5 Tips For Creating A Killer Content Plan

Lately I’ve been writing about the buffalo program, PropelGrowth’s strategic plan for helping marketers get the most mileage out of their premium content. While a buffalo strategy won’t solve all of your marketing problems, it will help you keep the content beast well-fed.

In essence, waste not, want not.

Premium content typically requires a substantial amount of time, money and resources to produce; so doesn’t it make sense to leverage it and get the most out of your investment? So here are five tips that will guide you in devising a killer marketing content plan.

The launching point of your buffalo content plan should be a major piece of premium content, such as a whitepaper or research report. From there, you can create loads of derivative content (i.e. blogs, shorter articles, etc.) based on the themes covered in your larger work For example, this blog post is our fourth piece of derivative content developed from a webinar I did last month – Feeding the Content Beast.

Tip#1: Create a Microsite for Derivative Content

Creating a microsite to house this derivative content is an ideal way to build awareness and grow an audience for your buffalo content over time. It’s worth noting that an innovative microsite that brings light to key industry issues can play an instrumental part in establishing your company as a thought leader. What’s more, a well-constructed microsite has the propensity to “take off” and gain popularity amongst your core audience—driving increased traffic to your website.  As your ideas take hold, the press will also leverage the microsite to get more information for their stories.

Tip #2: Publish Content Where it’s Most Apt to Get Found

Say you’re a company that does not get tens of thousands of web visitors each day. Not to worry. You can still attract a large audience if you’re smart about where you publish. Make sure you pick sites that your target audience visits regularly. For example, Tabb Forum and Advanced Trading both accept third party content and have fairly substantial financial services and trading audiences.

Publish your content on websites with higher traffic rates, but just make sure you link the piece back to your relevant microsite, as well as the next marketing piece in your buffalo series. This will help keep prospects engaged with your content and therefore your company.  It will also help boost traffic to your corporate website.

Tip #3: Be Consistent about the Use of Keywords

When it comes to writing your marketing content, stay consistent about using keywords in your titles, headers, copy and URL’s. SEO is all about making sure searchers find your content when they’re looking for it,  so be strategic about your use of keywords to help your target audience discover your content.

Choosing the right keywords will be vital to the success of your SEO strategy and overall content plan, helping ensure that your content gets found by the right people.

Tip #4: Always be Thinking About Social Updates

As you set to work writing all of your derivative pieces, keep an eye to tidbits in the copy that can be translated into compelling social media updates. Incorporating this step as part of your content creation process will ensure your content actually makes it to your social channels, improving your online presence.

This approach will also be a big time saver in terms of writing about the content when it’s still fresh in your mind, as opposed to revisiting it later and needing to reeducate yourself on the message.

Tip #5: Set Up Google Alerts for Your Keywords

Google alerts can help you see if your ideas are getting traction. Set up Google alerts for your keywords and keep an eye out for sites where your content is quoted or re-purposed. This will give you insight into websites and blogs where you can focus the guest blogging and PR aspects of your content plan.

Setting up the alerts is relatively easy. Simply, click here and you’ll be able to designate details like the frequency of notifications and what outlets you’re interested in monitoring (i.e. news publications, blog sites, etc.)

Think Brains Over Budget in Your Content Plan

So, to summarize, you don’t need a huge budget in order to get your content in front of a large prospect audience. Following the strategic guidelines I’ve set forth in this post will put you on the right track to giving your content high visibility without costing you an arm and a leg.

What makes the buffalo program so effective is that it instates an easy-to-follow plan for consistently churning out quality content, even if you have limited resources. For more insight on developing an effective, budget-friendly content plan, listen to our recorded webinar, “Feeding the Content Beast without Blowing Your Budget.”