Have you considered hiring a fractional CMO because your small business can’t afford a full-time marketing executive? Fractional CMOs have become increasingly popular in recent years, and can provide many of the same benefits as a full-time CMO without a long-term commitment.
But before you pull the trigger, consider starting up your content engine. Hiring a content marketing agency will not only reserve some of your marketing budget, but also deliver a marketing strategy that’s backed by data and guaranteed to succeed.
Quick Takeaways
The fractional model emerged over 20 years ago once companies realized they could hire on-demand executives on a contracted basis
A lack of trust between CEOs and CMOs, and a rise in popularity of the gig economy has caused a dramatic rise in popularity for hiring fractional CMOs
About 60% of marketers create at least one piece of shareable content per day
Hiring a content marketing agency ensures consistent content, use SEO-backed data, regular delivery of performance reports and a maximized budget
Not every SMB needs a fractional CMO. Here’s what you need to know about trending fractional CMOs and why a content marketing agency may be a better fit for your business.
What Is A Fractional CMO?
A fractional CMO is an on-demand, part-time chief marketing officer. Their expertise is outsourced to play the role of a full-time CMO, without any in-house commitment. They are responsible for mentoring the marketing team through specific tasks, such as:
Defining a marketing strategy
Driving traffic and sales growth
Improving digital presence
Managing content
Reporting on marketing results
Many small to midsize businesses, or SMBs, can’t afford to hire a full-time CMO. Instead, they opt for a fractional hire to free up their marketing budget. In-house CMOs make approximately $211K/year, whereas fractional CMOs only make about $130K/year.
What’s Next?
Fractional leadership isn’t a new concept. In fact, the fractional model was born over 20 years ago once companies realized they could utilize on-demand finance executives on a contracted basis.
In more recent years, research has shown a lack of trust between CEOs and CMOs, in addition to the rise in popularity of the gig economy. This explains the dramatic rise of traffic growth for fractional CMOs.
Source: Google Trends
A growing number of companies now list open positions for part-time, virtual or fractional executives. Additionally, premium talent marketplaces, like Toptal and Catalant, are supporting this trend by high-end remote talent easily accessible to companies.
Clearly, the trending fractional CMO market is seeing rapid growth. If you’re thinking about jumping on the bandwagon, it’s essential to first understand whether or not your business is the right fit.
Who Needs A Fractional CMO?
An in-house chief marketing officer holds more responsibility, whereas fractional CMOs only work with your business enough to offer honest feedback, guidance, and training.
Fractional CMOs are mostly beneficial when a company:
Needs a CMO, but can’t afford full-time leadership
Needs help running campaigns identified by an in-house CMO
Doesn’t need full-time leadership due to a simple marketing strategy
To learn more about whether your business can benefit from hiring a fractional CMO, enjoy the short video below.
Video Source: CMOwashere
Although hiring a fractional CMO sounds like a financially responsible option, you may not need one at all. Other options, such as hiring a content marketing agency, can be more affordable and beneficial to your company.
Why Prioritize Content Creation Before Hiring A Fractional CMO?
Content creation is the epitome of marketing best practices. In fact, 60% of marketers create at least one piece of shareable content per day.
By prioritizing the creation of high quality content, you can drive traffic to your website, maximize engagement and increase customer retention– without adding another employee to the payroll.
Before hiring a fractional CMO, consider turning your budget into working dollars and spending it on content marketing. Doing so provides a number of benefits, such as brand awareness, educated audiences and increased credibility in your community.
Image Source: Visme
One of the most effective ways to master content marketing is by hiring an agency to help your business succeed. Not only do content marketing agencies create an effective strategy, but they also:
Provide Consistent Content. Two of the most important factors in driving traffic to your website are frequency and consistency. Hiring a content marketing agency guarantees you can share high quality content consistently.
Use SEO Data. Google’s algorithm is looking for content that both uses keywords and provides genuine value to human readers. Content marketing agencies have a team of SEO experts that help deliver content that meets the high standards of SERPs.
Share Performance Reports. Measuring the effectiveness of your marketing efforts is key to growing your business. Content marketing agencies demonstrate their value by sharing performance reports that prove success.
Help You Save Money. When you’re choosing between filling an in-house leadership position and hiring a content marketing agency, the latter is guaranteed to maximize your budget. Paying salaries and benefits required by in-house employees is much more costly than working with an agency’s team of content marketing experts.
By focusing your budget on content creation, you can answer the questions of your audience with high quality content. Doing so creates a valuable customer experience, ultimately encouraging both engagement and conversions.
Get Your Content Engine Running Today!
Before you hire a fraction CMO to define your marketing strategy, consider Marketing Insider Group. Our team is full of content strategists, professional writers and SEO experts who will build and execute a marketing strategy that delivers success.
Learn more about how Marketing Insider Group can help grow your business today by checking out our SEO Blog Writing service now, or schedule a quick consultation today!
The post Get Your Content Engine Running Before Hiring A Fractional CMO appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/fractional-cmo.png540960exposurehttps://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/sydney-social-media-services-white.pngexposure2023-01-30 23:31:502023-01-30 23:31:50Get Your Content Engine Running Before Hiring A Fractional CMO
Have you ever stumbled upon a social media account and been amazed by how creative human beings can be? The accounts that rise to the top have figured out the secret sauce to an effective social media strategy.
I’m sure you’ve realized by now that keeping up with the social media algorithms isn’t easy. It can take several days of uninterrupted efforts to get your initial plan together.
But it’s important to take the time to do it properly. If you’re going to spend days and weeks coming up with the plan, you better make sure it’s sustainable.
Quick Takeaways:
Your social media efforts should be thoughtful and backed by demographic and psychographic research of your audience.
Casting the widest net doesn’t equate to reaching the greatest amount of potential customers. Start small.
An effective social media strategy will help you build deeper customer relationships, improve your customer satisfaction and provide clarity around your brand.
So what does a successful social media strategy look like?
Benefits of an effective social media strategy
We all know that social media is crucial today for businesses. But social media alone isn’t enough to drive growth. By building an effective strategy, you’re increasing your brand’s
Awareness
Authority
Authenticity
Engagement
Efficiency
Social media platforms have blurred the lines of communication between businesses and customers. You can only maximize on the benefits of social media if you’re actively breaking down the walls and showing up.
Here are 8 steps to help you create one:
Step 1: Understanding Your Audience
The foundation of a successful social media strategy is understanding who your target audience is and why they care about what you have to offer. To do this, you need to observe a combination of demographics and psychographics.
Demographics
Demographics are statistics and descriptions of a group of people, such as their location, age, gender and occupation. Keep in mind that not all of these statistics and descriptions may be relevant for your business.
If you have your own website, there are several ways you can determine your audience’s demographics. One helpful tool is Google Adwords. If you don’t have a website yet, find a competitor or similar site and use that for your analysis.
Psychographics
Psychographics explain your audience’s lifestyles, values, opinions, interests and attitudes. You should try to answer these questions about your audience when doing your analysis:
Why do they want to learn about your product or service?
How important is your product or service to your audience? For example, is it part of their job or is it a personal interest?
How do they like to learn and get their information from? Is it video, audio, text, etc., and on what device or channel?
What questions do they typically have about your product or service?
How knowledgeable are they about your industry and product or service?
Psychographics play an extremely important role in the success of your social media strategy, so as challenging as this may be, you want to make sure you do this part really well before moving on to the next step.
While there’s no tool that can directly get you the psychographic information you want on your target audience, there are a few places you can go to do this, such as:
Interview existing clients
Investigate website analytics
Utilize subreddits
Join community forums and focus groups
Read social media and blog comments
As you find valuable information about your target audience, record these observations as they could come in handy when it comes time to content creation!
Step 2: Targeting Your Channels
If you’re already active on social media, do an audit of what’s working well for you (and be honest about what’s not moving the needle).
Consider the following questions:
What’s working for you? Look at your insights and business analytics on each platform.
Who is currently engaging with your posts? Is it your target audience?
How do you compare to your competition? Are they growing at a rapid rate?
If you’re just starting out, you may be eager to get on every available channel out there. But it’s a good idea to start with 1-3 channels and focus all your efforts on those (or even master 1 before moving onto the next). Like any plan, your social media strategy needs to be sustainable in order for it to work.
You will get quicker and better results if you focus your time and effort on your 1-3 key channels, then expand as your business and team grow.
So how do you determine which social networks you should start with?
You need to find out where your audience hangs out, then start narrowing down your options.
Remember, age doesn’t give you the full picture though, so you want to look at your competitors and see which top social media platforms you should focus on. You can try to do this with BuzzSumo or Ahrefs.
Not every business CAN or even SHOULD be everywhere. Focus your energy on the platforms that will drive the most impact for you.
Step 3: Developing Your Content Strategy
Now that you have a better understanding of your target audience and the channels they use, it’s time to build out your content strategy. Think blog posts, videos, photography, quotes, quick tip.
The right kind of content will depend on your target audience and the channels you choose. It’s also important to share content produced by others as you don’t want to seem overly self-promotional.
You can also break up your content ideas into categories to help keep things organized and consistent. Check out some ideas below each category of ways you can incorporate diverse content into your plan!
Entertainment
What ridiculousness in Hollywood is headlining the media this week? Turn red carpet nights or the Royal Wedding into entertaining memes that relate back to your services or products.
But don’t let the fun stop there. More ideas include:
Videos
Lighthearted stories
Pop culture references
Inspiration
If you stumble upon a quote that speaks to you and your mission, tack your business logo on the bottom of it and turn it into a graphic. Your posts don’t always have to be prize winners.
How else might your followers be inspired? Get creative by sharing more:
Industry gurus
Trends
Before & afters
Education
Think about the core of your business. What is it that you do well, and how do you do it?
Now, think about how you can turn your knowledge into an evergreen asset that educates your customers without you shoving information down their throats. Tie it all up in a bow by creating an infographic or a video tutorial.
Create more graphics, posts or stories about anything, like:
How to’s
Tips and tricks
FAQs
Oberer Homes, a custom home-builder in Dayton, OH, consistently shares helpful tips on home trends, tips and tricks to help educate their customers during their journey. Here’s a recent graphic they included in an article that outlined bathroom color trends.
social media content by creating graphics on how-tos that your audience can apply.” width=”300″ height=”285″ srcset=”https://marketinginsidergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Paint-and-Room-Size-300×285.jpg 300w, https://marketinginsidergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Paint-and-Room-Size-1024×974.jpg 1024w, https://marketinginsidergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Paint-and-Room-Size-150×143.jpg 150w, https://marketinginsidergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Paint-and-Room-Size-768×730.jpg 768w, https://marketinginsidergroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Paint-and-Room-Size.jpg 1080w” sizes=”(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px” />
Notice, rather than creating a graphic from scratch, they included another industry expert’s graphic because it did the trick!
Conversation
Utilize your captions to start conversations in the comments. Maybe you’re posting an unpopular opinion or hot take on an industry topic. Encourage your followers to join in on the conversation! You’ll also be able to gather some psychographic research here.
More examples of conversational posts include:
Questions
Fill-in-the-blanks
Polls
Connection
Customers love to know what goes behind the scenes. Share a story of your product being created or packaged, or of you out for client visits on an average day at work. It makes you more relatable to them.
Here’s a few more ways you can connect with your audience:
Personal wins
Your “why”
Shoutouts to businesses/followers
Promotion
If you’ve got a recent blog post that you’re super proud of, you should repurpose it for your social media accounts! Create graphics or make a video inspired by the content.
Some other examples of promotional posts include:
Product launches
Sales or discounts
Client testimonials
Generally, it’s safe to follow the 80/20 rule of non-promotional to promotional content. And if you’re sharing your big launch and find yourself wanting to promote a bit more than usual, just be sure to sprinkle in other useful content around your posts!
What types of content should you share?
You can start by compiling a list of popular keywords for your topic or product/service. Use Adwords Keyword Planner as a starting point. Then go to BuzzSumo or Ahrefs and enter your keywords, and sort by the channel you’ve selected to focus on. This process will take some time, but it’ll be worth it at the end because you’ll have a list of proven topic ideas that your audience will be interested in.
Step 4: Finding Inspiration
Authenticity is first and foremost. You should show up as yourself on social media and be sure to represent your brand well.
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t draw inspiration from others who are doing it well!
Look to your favorite brands
What keeps you coming back to their page? What kind of content are you most drawn to as a viewer or potential buyer?
Apply those tactics to your strategy but make them your own!
Scroll on hashtags to see what’s trending
Mindless scrolling doesn’t have to be all that bad for you.
Pro tip: set a timer on your phone for 15 or 30 minutes to scroll through 1 or 2 hashtags. Whether you on the reels tab of Instagram or finding passionate dialogue on Twitter, try to leave with just 1 new content idea for yourself.
Don’t let the inspiration stop there, though. Start on a blank sheet and organize your ideas into sections or tabs for each category of content. You’ll be amazed at what you’re capable of when you sit down and let the ideas flow.
Ask your followers
They’re there for a reason. What makes them choose to stick around?
Don’t be ashamed to ask them what kind of content they’d like to see more of. You can do this through your regular posts, stories, or even your email list if you’ve got one.
For maximum engagement on posts, work smarter and not harder.
Step 5: Building a Content Calendar
Now that you’ve started growing your following and readership, you must be really excited about producing and sharing more content, right? You have to build a content calendar so that you’ll actually stick to your goals.
Frequency
There’s tons of dialogue around how often you should post on each platform. You could drive yourself nuts trying to hit each algorithm perfectly.
You may need to share more or less than these numbers, so try testing it out to optimize for your strategy. Here’s a general guide:
Instagram (feed): 3-7 times per week
Facebook: 1-2 times per day
Twitter: 1-5 times per day
LinkedIn: 1-5 times per day
Blogs: 1-2 times per week
When you’re in your early days, these frequencies might not be attainable, and that’s okay. If Instagram is where it’s at for you, don’t give up entirely because you can’t reach the minimum number of posts. Start somewhere!
Variety
By combining what you learned in steps 3 and 4, mix in valuable content that your audience will appreciate. Use your social media feed as a repository for all of the things you wish your potential customers knew about your industry, and a place to bring your audience together.
Step 6: Automating For Success
The key to social media success is consistency.
Don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis where you’re taking weeks just to decide what to post next. If you have a calendar to schedule your messaging, you’re more likely to stick to it.
But if you find that the best time for you to post is 5 a.m., it may not be feasible for you to consistently get up every day at 5 a.m. to post content. The easiest way for you to post consistently is to use tools to automate you content flow.
There are lots of free and paid tools out there to help you automate your posts, such as Hootsuite and Buffer. We use Hootsuite to automatically post every article across all our employee LinkedIn accounts.
Step 7: Maximizing Traffic
New content takes time and resources to create. To maximize the efforts you put into producing new content, you want to be sharing old posts as well as new content. This can help double and in some cases even triple your traffic.
You don’t want to be sharing the same post four times a day though. For example, on Twitter, you may wish to promote an old post 2-3 hours after your first tweet, then promote again the next day, next week, next month, and so on.
To maximize traffic, you should also use different descriptions when promoting old posts. If you use the same descriptions, your followers and readers will likely see these posts as spamming and will ignore them.
You might also consider reaching out to influencers in your network and encourage them to share the post with their audience. This will help you gain even more exposure for your content.
Step 8: Tracking Results
To see what’s working and isn’t working with your social media strategy, you need to measure your results so you know what to improve on in the future.
You want to record all your social shares, such as impressions, shares and clicks, to see which content pieces and social media posts are getting the most clicks and engagement and are pushing traffic to your website, and which ones are not. Google Analytics, Buffer, and Hootsuite are great tools to help you collect these stats.
When you track these numbers regularly, you’ll learn what gets the most clicks and reads, and you can go back and revise your strategy to improve your results.
Now that you have the knowhow, it’s time to go build your social media strategy!
Do you want to use some of the marketing strategies seen here on MIG’s site but need some help or advice? Marketing Insider Group has a team of 35+ experienced writers ready to produce content for YOUR business. Check out our weeklyblogcontentservice or scheduleafreeconsultation.
The post 8 Steps To An Effective Social Media Strategy appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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Have you been tasked with planning your marketing team’s content calendar for the entire year? No doubt, this can feel like a tall order. It requires including key themes defined in your content marketing strategy and planning for various types of content. Likely, the driving force behind your content marketing success is your business blog.
Setting out to create a long-term blog content calendar can be daunting – even for seasoned marketers. To help ease the pressure and avoid extra stress, we’ve created a comprehensive guide to walk you through the process of building an effective, robust content calendar to empower your team to develop strategic content all year long.
We use this process for each of our clients who publish an average of two articles per week (100 per year). Read on to learn about the specific tactics and tools we use. They’ll help your team stay on track and work ahead if desired. Most importantly, this process will help you impress your boss and create engaging content consistently for your target audience.
Quick Takeaways:
Every content calendar should focus primarily on the customer rather than your business.
Many free resources exist today to help you identify keywords, develop relevant blog topic lists, and learn what customers are searching for in your industry.
Diversifying your output with various forms of content (e.g., blog articles, infographics, podcasts, etc.) is essential in implementing a successful content marketing strategy.
What is a Content Calendar?
A content (or editorial) calendar will help you plan, organize, and schedule your content successfully. It’ll help you and your team stay on track and enable you to work ahead. You can build a content calendar using a basic spreadsheet like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, a physical calendar, a content calendar tool like DivvyHQ, or a project management tool like Trello or download some readily available content calendar templates.
The Role of Content Marketing Today
You’ve probably heard the standard business advice circulating the internet today: “Remember your why.” This tip applies directly to content marketing. By focusing on meeting our buyer’s needs first, you can address their challenges and offer relevant solutions to their problems.
The buyer’s journey has shifted over the past several years. Today, with such easy access to the internet from nearly any location in the U.S., consumers rely on their own knowledge and self-education to find the best products and services for their needs. Consumers are in complete control of their purchasing journey. Access to multiple platforms gives them full control over the information they consume and with whom they share their discoveries.
As content marketers, it’s our job to create content that resonates well with our target audiences. We must create content that builds trust, share specific information about our products and services, and have an end goal of converting prospects and leads into paying customers.
How to Build an Effective Content Calendar for Your Blog and Other Content Formats
To develop an effective content calendar for the upcoming year, you must identify your goals, know your target customers, and understand the buyer’s journey. Only then can you identify, plan, and organize the most relevant topics and content formats to engage your audience successfully throughout the year.
Follow these seven steps to build a simple, SEO-driven content calendar for your business.
1. Identify Your Content Marketing Goals
Ultimately, the goal for most businesses is to generate more customers and improve Marketing ROI. But what does that process look like for your business specifically? What S.M.A.R.T. goals do you have to move your business forward and reach more of your target audience effectively?
Source: Indeed
Your content marketing strategy should address consumers in each of the three phases of the buyer’s journey: the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. Your marketing plan should also include retention marketing strategies to keep your current customers happy.
Top of the funnel (TOFU)/awareness stage: In the first phase, you should focus on attracting new customers. Your content should be helpful, relatable, and easy to share. Avoid mentioning specific products or services at this stage. Instead, offer relevant advice, address pain points, and focus on educating consumers to help build their knowledge of your industry.
Middle of the funnel (MOFU)/consideration stage: During the second phase, consumers are somewhat familiar with your brand and beginning to trust you. They might follow you on social media or subscribe to your newsletter. Continue building trust and positioning your brand as a thought leader in your industry.
Bottom of the funnel (BOFU)/decision stage: It’s decision-making time in the buyer’s journey. In this phase, consumers are usually ready to take the final step toward making a purchase. Provide product-specific content based on what you now know your target audience is seeking. You’ve earned their trust and want to encourage them to make the final jump.
Source: Hotjar
Of course, the sales journey doesn’t end when consumers reach the bottom of the funnel. You’ll want to create content that reengages past and current customers so they remain loyal to your brand and continue engaging with your business.
While all stages of the customer experience are vital, most of the content you produce should be geared toward consumers in the first two stages. The awareness and consideration stages are often the most time-consuming parts of the buyer’s journey. It takes time to build trust and credibility with a target audience.
Our research suggests that for every single buyer, around 100 individuals are looking for answers to questions that trigger a buyer’s journey. Examples of TOFU/MOFU content include educational blog posts, brand stories, and thought leadership articles.
As the funnel suggests, you’ll have a larger audience at the top of the funnel. As you start getting more specific with your content and weeding out those who aren’t serious about paying you for a solution to their problem, your audience will grow smaller. Those who make it to the BOFU are usually more serious prospects. They’ll be much more likely to become loyal customers than those at the TOFU. Focus on quality over quantity.
At MIG, we plan our content calendar based on our company goals. Most of the content we produce focuses on our top priority. We then fill any gaps by addressing our secondary goals.
2. Conduct Keyword Research
The first step in identifying relevant content ideas is generating a list of questions and topics you already know people ask in your industry. Speak with individuals on your sales team, and look at past campaign analytics. Customer testimonials can also prove insightful.
Another easy way to brainstorm new ideas is by searching online. Here are several content marketing tools to help you develop new topics, identify questions people are asking today, and generate specific topics for your content calendar.
Google
Test out Google autofill by entering the first part of a query into the search bar. The autofill will show you what people most often enter into the search bar for any given topic. Try entering your target personas and keywords you’re considering to see what appears.
For example, we could enter “marketers will” or “marketers are” to get a sense of what our target audience is thinking, doing, or looking for online.
Also, look at the “news” tab on Google for current events and keywords to consider targeting.
Google Trends
Google Trends shows you how popular different search terms are over time. It’s a great place to start determining relevant keywords based on their relative search volumes. Compare two or three similar terms to identify which ones are more interesting to the public.
AnswerThePublic
AnswerThePublic is a free, valuable resource for content marketers. It scrapes Google to identify, categorize, and visualize questions people are asking surrounding specific keywords. You can remove irrelevant results and download a customized list as a CSV file.
BuzzSumo
With BuzzSumo, you can find the most socially engaging content for any website or keyword. This robust tool gives content marketers an organized way to plan their content calendars while also viewing competitor data. Keep in mind that you’ll need to subscribe to a paid plan after a free 30-day trial.
Google Keyword Planner
Keyword Planner is another easy-to-use tool that can help you cultivate additional topic ideas. Focus on pinpointing short-tail and long-tail keyword phrases that accurately represent your brand and target audience. Ultimately, you’ll develop content based on select keywords to support both. If you’re already actively involved in search engine optimization (SEO), this process should feel natural to you.
3. Select Relevant Keywords Based on Your Research
After you’ve brainstormed keyword and topic ideas, it’s time to narrow down your list by selecting the most relevant keywords and phrases. You’ll use these to build content topics and optimize your content throughout the year. This keyword data will be the foundation of your content calendar.
After generating your keyword data, it’s time to review your findings and select the phrases that make the most sense for your business and target audience. Here’s the basic process we use.
In the following example, we want to reveal insights surrounding the keyword “film transfer,” a service that involves converting old film to DVD and other digital formats.
Using Keyword Planner, submit a related keyword phrase where it says to “Search for new keywords using a phrase, website, or category.”
Next, extract all keyword phrases relevant to your target audience and future content strategy. You can easily save keywords using the “Add to plan” option. In the next phase, we’ll refer to this data.
Review the keyword ideas Google suggested, then add phrases to your plan if they have significant meaning and are relevant to your project. You can view annual search trend data by hovering over the bar graph icon next to each keyword.
Next, it’s time to leverage your trend data to create your content calendar and learn when to schedule content when people search for it most.
In our example, the phrase “film transfer to DVD” has the highest search volume between November and January, probably because of the holiday season when families spend more time together.
To keep your data even more organized, you can create new “ad groups” or related keyword categories. This will make your data easier to analyze for future use.
After gathering enough keyword data, download your data into a spreadsheet to further analyze and organize it for your content calendar. You have several options when downloading your keyword data. Make sure you check “Segment by month” to include monthly search volume so you can analyze search trends.
You can also “Save to Google Drive” if you’d like to work directly from Google’s spreadsheet interface.
4. Format Your Keyword Data Spreadsheet
After you download your keywords, open your spreadsheet. You’ll see several columns that are irrelevant to this process. We suggest formatting your spreadsheet in a way that makes reviewing the data as efficient as possible. It’s time to remove unnecessary information.
We usually delete columns A through I and rows labeled “keyword type,” “segmentation,” “forecast quality,” “impression share,” “organic impression share,” and “organic average position.” We also delete rows 3 to 8 to further tighten up the data.
There’s no right or wrong way to organize your data. Focus on which categories are the most relevant to your team so you can format your spreadsheet in a way that is easy to interpret. The outcome may look similar to the figure below – an organized list of key phrases with monthly keyword data.
5. Review Your Keywords to Identify Trends
The final phase of keyword research involves reviewing your data to pinpoint trends. Look for keyword phrases that inspire high-quality, relevant topics for your audience and business. Many of them will be long-tail phrases that searchers use to ask questions or find a desirable solution.
Below, we’ve selected a few phrases that we could use to produce relevant content marketing topics for our example client.
As selecting keyword phrases in this phase, consider the months in which particular keywords are popular. Highlight the months with the highest search volume so you can maximize your SEO traffic potential at the right time of year for every piece of content you publish.
6. Determine Your Publishing Schedule
After conducting keyword research and before building out your content calendar, you need to pick a content publishing schedule you can stick to. Consistency is the key to success when it comes to content marketing.
Aim for publishing at least one or two blog posts per week.
According to our research, the sweet spot for publishing frequency in terms of traffic and conversions is two to four times a week. Of course, this will depend on your business’s size, goals, and industry. However, as a rule of thumb, the more often you post on your blog, the more traffic and conversions you tend to get.
Source: HubSpot
Your volume will depend on your available resources, so choose a blogging frequency you can stick to long term to start seeing positive results over time. Identify deadlines for each stage of the blogging process: outline, first draft, copyediting, and publish date. Also, schedule in time to update older blog posts so they remain relevant. Remember that blog post traffic compounds, meaning it gains more traffic exponentially over time.
Setting up a clear framework will help you get everyone on your team on the same page. Having a clear plan upfront will also allow your team to work ahead of schedule.
6. Construct and Organize Your Content Calendar
It’s time to put together your content calendar. Once you know your topics and have decided on a plausible content schedule, the next step is choosing the types of content formats that fit well with the topic, your business resources, and your target audience. As we mentioned earlier, the buyer’s journey should also help you determine which types of content will work best for each stage.
Here’s a quick list of content types you could work into your content calendar:
Next, we’ll move onto the final step in the process: choosing a tool for building your content calendar. DivvyHQ and Google Sheets are what we use but there are plenty of great tools for content marketers who are serious about staying on schedule and making trackable progress.
Google Sheets
We like using DivvyHQ for our medium to large enterprise clients with multiple formats and a large group of collaborators. Google Sheets works for our smaller clients because it’s easy to share, update, and customize. Our content marketing templates includes space for due dates on topics, different content formats, brief details about the project, target keywords, personas, and calls to action/offers.
We recommend setting up your content calendar similarly so you know the purpose of every piece of new content you produce. Try to include these core components at a minimum:
Topics
Working headlines
Content format
Target keywords and phrases
Calls to action or offers you want readers to click on
You can break down your content calendar by week, month, or topic, depending on your publishing volume. You could also incorporate social media planning into your calendar to know where you’re going to distribute which pieces and whether you’re going to pay for promotion.
Trello
Trello has various templates you can use, including one specifically labeled “Content Calendar.” It allows you to add specific rules for your team to follow, use color-coded labels for different categories, and build your workflow – right into the platform.
I’m personally allergic to Trello but some of our clients use them or other project management tools like Asana because their team is already on those platforms.
7. Celebrate Your Progress
Once you’ve filled out your content calendar, take a minute to congratulate yourself. You spent a lot of time researching and planning an effective year-long strategy to set your marketing team up for success. That deserves recognition. Next, it’s time to start creating content.
Leave Your Content Calendar, Blogging, and Marketing to the Pros
If building a content calendar and keeping up with consistent blogging sounds overwhelming, we’d be thrilled to step in and lend a hand. Our Content Builder Service includes keyword strategy, content planning, content creation, regular blog publishing, and SEO. We also measure search visibility for our clients and report ROI so you know exactly what you’re getting from us every step of the way.
If you’re ready to get more organic traffic to your website using quality content, we’d love to get you on the phone for a quick consultation. Start bringing more traffic to your website to get the results you’re looking for.
If you are ready to get more traffic to your site with quality content published consistently, check out our Content Builder Service.
Set up a quick consultation, and I’ll send you a free PDF version of my books. Get started today and generate more traffic and leads for your business.
The post How to Plan Your Blog Content Calendar for the Entire Year appeared first on Marketing Insider Group.
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