In today’s digital marketing world, it can be hard to create and manage content that delivers results. So I will show you how to plan a long-term content strategy step-by-step.
You will learn how to plan a long-term content strategy for your business or organization. You will discover the benefits of having a long-term content strategy, the steps involved in creating one, and the tools and resources you can use to execute and optimize your content.
By the end of this article, you will have a clear understanding of what a long-term content strategy is, why you need one, and how to create one.
What Is A Long-Term Content Strategy?
A long-term content strategy is a plan that guides the creation, distribution, and measurement of content over some time, usually longer than a year. It helps to align the content with the business goals, audience needs, and brand identity.
A long-term content strategy is a way of planning and creating content that helps you achieve your business goals and connect with your audience over a long time. It involves researching your audience, auditing your content, creating a content calendar, producing high-quality content, distributing and promoting your content, measuring and analyzing your content performance, and reviewing and refining your content strategy.
Why Is Long-Term Content Planning Important?
Planning provides a roadmap for your content. You need to think of your long-term content strategy as your portfolio or a piggy bank. If you make a plan and are consistent in approach, then you’re giving yourself the best chance at achieving a positive return on investment from your content creation efforts.
During the process, you will encounter some setbacks that will try to weigh you down to quit. Having a long-term content strategy will make you stay focused and organized.
A long-term content strategy can help you to:
- Build trust and authority with your audience by providing valuable and relevant information.
- Increase your organic traffic and conversions by optimizing your content for search engines and user intent.
- Establish a consistent voice and tone across your channels and platforms.
- Reduce the cost and effort of content production by planning and reusing or repurposing existing content.
- Evaluate the performance and impact of your content by setting clear objectives and metrics.
Content is not just about supporting the marketing team, but it’s what gives the inbound methodology fuel, through the art of storytelling to keep running.
Inbound Marketing Methodologies
Attract, engage, and delight are the three phases of the inbound marketing methodology, which aims to provide value and build trust with customers throughout their journey with your brand.
- Attract: This phase is about drawing in the right people who are interested in your products or services, and who are likely to become leads and customers. You can attract them by creating and publishing content that answers their questions, solves their problems, and educates them about your industry. You can also use SEO to optimize your content and website for search engines and users, and use social media to share your content and interact with your audience.
- Engage: This phase is about presenting solutions that match the needs and goals of your prospects, and convincing them to buy from you. You can engage them by creating landing pages to capture their contact information, offering incentives such as ebooks or webinars, using email marketing to nurture them and build relationships, and using customer relationship management (CRM) tools to manage your interactions and follow-ups.
- Delight: This phase is about providing help and support to your customers after they make a purchase, and ensuring their satisfaction and loyalty. You can delight them by delivering on your promises, offering customer service and feedback options, creating loyalty programs or referral schemes, and providing additional value through upselling or cross-selling.
How To Create A Long-Term Content Plan?
To create a long-term content strategy, there are things you need to know in other to plan better content for your customers.
What is a Buyer Persona?
This is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about customer demographics, behaviors, motivations, and goals.
Having this in-depth understanding of your customers helps you plan strategic content for each of them.
What is a Buyer’s Journey?
This is the active research process someone goes through leading up to making a purchase. When you understand the stage in which your customers are currently, you will produce content that resonates with them at that stage of their journey. I’ll discuss more on this later in this article.
Step 1: Setting Up Your Marketing Goals
Setting marketing goals provides your long-term vision and short-term motivation. This will help you think of content that will help you achieve your set goals.
Setting goals like having:
- 1,500 Unique website
- 250 Website visits
- 100 New customer leads
Each goal you set should be a SMART goal.
- Specific: Your content goals should be clearly defined and specific. Instead of a vague goal like “increase website traffic,” a specific goal could be “increase organic website traffic by 30% over the next year.” just like what I’ve set above.
- Measurable: Your goals should be quantifiable so you can track progress. Using the previous example, “increase organic website traffic by 30%” is a measurable goal because you can track the traffic metrics over time to see if you’ve achieved it.
- Attainable: Your goals should be realistic and achievable within the resources and constraints of your content strategy. Setting an attainable goal means ensuring you have the necessary resources, such as time, budget, and expertise, to work towards it.
- Relevant: Your content goals should align with your long-term content strategy and overall business objectives. They should be relevant to your target audience and the mission of your brand. For example, if your brand focuses on eco-friendly products, your content goals should reflect that commitment.
- Timely: Goals should have a timeframe or deadline. This helps create a sense of urgency and accountability. For instance, “increase organic website traffic by 30% over the next year” sets a clear time frame for achieving the goal.
When planning a long-term content strategy, using SMART criteria helps you set specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely goals that guide your content creation efforts and ensure they align with your overall business objectives.
You can choose to Increase unique website visitors from 1,000 to 1,500 by the end of the year. This type of goal can be said to be a SMART goal, because it is Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timely.
Setting this type of goal helps you to keep track of your progress, and there’s nothing wrong with passing the set goal. Doing so will help you set higher goals and work on achieving them.
Step 2: Auditing Your Organization’s Initiatives And Assets
This is the act of analyzing and measuring your progress. This will help you to be on track on what you are doing, and what you plan to be doing.
Types of Long-Term Content Planning Audit
1. Content Audit
Identify all the assets your business uses to attract and engage your audience. By doing your content audit, you’ll be able to identify resources that you already have.
Organize your content audit by these categories:
- Content title: Here you’ll type the title of the content offer.
- Buyer’s journey stage: Here you’ll map the piece of content to the relevant buyer’s journey stage (Awareness, Consideration, or Decision stage).
- Lifecycle stage: Here you’ll map the content to your specific lifecycle stage (Subscriber, Lead, Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Opportunity, Customer, Envangelist, and others).
- Content format: Here you’ll identify the content format, if you will use, video, blog article, webinar, newsletters, etc.
- Targeted buyer persona: Here you’ll identify the buyer persona(s)
- Topic: Here you’ll identify the topic covered in this piece of content.
- Any additional notes that provide value or context: Here you’ll provide context for the content if needed.
2. Event-based Audit
Here you have to tie everything together with a series of blog posts that could connect to a relevant content offer.
Organize your event-based audit by:
- Upcoming monthly priorities
- Initiative Overview
- Theme
- Prospective blog post topics based on your buyer personas
- An inbound marketing campaign that ties your efforts together
Step 3: Identifying Your Buyer’s Journey
You’re creating content that’s meant to attract and engage your buyer personas through their buyer’s journey.
Awareness Stage
In this stage, you’ll help potential customers discover your brand with the help of content marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and social media marketing (SMM).
Your awareness stage content should answer questions like:
- What product does your brand offer?
- Why does a customer need your product?
- What solution does your product provide?
Answering these questions will make you an authority and a go-to place for your potential customers.
Consideration Stage
In this stage, your customer considers your product, so you need to help them understand how your product is valuable to them.
Your consideration stage content should answer questions like:
- What features make your product valuable to others?
- How will you increase customer engagement towards your product?
Plan your campaign around welcome emails, newsletters, product descriptions, ratings, and reviews of the product, as it will encourage the customer to purchase your product.
Encourage customers to buy a product by:
- Creating a detailed blog article about your product.
- Opting for a customer testimonials.
- Guest blogging.
Decision Stage
In this stage, you need to encourage your customers to buy your product. According to Econsultancy, 83% of the online audience requires encouragement to complete a purchase. Giving promo, and additional incentives will increase the chance of your customer buying from you.
During this stage, you should be able to answer questions like:
- How are your prices compared to my competitors?
- Is your brand more credible than others?
Answering these types of questions will give you the confidence to sell to your customers and see success in your online business.
To break down what I’ve discussed above into more simpler steps consider the following bullet points:
- Define your business goals and how content can help you achieve them.
- Research your target audience and their pain points, preferences, and behaviors.
- Conduct a content audit to assess the current state of your content and identify gaps or opportunities.
- Create a content calendar to outline the topics, formats, channels, and deadlines for your content.
- Produce high-quality content that meets the needs and expectations of your audience.
- Distribute and promote your content through various channels and platforms to reach your potential customers.
- Measure and analyze your content performance using tools like Google Analytics, Search Console, or social media analytics.
- Review and refine your content strategy based on the feedback and data you collect.
How To Work With Influencers To Improve Your Content Strategy Efforts
Working with influencers can be a great way to improve your content strategy efforts, as they can help you reach a wider and more engaged audience, boost your brand awareness and credibility, and generate more leads and conversions.
However, to make the most of influencer marketing, you need to follow some best practices and avoid some common pitfalls.
Here are some tips on how to work with influencers to improve your content strategy efforts:
- Define your goals. Before you start looking for influencers, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with your campaign. Do you want to increase your website traffic, grow your social media following, generate more sales, or something else? Having specific and measurable goals will help you choose the right influencers, create the right content, and track your results.
- Identify and define your audience. You also need to know who you are trying to reach with your content. Who are your ideal customers? What are their demographics, interests, pain points, and preferences? Knowing your audience will help you find influencers who have a similar or complementary audience, and who can create content that resonates with them.
- Define your budget. Influencer marketing can be a cost-effective strategy, but it still requires some investment. You need to decide how much you are willing to spend on your campaign, and how you will compensate your influencers. Some influencers may accept free products or services, while others may charge a fee or commission. You need to negotiate the terms and conditions of your collaboration with each influencer and make sure they are fair and transparent.
- Choose a type of campaign. There are different types of influencer marketing campaigns that you can use to improve your content strategy efforts. Some of the most common ones are:
- Product reviews: You can ask influencers to review your product or service and share their honest feedback with their followers.
- Giveaways: You can ask influencers to host a giveaway contest where they offer your product or service as a prize to their followers who enter by following certain rules.
- Unboxing: You can ask influencers to unbox your product or service and show their first impressions and reactions to their followers.
- Tutorials: You can ask influencers to create a tutorial or how-to video where they demonstrate how to use your product or service or how it solves a problem for them.
- Guest posts: You can ask influencers to write a guest post for your blog or website where they share their expertise, insights, or stories related to your niche or industry.
- Takeovers: You can ask influencers to take over your social media account for a day or a week and create content for your followers.
- Decide on the social media platform you want to use. Different social media platforms have different advantages and disadvantages for influencer marketing. You need to choose the platform that best suits your goals, audience, content type, and budget. Some of the most popular platforms for influencer marketing are:
- Instagram: This platform is ideal for visual content such as photos and videos. It has a large and active user base, especially among younger generations. It also offers features such as Stories, Reels, IGTV, and Live that allow influencers to create engaging and diverse content.
- YouTube: This platform is ideal for long-form video content such as reviews, tutorials, interviews, documentaries, etc. It has a huge and loyal user base that consumes hours of video content every day. It also offers features such as YouTube Shorts, YouTube Stories, YouTube Live, and YouTube Premiere that allow influencers to create interactive and dynamic content.
- TikTok: This platform is ideal for short-form video content such as challenges, dances, pranks, memes, etc. It has a massive and growing user base, especially among Gen Z. It also offers features such as Duets, Stitching, Filters, Effects, Sounds, etc. that allow influencers to create fun and creative content.
- X ( formally Twitter): This platform is ideal for text-based content such as tweets, threads, polls, etc. It has a large and influential user base that follows the latest trends and news. It also offers features such as Fleets (similar to Stories), Spaces (similar to Clubhouse), Moments (similar to Highlights), etc. that allow influencers to create timely and topical content.
- Facebook: This platform is ideal for mixed-media content such as photos, videos, articles, live streams, etc. It has a huge and diverse user base that covers different age groups and interests. It also offers features such as Facebook Stories, Facebook Watch, Facebook Live, Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages, etc. that allow influencers to create community-oriented and personalized content.
- Find and vet influencers. Once you have decided on your goals, audience, budget, campaign type, and platform, you need to find and vet influencers who can help you achieve your objectives. You can use tools such as BuzzSumo, Upfluence, AspireIQ, or Influencer Marketing Hub to search for influencers based on keywords, topics, niches, locations, followers, engagement rates, etc. You can also browse through hashtags, comments, reviews, or recommendations to find relevant influencers. You need to vet the influencers by checking their profiles, content quality, audience demographics, authenticity, reputation, and past collaborations. You also need to reach out to them and establish a rapport and trust before proposing a collaboration.
- Create and approve content. After you have selected and contacted the influencers you want to work with, you need to create and approve the content for your campaign. You need to provide the influencers with clear guidelines and expectations about the content, such as the topic, format, tone, style, length, deadline, call-to-action, disclosure, etc. You also need to review and approve the content before it goes live to ensure it meets your standards and complies with the platform’s policies and regulations.
- Launch and monitor your campaign. Once your content is ready and approved, you need to launch and monitor your campaign. You need to coordinate with the influencers on the best time and frequency to post the content. You also need to track and measure the performance of your campaign using tools such as Google Analytics or social media analytics. You need to monitor the metrics such as impressions, reach, views, clicks, likes, comments, shares, conversions, etc. You also need to monitor the feedback and sentiment of your audience and respond to their questions or concerns.
- Evaluate and optimize your campaign. After your campaign is over or at regular intervals during your campaign (depending on its duration), you need to evaluate and optimize your campaign. You need to analyze the data and feedback you collected and compare it with your goals and benchmarks. You need to identify what worked well and what didn’t work well in your campaign. You also need to thank the influencers for their collaboration and ask them for their feedback and suggestions. You need to use the insights and learnings from your campaign to improve your future campaigns and optimize your content strategy efforts.
Final Thoughts
Creating a long-term content plan is a smart and effective way to achieve your content marketing goals and grow your business.
By following the steps we’ve discussed above, you can create a long-term content plan that will help you achieve your content marketing goals and grow your business.
A long-term content plan is not a one-time project, but a continuous process that requires constant monitoring and improvement. You need to keep up with the latest trends and changes in your industry, audience, and competitors, and adapt your content accordingly.
You also need to experiment with new ideas and formats and test what works best for your audience. A long-term content plan is a powerful tool that can help you create engaging and effective content that delivers results.
I wish you the best in your content marketing journey.
Read Also: Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Content Creation Framework.
