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The 6-Step Guide for Crafting an Effective Content Marketing Channel Plan

Posted By Guest Blogger 12th of August 2014 General 0 Comments

CREATE AN ACTION PLANThis is a guest contribution from freelance writer Kanika.

With businesses employing multiple channels for marketing, it can quickly get overwhelming. To stay across everything without losing your head, you really need to have a plan of attack for each channel. Only then will your business be able to get the best results from its marketing projects, campaigns undertaken across various channels, and comprehensively achieve its marketing objectives.

You have to ensure that the content created suits its targeted audience and is appealing and informative enough to hold the people’s attention. But the same content cannot be presented on different channels in the same format – t has to be moulded and revised to best fit into a situation, so it can deliver the goods. This is so important for the success of a business’s marketing projects and campaigns.

Follow this 6-step approach and you will be well on your way.

 

Research your chosen channel

Before a business goes ahead with putting its content on a chosen channel or channels like Twitter, Linkedin, etc., it needs to conduct deep research on various factors. The timing of publishing a content, what type of people it wants to target, the tone of content, and team members who will be writing it, and the budgetary limitations all need to be looked at. You also need to consider an estimated number of people who will respond to the content, what action you want them to take, devices people would be using for seeing the content, their time of accessing it; whether they would be at work or holidaying, and similar other factors. Only then will you be able to mold the content to best fit a situation and hold the interest of your target audience.

Choosing the right channel at the right time

It’s great that a business can maximize its content promotion efforts and use every available channel for promoting itself, its products, and solutions, but you need to use these tactically. Choosing some channels over others is best, as it enables a business to devote enough time and energy on few specific channels rather than spreading too thin across all. This is helpful for those businesses who have a limited number of personnel for doing various tasks like content creation, SEO, etc. For maximizing their output, it is better to selectively utilize a couple of channels you think will work well. After that, you can try others – but just starting with every channel and leaving many of them silent is not going to work. Moreover this will burn out team members who have too much work to do than they can easily handle. Failure to follow up with maximum channels is bad for a business’s reputation. People who have posted their comments and are waiting for ages to get their questions answered will get annoyed. This does not do much for your reputation – dissatisfied people can be pretty vocal about being ignored.

 

Formulating a content management plan

A business has to get created quality content in a time bound manner and this can be done by making a content management plan and executing it systematically. It has to devise a content strategy which will decide what type of content needs to be created for various channels and which type of audience will be targeted by the content. The team members who will be writing the content, submitting, promoting and marketing it, have to be identified and assigned their respective tasks. They should clearly know the deadlines of their tasks and milestones. Once content has been submitted and promoted on various channels, the results obtained need to be analyzed. This will help a business to know if its marketing efforts are succeeding as intended or do they need to be improved. This will give an idea what new or extra it needs to do for achieving the desired results. Thus it can better plan for its future content marketing projects. 

Executing the content management plan

After the content management plan for a project or campaign has been formulated, it needs to be executed in a streamlined manner. Activities of team members assigned with various content creation, submission and promotion tasks have to be coordinated. Their progress at their tasks needs to be tracked and critically assessed. A business has to know if they are completing their tasks within the stipulated time or if they taking more than required time for their execution. This helps it to know if a project or campaign will be completed within the allocated time and budget. If a business discovers some inconsistencies in the smooth functioning of such projects and campaigns, it should be able to take corrective measures in a timely manner.

This calls for improved organization, communication, collaboration and precise monitoring of tasks and projects. This is something which cannot be achieved manually. The reason being team members are often based in different locations and it becomes difficult to update them on latest developments happening in such projects. It becomes difficult to keep them at same page over a project. So better solutions are needed – and usually web-based.

Web-based project management tools enable smooth and proper execution of content management projects. These will improve communication and collaboration among globally dispersed team members so projects can be completed within time and budget. 

You might like to try some of these:

Basecamp: A popular project management tool enables enhanced management in projects in a simple manner. Team members remain well aware of any new activities happening in projects.

ProofHub: Team members can communicate, collaborate fast and transparently with this enterprising project management tool. This tool enables smooth implementation of projects and these can be completed as scheduled.

Trello: This collaboration tool boosts communication and collaboration among group members by making it smoother. Work, projects can be better organized and managed with this solution.

Asana: This project management system enables team members to work together without using emails. Their efficiency improves and they are able to achieve more at work with minimum effort.

Molding content as per the context

After content has been created, it has to be molded so as to fit into the right context. A business may witness new developments like it launching new features or solutions, redesigning its website, upcoming festivities like Christmas, New Year and others where it becomes quite necessary to mold the content to best fit to a given situation, context and the targeted audience. Thus the business would be able to present the latest and updated information to the people and they will respond more actively to the business’s needs. 

6. Creating an editorial plan

For properly using a chosen channel and for getting the maximum results, a business needs to create an editorial plan. This will get mapped to its global editorial calendar. The editorial plan enables a business to determine velocity, tone, intended action and structure for the content it needs to put on a specific channel. As an example, a business wants its Twitter page to consist of following things: 


Velocity: One post per day
Tone: Conversational, friendly and occasionally laced with humor
Intended Action: A business wants subscribers to click through to its guest post
Structure: 140 worded post with a business’s logo

An action plan means you get your business marketed effectively and quickly. I hope these six steps have helped you.


Kanika is a freelancer content writer who likes to delve deep into technology, tools, and making people aware about utility of such aids through her informative write-ups. In her spare time she enjoys sketching, cooking, travelling and spending time with her family and folks.

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This post was written by a guest contributor. Please see their details in the post above.
Comments
  1. Content planning is very crucial these days for any business. Inbound or content marketing is now an integral part of overall marketing so a proper planning, execution, monitoring and analysis is pretty important to attract more and more visitors and prospective customers.
    We are a startup company and like all other startup companies we have very few resources and budget. We have a very clear content strategy for our targeted audience on our industry and we keep on creating content, promoting them using different social networks, content aggregator sites etc. We use couple of tools to manage the whole process.
    A startup must involve their human resources someway to contribute in content creation (idea, keywords, analysis, graphics or copy) and management. We do that and surely it is helping us a lot.

  2. All of the above mentioned 6 steps hitted me effectively and so i think they are also gonna to help me to effect my content marketing channel.
    Thanks for the share.

  3. Hi Kanika,
    Executing the content management plan plays vital role, will be going to focus on all the steps explained in this guide. Thanks for sharing this useful guide.

  4. Kanika – this is excellent! I must say that an editorial plan has literally saved my head from exploding! From wondering what to write each week, to which sites to pitch for guest posts – spending a couple of hours planning it all out made my writing life incredibly easy !

  5. Hi Kanika,

    Working the right channels resonates strongly with me. I prefer twitter and Facebook, and more than any channels, Triberr. Triberr rocks for disseminating content through multiple social channels at the click of a button and the networking potential is out of this world.

    Each channels should be a marketing fit. I may enjoy sharing on Google Plus but if my brand and content marketing plan lends itself more easily to twitter I’m better off sticking to that channel.

    As for your plan, stick to it but be ready to morph when change arises. I went heavy on content creation with my old blog and lighter on outreach. After ditching that blog I learned my lesson; for me, aggressively outreaching and publishing three, 2500 word posts weekly was the secret formula. I stopped on a dime once I dropped the old blog to start my new blog.

    Being flexible helps you get your content in front of prying eyes.

    Thanks for sharing Kanika.

    Ryan

  6. Thanks for sharing such a useful guide with us. Your all mentioned six steps are absolutely effective. if anyone wants to become freelancer content writers can visit iwriters.in

  7. Hello

    Good formula for starting content marketing, which I will be doing in 2 weeks or so. Crafting content to post on other websites with the correct content and message you are trying to get over are two key points, for me at least. As you say choosing the right channels and timing to release your content to reach the desired audience will be trial and error to start for me. Releasing content daily may not always be required, although this depends on the message you are trying to get out, the type of business and product/service. Just my thoughts as a person new to all this fun.

  8. That all about create an effective plan and these 6 tips are handy to “Content Marketing Channel Plan.” Everyone should follow it.

  9. Content marketing channels are many. They could be overwhelming with regards to functionality. However, with the right planning concepts and the mechanism for implementing the plans the marketer would be able to achieve the needed results.

    The 6 step guide for crafting an effective content marketing channel plan as shared in this post is revealing. At least, marketers are guided on just about how to go about making effective plans for multi channel marketing.

    This post was “kingged” or upvoted in kingged.com where it was shared for bloggers,social marketers,and online marketers.

  10. Getting closer to your customers and having a conversation with them is getting more and more popular with big brands. People like to get noticed. Very good article. Thanks

  11. Well, first of all thank you Darren to show us another great post. I’ll try to do it better with those tips.

    Have a nice day,
    Francisco M.

  12. Couldn’t agree more about crafting and molding content. DrewryNewsNetwork took time to redo site content and remove content with affiliate links in the body of threads, so not only a better concentration can be achieved on content marketing and wording, but, building and maintaining deep relationships with site visitors, leading to a future potential spike in ad revenue.

  13. Thanks! This is exactly what I need right now as I work on our new website. I am trying to build an editorial calendar, but geeze it is hard work!

  14. “…dissatisfied people can be pretty vocal about being ignored.” – This is pretty important for me as a customer seeking answers. Sometimes even an informative topic can only help to a certain extent, but it would add a bit of value if the author added an extra effort to clarify some of our immediate questions.

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