How To Create A Website Content Plan

Producing quality content is one of the most important online tactics for any business. Whether it’s for consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B), a content marketing plan is required to ensure that your business achieves high customer attraction, better conversion and retention rates and lower churn rates.
So, here are some elements of a successful website content plan that you should implement for your business:

Identify target audiences

The most important part of creating a content marketing plan is to identify the audiences and markets you want to target. Individuals and businesses will visit your website, social platforms and anywhere else that you promote your content to interact with your business and benefit from your content.
If it is not of the highest quality and does not meet their needs, then they will not hang around for long and they will defect to competitors. Finding out what your target audiences require is not difficult or expensive and you can use survey tools to get responses or you can track your website metrics to see which content they respond to. Even sites like Twitter provide analytics data to show which are some of your highest engagement posts and what their click through rates are. You can then focus more on what people respond to the most and is important to your prospects and business goals.

Research competitors

Search engine organic traffic is a major reason why many businesses produce content. It helps to rank higher in the search engines and target long tail keywords that are profitable for your business. Most of your competitors will be creating content and implementing search engine optimisation tactics to achieve high rankings.
It’s easy to identify competitors from search results, because they will have high positions for the keywords that you want to rank for. And it is also easy to identify the tactics they are using such as link building, rate of content updates, website structure etc. There are many tools to help you monitor their SEO strategies and these include Alexa and SEO Book.

Decide on content tactics

You should decide which content you will be producing based on your understanding of your target audiences. If you are in the B2B sector for example, then whitepapers, case studies, guides and webinars will be important to your business because they help to establish you as an expert and your audiences can see how you have helped other businesses and how they will benefit.
For the B2C sector, blog posts, product descriptions, articles, infographics, videos and so on, will be primary content types to create for your markets. The type of content you create also depends on the platform you will be sharing it on. For example, on Slideshare, you can share files like whitepapers and infographics and on Twitter you will post links to content that is on your website.
Overall, it’s important to experiment with content types and make sure that you are creating the best for your target markets.

How will you promote it?

Promoting your content is an important part of your content marketing plan. There are many channels to choose from including social media, video marketing, organic, pay per click advertising, press releases, email marketing and it may not be possible for your business to implement all of these because of budget constraints, target market needs and expertise.
For video, YouTube is a good channel to promote your products or services and inform and educate customers. Its audiovisual capabilities are unmatched by other channels and it helps you to create a lasting impression, build relationships and increase brand awareness.

Track content metrics

Google Analytics has a wealth of data to track and measure the effectiveness of your content. There are metrics like bounce rate, sessions, unique visitors, goal conversions etc that are essential to your content marketing plan and they help to steer your future marketing tactics.
However, you can’t track and report on all of them and you should focus on the most important ones. So, start by creating marketing objectives that detail what you want to achieve and by when with your content. For example, you could have an objective to reduce bounce rates below 50% within 6 months. Then you should create key performance indicators (KPIs) that track your progress towards achieving your objectives.

Summary

There are many factors that go into creating a winning website content plan. With these in place, you will see higher retention rates, better customer engagement and an increase in visitor and customer engagement. Download my free content marketing strategy template to plan your strategy.