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Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been using the same approach for a while, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy plan — to make sure it’s up-to-date, innovative, and strong.

After all, you’ve got more competition than ever. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 70% of B2B marketers surveyed say they are creating more content this year than they did in 2016.

The first step to getting a leg up on the competition is to have a solid, smart content marketing plan in place. If you’re having trouble planning for the upcoming year or need some fresh ideas to include in your plan, read on.

In this post, we’ll dive into why your business needs a content marketing plan and the exact steps you will need to take to create one.

What is Content Strategy?

In short, your content strategy is the piece of your marketing plan and development that refers to the management of pretty much any tangible media that you create and own — written, visual, downloadable — you get the picture.

You may have heard how important content creation is, but as we’ll get into throughout this post, it needs to have a well-planned purpose. When you develop a content strategy, there are some key things to consider:

• Who you’re creating it for
• The problem it’s going to solve for that audience
• How it will be unique
• The formats you’ll focus on
• The channels where it will be published
• How you will schedule and manage creation and publication

Why Do Marketers Need to Create a Content Marketing Strategy?

Content marketing helps businesses prepare and plan for reliable and cost-effective sources of website traffic and new leads. Think about it — if you can create just one blog post that gets a steady amount of organic traffic, an embedded link to an ebook or free tool will continue generating leads for you as time goes on.

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give you the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content. Plus, your content will not only help attract leads — it will also help educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your brand.

Now, let’s dive in to learn the specifics of how to create a content marketing plan.

7 Steps for Creating a Content Marketing Strategy

1) Define your goal.

What’s your aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do you want to produce content and create a content marketing plan? Know your goals before you begin planning, and you’ll have an easier time determining what’s best for your strategy. (Want help figuring out the right goals? Download this goal planning template.)

2) Conduct persona research.

To develop a successful plan, you need to clearly define your content’s target audience — also known as your buyer persona.

This is especially important for those who are starting out or are new to marketing. By knowing your target audience, you can produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to read and convert on.

If you’re an experienced marketer, your target may have changed. Do you want to target a new group of people or expand your current target market? Do you want to keep the same target audience? Revisiting your audience parameters by conducting market research each year is crucial to growing your audience.

3) Run a content audit.

Most people start out with blog posts, but if you want to venture out and try producing other content pieces, consider which ones you want to make. For instance, if you’ve been doing weekly blog posts for the past year, creating an ebook that distills all your blog posts into one ultimate guide would be a one way to offer information in a different format. We’ll go over several different types of content you can use further down on the list.

If you’ve been in business for a while, review your content marketing efforts and the results from it in the last year. Figure out what you can do differently in the upcoming year and set new goals to reach. (Pro tip: Now is a great time to align your team’s goals with the rest of your organization’s goals.)

4) Determine a content management system.

Have a system in place where you can manage your content. A few vital parts of content management include content creation, content publication, and content analytics.

If you’re a HubSpot customer, you can plan, produce, publish, and measure your results all in one place using HubSpot software. Other content management system options include CoSchedule and WordPress (although we can’t speak to the full range of capabilities of these sites).

5) Brainstorm content ideas.

Now, it’s time to start coming up with ideas for your next content project. Here are some tools to get the wheels turning:

• HubSpot’s Website Grader: HubSpot’s Website Grader is a great tool to use when you want to see where you’re at with your marketing. From your blogging efforts to your social media marketing, Website Grader grades vital areas of your marketing and sends you a detailed report to help you optimize and improve each area. With this tool, you can figure out how to make your website more SEO-friendly and discover new content ideas.

• What To Write: Get your mind gears going with What To Write’s unique content idea generator. This tool asks you questions that will help jumpstart your brainstorming. It also generates several blog post ideas for you after you’ve completed the questions, so you can use those ideas in your content marketing plan.

• HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator: Get blog post ideas for an entire year with HubSpot’s Blog Topic Generator. All you need to do is enter general topics or terms you’d like to write about, and this content idea generator does all the work for you.

• Feedly: This popular RSS feed is a wonderful way to keep track of trendy topics in your industry and find content ideas at the same time.

• BuzzSumo: Discover popular content and content ideas at BuzzSumo. BuzzSumo uses social media shares to determine if a piece of content is popular and well-liked, so this information will help you see which content ideas will do well.

• Content Forest: Content Forest offers free tools, which include KeywordKiwi and ContentIdeator. These tools will help you find popular content from your competitors, effective keywords to use in your content, and great content ideas all in one spot.
• Blog Post Headline Analyzer: CoSchedule’s tool analyzes headlines and titles and provides feedback on length, word choice, grammar, and keyword search volume. If you have an idea in mind, run a few title options through the Headline Analyzer to see how you could make it stronger, and to move your idea further along in the brainstorming process.

6) Determine which types of content you want to create.

There are a variety of options out there for content you can create. Here are some of the most popular content formats marketers are creating and tools and templates to get you started.

Blog posts

If you haven’t already noticed, you’re currently perusing a blog post. Blog posts live on a website and should be published regularly in order to attract new visitors. Posts should provide valuable content for your audience that makes them inclined to share posts on social media and across other websites. We recommend that blog posts be between 1,000 and 2,000 words in length, but experiment to see if your audience prefers longer or shorter reads.

Check out our free templates for writing great how-to, listicle, curation, SlideShare presentation, and newsjacking posts on your own blog.

Ebooks

Ebooks are lead generation tools that potential customers can download after submitting a lead form with their contact information. They’re typically longer, more in-depth, and published less frequently than blog posts, which are written to attract visitors to a website. Ebooks are the next step in the inbound marketing process: After reading a blog post (such as this one), visitors might want more content from an ebook and submit their contact information to learn more valuable information for their business. In turn, the business producing the ebook has a new lead for the sales team to contact.

Templates

Templates are a handy content format to try because they generate leads for you while providing tremendous value to your audience. When you provide your audience with template tools to save them time and help them succeed, they’re more likely to keep engaging with your content in the future.

Infographics

Infographics can organize and visualize data in a more compelling way than words alone. These are great content formats to use if you’re trying to share a lot of data in a way that is clear and easy to understand.

If you’re ready to get started, get our templates for creating beautiful infographics in less than an hour.

Videos

Videos are a highly engaging content medium that are shareable across social media platforms and websites alike. Videos require a bigger investment of time and resources than written content, but as visual marketing increases in popularity — after all, it’s 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content — it’s a medium worth experimenting with.

Podcasts

Starting a podcast will help audiences find your brand if they don’t have time or interest in reading content every day. The number of podcast listeners is growing — in 2016, an estimated 57 million people listened to podcasts each month. If you have interesting people to interview or conversations to host, consider podcasting as another content format to experiment with.

Here’s our comprehensive guide to starting a podcast.

External Content

Once you’ve been regularly publishing content on your own site for a while, it might be time to start thinking about distributing your content on other sites. This could entail a few things:

• Publishing website content on social media sites, such as LinkedIn
• Repurposing content into new formats and publishing them on your blog or social media sites
• Creating original content specifically for external sites, such as Medium

And speaking of Medium, if you’re considering that platform, check out our insights from our first year of publishing original content on ThinkGrowth.org.

When you’re ready for more ideas, there are a plethora of different content types to diversify your website. Check them out below:

7) Publish and manage your content.

Your marketing plan should go beyond the types of content you’ll create — it should also cover you’ll organize your content. With the help of an editorial calendar, you’ll be on the right track for publishing a well-balanced and diverse content library on your website. Then, create a social media content calendar so you can promote and manage your content on other sites.

Many of the ideas you think of will be evergreen — they’re just as relevant months from now as they are today. That being said, you shouldn’t ignore timely topics either. While they may not be the bulk of your editorial calendar, they can help you generate spikes of traffic.

Most people count on incorporating popular holidays such as New Year’s and Thanksgiving in their marketing efforts, but you don’t have to limit yourself to these important marketing dates. If there are niche holidays that might appeal to your audience, it could be worth publishing content on your blog or on social media. HubSpot Staff Writer Sophia Bernazzani compiled this ultimate list of social media holidays — keep an eye on it when you’re planning your calendar.

Ready to Get Started?

We know this is a lot of information, but the work has just begun. It takes time, organization, and creativity to grow a successful content marketing strategy. From building the foundation of your content marketing plan to adding tools to better manage your content, setting up your strategy for the new year won’t be a hassle if you follow the steps and explore the resources here. For additional guidance, use HubSpot’s Marketing Plan Generator to create a 12-month strategy in just a few minutes.

Happy creating.

Following its April 2017 white paper investigating the potential misuse of its platform, Facebook announced yesterday that it would be instituting new efforts to detect and block content — and accompanying ad spends — from fake accounts.

It’s the latest result of investigations into potential use of the social network during the 2016 U.S. presidential election to interfere with voter outlooks and decisions. As the official statement points out, “these are serious claims,” and Facebook has been reviewing a number of activities on its site to aid a broader investigation — and among them is all ad spend between June 2015 and May 2017.

The findings: During that time, a total ad spend of approximately $100,000 — which was associated with about 3,000 ads — was discovered to be connected to about 470 “fake” accounts and Pages — essentially, those that violated Facebook’s policies and weren’t associated with an official brand or organization. What’s more, the managers behind these Pages were found to be interlinked, and based in Russia.

But this isn’t a political post.

Rather, to us, this news is a major signifier of the effectiveness of social media advertising, as well as a reinforcement of its presence in our lives. The average user spends anywhere between 35 and 50 minutes on Facebook per day. That much exposure is often equated to many eyes on a given brand, cause, or organization by advertisers — but in addition to forming a strategy behind that ad content, this latest development shows that it also requires some advanced planning of knowing where it might appear.

“I think it’s telling that people who wanted to influence the election took to Facebook. It was clear to them it’s the best way to influence the most people,” says Marcus Andrews, a product marketing manager at HubSpot. “Ads aren’t at fault here — the manipulative humans who abuse them are.”

What does that mean for marketers? Let’s go over what we know.

What Facebook’s Latest Information Operations Announcement Means

What We Know

For many months now, Facebook has been emphasizing its efforts to prevent and reduce the use of its platform to distribute fake accounts and misinformation. Some are rooted in laws that, as a business, Facebook must follow to aid in high-level investigations, while others are the result of “protecting the integrity of civic discourse,” as the statement reads, that require advertisers to follow certain rules. One major step in that path to purely authentic information sharing is the banning of Pages that are found to repeatedly distribute and promote fake news on Facebook. 

But part of those efforts have to be preventative — which means implementing technology and practices to keep accounts that engage in this sort of activity from being created and able to advertise in the first place. That means creating ways to determine the nature and intention to figure out if Page meets that criteria as soon as it’s created. The answer to that, Facebook largely believes, lies in automation and other digital improvements. Among them, the statement outlines:

• “applying machine learning to help limit spam and reduce the posts people see that link to low-quality web pages;
• adopting new ways to fight against disguising the true destination of an ad or post, or the real content of the destination page, in order to bypass Facebook’s review processes;
• reducing the influence of spammers and deprioritizing the links they share more frequently than regular sharers;
• reducing stories from sources that consistently post clickbait headlines that withhold and exaggerate information;
• and blocking Pages from advertising if they repeatedly share stories marked as false.”

It’s a fairly comprehensive action plan — but it does bring up a few connotations for content creators.

Why It Matters

When I alerted my colleague, Senior Director of Marketing Ryan Bonnici, he was immediately reminded of an incident from earlier this year when heavy-hitting brands began to pull their ads from YouTube, resulting in a loss of roughly $25 billion in ad revenue for the video sharing platform. The motivation behind it? The ads were appearing in the pre-roll for videos from content creators with which these brands wanted no affiliation — the types of content creators, it seems, Facebook is attempting to keep off its channel.

That series of events resulted in a promise from Google — which owns YouTube — to implement better procedures for ensuring that advertisers had more control over where their content appears. However, according to Bonnici, the reverse has always been an option. “YouTube allows big brands to pick and choose whose ads appear before their videos,” meaning that if you wanted your ad to appear in the pre-roll of content created by someone with a name as big as Coca-Cola’s, for example, you could do so … if you spent enough.

However, on Facebook, that isn’t the case. Visual content created exclusively on and for that platform doesn’t come with a pre-roll — not yet, anyway — leaving less concern from brands around the possibility of negative content appearing on their Pages.

There’s also the matter of the fact that social networks are, at the end of the day, businesses for profit. Anyone, for the most part — minus those that don’t get through Facebook’s new and in-progress filters — can create an account and advertise on these platforms. Higher-profile brands, of course, have more to lose by not following proper protocol. “But smaller ad accounts,” notes Bonnici, “are more difficult to manage” and have less at stake, in terms of a bottom line, when it comes to the content they create and promote. In essence, it’s easier for them to slip through the cracks, and we can’t imagine that Facebook has an easy road ahead in its efforts to diminish actions in violation of its policies.

For marketers that are concerned about what these developments mean for them, we have a few words of advice: Know where your ad spend is going, and know where your content might appear. When you create a targeted social media promotion or advertising strategy, keep these rules and past experiences shared by other advertisers — even if unintentional by the platform — in mind.

As for our own internal marketers, the move from Facebook hardly comes as surprise. “Facebook has spent much of this year cracking down on inauthentic and low-quality content,” says HubSpot Staff Writer Sophia Bernazzani. “Mark Zuckerberg said himself he wants to take stock of the impact of Facebook, ever since reports and allegations surfaced of the app swaying crucial opinions. It’s a positive sign that his team is taking journalistic integrity not just as a social network — but as a news outlet — seriously.”

We’ll be keeping an eye on the investigation as it unfolds.

As marketers, we’ve gotten quite good at evolving our playbooks when it comes to SEO. But the changes we’ve seen to this point are nothing compared to what’s coming next.

We’re no longer in the “early stages” of a new era of search — we’re here, now, witnessing new trends and best practices unfold in real time.

First, it was an era tied closely to patterns such as mobile, social, and voice search, among other things. But many marketers are past the point of being on the cutting-edge of those patterns, and want to know, “What now?”

Now, we also have topic clusters and messaging apps. Make no mistake: Mobile, social, and voice search are still major players in the SEO game. Prior to their entrance onto the landscape, SEO predominantly revolved around browser-based search engines. More precisely, it’s been linked directly to Google. That’s where all the search activity has been. That’s where content consumption has historically started.

But now, new universes of search are taking shape outside of the browser window. In many of them, the rules for optimization have yet to be defined — but why does that matter to marketers? Well, in a nutshell, changes in the way people search indicate changes in the way they discover your content. They’re using new keywords and shaping queries in different ways; e.g., what may have once been a query for “Boston restaurant” might now look more like, “Where should I eat tonight?”

Let’s dive back into these four search patterns that are changing the face of SEO.

What is SEO?

Despite these changes, SEO still stands for “search engine optimization” — for marketers, the “optimization” part is what requires agility. Google defines the strategy as “the process of maximizing the number of visitors to a particular website by ensuring that the site appears high on the list of results returned by a search engine.” And while that, to some extent, remains true, we’ve widened the circle around the search engine results page (SERP). Of course, keep your eye on your ranking, but also, look farther out on the horizon.

You’ve likely heard the word “organic” associated with SEO. That’s because, when done properly, your content should be a natural result of search engine queries for the topic at hand.

Sound good? Great. Let’s have a look at some of the new ways users are organically discovering this content.

What SEO Looks Like Now: Four Patterns to Consider

1) Mobile Search

Here’s a fascinating little tidbit that changes everything. We all know the lion’s share of web usage has moved from desktop to mobile devices. At last count, 71% of U.S. internet use took place on mobile. It’s a figure, somehow equally astounding and obvious, that once led expert Benedict Evans to nudge, “We should stop talking about ‘mobile’ internet and ‘desktop’ internet. It’s like talking about ‘colour’ TV, as opposed to black and white TV.”

“Mobile is the internet,” he declares.

Now, that would be change enough, but the fascinating little tidbit I’m talking about? That’s still to come. According to Flurry Insights, it turns out that 92% of the time we spend on phones is spent in apps. So, if internet activity is growing on mobile, and mobile activity is predominantly spent in apps, what does that mean for search engines?

Source: Flurry Insights

Over the years, user experience improvements have been made to app searches — which was somewhat inevitable, as Spotlight search as the sole option for searching within apps (and, in some cases, even bypassing Google to bring you some web results) wasn’t a sustainable solution.

Let’s have a look at how the search capabilities within these apps themselves have also evolved — there are certainly repercussions for marketers there, too. Once thought of strictly for GPS capabilities, map apps are now being used as geographical search engines in-and-of themselves. Google Maps is a prime example — consider all of the information now contained in a single business listing.

So, we’re beyond the initial days of SEO for apps and the content within them. Messaging apps also play a vital role there — we’ll get to that in a bit.

2) Social Search

Something has been happening on our favorite social channels. Over the last few years, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat have all released features that collectively signify a massive shift in the priorities of social channels: to make it just as easy — if not, easier — to search for content as it is to search for people and brands.

It’s an interesting move for a number of reasons, one of which is to see the role of connections and influencers in search results. For example, have a look at some of my content suggestions from Instagram:

As a rule, I don’t follow a ton of celebrities on Instagram — unless, of course, you count certain famed dachsunds — and yet, Instagram curated a collection of images from them that it algorithmically believed I would want to see. It’s an indication that optimizing for social channels is an entirely different game than optimizing for Google — one that takes into account a user’s behavior within an app, such as likes, tagged locations, and accounts followed. The far-right photo in the second row, for example, is from the account of an influencer based in Milwaukee, where I happen to spend a significant amount of time.

The second search-related change on social has to do with how these channels are beginning to treat content. We call them social “channels” because these sites have historically been a pass-through for businesses and publications — a way to promote content and get viewers back to your websites. But consider recent changes within Facebook, however, designed to keep viewers on their sites and in their apps, with no pass-through — e.g., Instant Articles, which contain the full article within the Facebook app rather than requiring a clickthrough.

Social media has long been considered a powerful channel through which visitors find content on your website. These less-than-subtle changes, however, are reshaping the face of content discovery. And as content becomes more decentralized away from the website, optimization of that content will likely continue to change, too.

3) Voice Search & Personal Assistants

In the last few years, we’ve been introduced to Siri, Google Now, Cortana, and Alexa — voice-activated personal assistants created by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, respectively. The emergence of voice-activated personal assistants has run alongside the rapid development of connected devices beyond the desktop computer or smart phone. Everything from watches to scales, home speakers to lights are now connected to the internet and its never-ending sea of information. As our access to the internet has diversified, so has our search behavior. How so? Let’s take a look.

• Natural language: Each morning, explains HubSpot Vice President of Marketing Meghan Anderson, “I get up, stagger to the coffee pot and utter the phrase: ‘Alexa, what’s new?’, and Amazon’s Alexa — which is based on a speaker on my countertop — dutifully answers: ‘Here’s Meghan’s Flash Briefing.’ She then plays news and weather relevant to me and my location. I don’t structure the search query. I don’t use keywords. Alexa is smart enough to associate natural language with a request.”
• Expanded search windows: Because of the prevalence of connected devices, we’re no longer only searching when seated at our desks or in a convenient place for typing on our phones. With a vocal command (read: “Hey, Siri”) or push of a button, search can happen anywhere, at any time, just by asking our devices, “How do I quickly remove soy sauce from a white shirt?” Just saying. In any case, this development influences both the volume of the searches we’re conducting, and their composition.
• Context and history: Unlike browser search engines which still rely heavily on the expressed search terms, personal assistant searches pull upon the searcher’s history and context. If I’ve ordered dog food before, Alexa pulls in the exact brand from past orders and asks me if I’d like to re-order it. If I have a flight leaving at 6 p.m., Google Home will let me know if it’s delayed, or if traffic is particularly bad and I need to leave early. These searches — if you can even call them all that — remove a step, or several, from the research and get me to the point of action more quickly.

#Alexa, be more human
– via @benfoxrubin @CNET #voicefirst #AI #bot
cc @BrianRoemmele @JimMarous @SpirosMargarishttps://t.co/EJlT2x6upj http://pic.twitter.com/3TBeqlS0Xc

— Theo (@psb_dc)
August 30, 2017

When the internet is suddenly all around you, it becomes more and more common to discard your keyboard and directly ask the universe for what you want. This changes the structure of these queries. What you want may be less specific and structured than traditional search queries. Take our restaurant example from earlier — it means that marketers need to optimize for queries like, “What should I do tonight?” as opposed to structured searches like, “Best Sydney Area Restaurants.”

4) Messaging Apps

Simply put, people shop and buy in a world of immediacy — and, for that reason, messaging is how they communicate. Think about the last time you actually called someone to make plans. As for myself, I can’t actually remember it.

That’s only one reason why messaging apps have grown in usage and popularity — whether it’s Facebook Messenger, on-site chat, or bots through a number of platforms, including social media and Slack. Buyers ask questions and get a quick response, which can be enabled by this technology.

It’s also a sign of the growing number of methods for users to seek an immediate answer when they need information. That means brands need to optimize their content and copy to respond to these queries to address this sort of omnipresence of communication options: on-site, in-app, and messaging. Plus, it’s just another example of how people are going to expect solutions when they use natural language — which means that marketers need to build out messaging platforms, like bots, to be able to provide conversational answers that actually provide the answer the user needs.

One of our favorite examples here is Pegg, a financial assistant designed for startups and small businesses. Pegg’s bot, HelloPegg, embodies the principle that, in this capacity, chatbots don’t necessarily need to be loquacious — they just have served the purpose solving real problems from real people with the same (or better) ability as a human.

And to Top It All off, We’ve Got Topic Clusters

Topic clusters are a foundation of content strategy that my colleague, Matthew Barby, once described as “enabl[ing] a deeper coverage across a range of core topic areas, whilst creating an efficient information architecture in the process. That sounds more complex than it is in reality. What I’m saying here is that through aligning sets of web pages into topic clusters, you can manage the internal linking between each more efficiently and also provide a better user experience for visitors.”

This video explains it nicely:

But why do topic clusters matter?

With each of these trends — mobile, voice, messaging, and social — the common theme has been, “the way people structure their searches will be different.” We’re approaching a point where users will stop using disjointed long-tail queries, and will just ask questions, without context, whenever they need an answer.

Thankfully, topic clusters can shift your search strategy to something more topic-based, where — in a world where to get found, marketers need to consider how people are actually searching — can help you structure and build messaging with natural language, based on these topics and the input data around them.

Changes in behavior always precede changes in strategy. The point of drawing attention to these new search patterns is not to raise alarms — rather, it’s to raise eyebrows. While the future is uncertain, one thing is clear: The world of search is not ending, it’s expanding. And expanding worlds call out for exploration.

Editor’s Note: A version of this post titled, “Why You Won’t Recognize SEO in 5 Years” was published in 2016 and syndicated by third-party outlets. This updated version explores how those trends have been shaped in 2017.