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Hemingway tried to warn us.

“All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

And bleed we shall.

Because we’ve created a monster that’s bent on ruining the content marketing that was once the saving grace in our long journey toward self-destruction.

“There is a content monster, and it’s tearing apart content marketing. Monsters are creatures that are out of control, that don’t respond to reason or logic, that just are; with no purpose.”

You know what’s even scarier?

Almost everyone is doing content marketing. Yet, less than half of B2B marketers feel their efforts are performing better than “meh.”

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We’ve got a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn things around.

If what Seth Godin said about content marketing being the only marketing we have left is true, we’d better grab it.

Artificial intelligence is here, and it might pull content marketing back from the brink of destruction — if we’ll just let it.

When I say AI will save content marketing, you might jump at the thought of getting some of your most time-consuming tasks — like that whole writing thing — off your plate.

Not so fast.

Quality content isn’t something that can be completely automated just yet. But it can be augmented.

Some chatbots are already smart enough to put tons of relevant data at our fingertips as quickly as we’re able to make a query.

Take GrowthBot that is used by over +12K marketers today. It talks to over a dozen systems and APIs to bring some of these cool, useful features:

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And yes, it is true that AI can write entire blogs. In fact, it already has. You might have read one without even knowing it.

Associated Press already uses AI to create stat-heavy sport and finance write-ups.

Engadget mixed a million words and a few rules to create a “Blogbot” that spit out a complete, though drab, tech announcement.

The rear-facing camera is a 12-megapixel unit, which is lower resolution than most sensors in this price range, but Samsung claims it takes great pictures anyway thanks to its larger pixels and fast autofocus.

Can you believe a robot wrote that? Probably.

As far as coherence and creativity, this is the outer limit for AI.

These current limitations might actually be a good thing, considering that a deluge of content isn’t exactly working.

What is working is quality. Quality content gives the reader a unique experience. Quality content meets both your objectives and theirs.

Quality content is epic.

“Content volume is important. Enterprise organizations need lots of content in many different forms and multiple channels. But quality cannot be sacrificed. To break through the clutter, content must be epic.”

— Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute

Can AI create epic content? Not yet.

But it can go a long way in helping you research, edit, and maintain extremely valuable content marketing.

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Remember Clippy, the paper clip the world loved to hate?

It might not have been self-aware, or all that helpful, but it heralded a future for content marketing that Vedant Misra, founder of machine-learning company Kemvi, dreams of:

“Machines will help us produce content. Machines will suggest assets to include in the content you’re making, or subsets of content to include. Executive control will remain with creators, but the ideation and production process will become increasingly automated. Think Clippy the Microsoft Office Assistant, but with a much bigger brain.”

While that dream isn’t yet fully realized, a shape is starting to form that looks a lot like a life raft rescuing us from drowning in content.

AI-enabled tools can examine trends to tell you what content each and every one of your readers wants to read. And they can tell them what to read based on their behavior and tons of other data.

But can they help develop that epic reading material from scratch?

Actually, yeah.

Take for example Atomic AI.

Once given enough data about the target audience for your story (or email, or whatever), the smart program will calculate readability to give you customized, predictive recommendations in real time.

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That, of course, is only the first step.

If there’s one thing AI excels in over humankind, it’s making sense of data.

AI-enabled platforms deduce behavioral patterns from a number of inputs that would take us years to organize, much less understand.

Better yet, they can tell you how to act on this knowledge.

“By analyzing hundreds of data points about a single user (including location, demographics, device, interaction with the website, etc.), AI can display the best-fitting offers and content.”
– Content Marketing Institute

Once you have the perfectly-personalized content in hand; an intelligent system can tell you when, where, and how often you should be publishing and sharing it for maximum impact.

Then the whole cycle starts over again with smart recommendations on which topics your audience is interested in based on how they’ve interacted with your content.

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The implications go well beyond simply crafting epic blog posts.

Evergage and Researchscape International found that 70 percent of organizations surveyed said email was the most important marketing channel to personalize.

Luckily for those respondents, AI makes it easier than ever to actually personalize email content based on the stuff subscribers care about.

No more yelling into the void.

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User experience and conversion rate optimization can also benefit from intelligent personalization.

An AI-enabled platform allows you to serve the perfect content and products throughout a user’s experience, increasing the likelihood of a conversion while keeping the churn rate low.

AI will deliver us from crappy copy by making it obsolete.
I like to think we haven’t done things completely wrong as content marketers. Maybe we’ve done too good of a job.

Too much content with too little intelligence is crushing us under its weight.
Consumers have shown us they want extreme value. They want relevance. They expect the perfect solution at the perfect time.

They want epic content marketing.

We need a little help cutting through the chatter. The most powerful tool we have to reach epic status is AI that augments our natural skills.

Artificial intelligence isn’t replacing content marketers, it’s working alongside us.

Afterall, Hemingway told us “There is nothing to writing. All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Let’s see a machine do that.

You did it.

You’ve been spearheading your organization’s content marketing efforts for a while now, and your team’s performance has convinced your boss to fully adopt content marketing.

There’s one small problem, though: your boss wants you to write and present a content marketing plan to her, but you’ve never done something like that before. You don’t even know where to start.

Fortunately, we’ve curated the best content marketing plans to help you write a concrete marketing plan that’s rooted in data and produces real results.

Read on to get inspired by some of marketing’s top content strategies.

5 Marketing Plan Examples to Help You Write Your Own

1. Shane Snow’s Marketing Plan for His Book Dream Team

A successful book launch is a prime example of data-driven content marketing. Using data to optimize your content strategy spreads more awareness for your book, gets more people to subscribe to your content, converts more subscribers into buyers, and encourages more buyers to recommend your book to their friends.

When Shane Snow started promoting his new book Dream Team, he knew he had to leverage a data-driven content strategy framework. So he chose his favorite one: the content strategy waterfall, which is defined by Economic Times as a model used to create a system with a linear and sequential approach. To get a better idea of what this means, take a look at the diagram below:

Snow wrote a blog post about how the content strategy waterfall helped him successfully launch his new book. After reading it, you can use his tactics to inform your own marketing plan. More specifically, you’ll learn how he:

• Applied his business objectives to decide which marketing metrics to track.
• Used his ultimate business goal of earning $200,000 of sales or 10,000 purchases to estimate the conversion rate of each stage of his funnel.
• Created buyer personas to determine which channels his audience would prefer to consume his content on.
• Used his average post view on each of his marketing channels to estimate how much content he had to create and how often he had to post on social media.
• Calculated how much earned and paid media could cut down the amount of content he had to create and post.
• Designed his process and workflow, built his team, and assigned members to tasks.
• Analyzed content performance metrics to refine his overall content strategy.

You can use Snow’s marketing plan to cultivate a better content strategy plan, know your audience better, and think outside the box when it comes to content promotion and distribution.

2. Buffer’s Content Marketing Strategy Template

Writing a content plan is challenging, especially if you’ve never written one before. Since only 55% of marketing teams have a documented content strategy, Buffer decided to help out the content marketing community.

By sifting through countless content marketing strategy templates and testing the best, they crafted a content marketing plan template with instructions and examples for marketers who’ve never documented their content strategy.

After reading Buffer’s marketing plan template, you’ll learn how to:

• Answer four basic questions that’ll help you form a clear executive summary.
• Set SMART content marketing goals.
• Create highly accurate audience personas by interviewing real content strategists.
• Solve your audience’s problems with your content.
• Do competitive research by analyzing your competitors’ and industry thought leaders’ content.
• Evaluate your existing content strategy by examining the topics and themes of your highest and lowest performing pieces.
• Determine which types of new content to craft, based on your team’s ability and bandwidth.
• Establish an editorial calendar.
• Develop a promotional workflow.

Buffer’s template is an incredibly thorough step-by-step guide, with examples for each section. The audience persona section, for example, has case studies of real potential audience personas like “Blogger Brian”. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the process of creating a marketing guide, this can help ease you into it. 

3. Contently’s Content Plan

Contently’s content methodology works like a flywheel. Instead of applying an entirely new strategy to each new marketing campaign, they leverage the strategy of their previous marketing campaign to drive the next one. Similar to a flywheel, their content methodology needs an initial push of energy to get the gears in motion.

What supplies this energy? Their content plan.

Contently fleshed out their entire content plan in a blog post to help marketers develop a self-sustaining marketing process. After reading it, you’ll learn how to:

• Align your content objectives and KPIs with your business goals.
• Create highly detailed buyer personas using psychographics instead of traditional demographics.
• Craft content for each stage of your marketing funnel, based off your prospects’ pain and passion points.
• Identify your most effective marketing channels.
• Discover the content topics your audience actually craves.
• Assess your organization’s need for resources.

By applying a flywheel-like strategy to your own marketing efforts, you essentially take away the burden of applying new strategies to each individual marketing campaign. Instead, your prior efforts gain momentum over time, and dispel continual energy into whatever you publish next.

4. Forbes’ Marketing Plan Template

An oldie, but a goodie — Forbes published a marketing plan template that has amassed almost four million views since late 2013. To help you sculpt a marketing roadmap with true vision, their template teaches you how to fill out the 15 key sections of a marketing plan, which are:

• Executive Summary
• Target Customers
• Unique Selling Proposition
• Pricing & Positioning Strategy
• Distribution Plan
• Your Offers
• Marketing Materials
• Promotions Strategy
• Online Marketing Strategy
• Conversion Strategy
• Joint Ventures & Partnerships
• Referral Strategy
• Strategy for Increasing Transaction Prices
• Retention Strategy
• Financial Projections

If you’re truly lost on where to start with a marketing plan, this guide can help you define your target audience, figure out how to reach them, and ensure that audience becomes loyal customers.

5. HubSpot’s Comprehensive Guide for Content Marketing Strategy

At HubSpot, we’ve built our marketing team from two business school graduates working from a coffee table to a powerhouse of over 200 employees. Along the way, we’ve learned countless lessons that’ve shaped our current content marketing strategy, so we decided to illustrate our insights in a blog post to teach marketers how to develop a successful content marketing strategy, regardless of their team’s size.

In this comprehensive guide for modern marketers, you’ll learn:

• What exactly content marketing is.
• Why your business needs a content marketing strategy.
• Who should lead your content marketing efforts.
• How to structure your content marketing team, based on your company’s size.
• How to hire the right people for each role on your team.
• What marketing tools and technology you’ll need to succeed.
• What type of content your team should create, and which employees should be responsible for creating them.
• The importance of distributing your content through search engines, social media, email, and paid ads.
• And finally, the recommended metrics each of your teams should measure and report to optimize your content marketing program.

These marketing plans serve as initial resources to get your content marketing plan started — but to truly deliver what your audience wants and needs, you’ll likely need to test some different ideas out, measure their success, and then refine your goals as you go.