticipate the movie only to be underwhelmed by the script or acting in the whole movie. Or maybe it had a stellar cast and the script was powerful, vaulting it to your list of favorite movies. Individual content that you create can either make the content surrounding it stronger or weaker. A misplaced piece can make people wonder where this piece came from and how does it really fit with the image they have of your rental. Pieces that connect to one another strengthen each other.
In my recent blog posts I started out discussing the need to structure inbound marketing campaigns and I’ve followed that post with in-depth exploration of the structural components of a successful campaign. I’ve balanced between identifying what the components are, such as a marketing offer, and then wrote again about how to execute them. The individual pieces connect to deliver the whole picture.
3) Holes
Another benefit of a content marketing plan is the ability to see the holes so you can fill them. You’re creating blog posts, offers, guides, and other content across a diverse range of topics relating to your properties. It’s easy for a topic to be missed with uncoordinated content creation. With a content marketing plan, you have a checklist of topics to share, content type, and the dates planned from creation to delivery. If I had a vacation rental in my area, there’s no way my content marketing plan would miss discussing St. Augustine’s Music by the Sea summer events in time for people to take advantage of making reservations and experiencing the event for themselves.
It isn’t enough to create outstanding individual content pieces. If your content doesn’t connect with your other pieces it won’t be as effective as content with coordinated support. Fitting your content pieces together with a content marketing plan ensures there are no holes in your strategy, your delivery is cohesive, and delivery is timely for the whole picture.
