12 Days to Build a Better Content Marketing Plan: Part One of Three

If you dream of building a better strategic plan for your organization’s content marketing efforts, you’re just 12 days away from upgrading your plan… or building your first Content Marketing Plan!

This 12-day challenge was created to help marketing professionals who have one of these challenges that I’ve commonly seen from my digital marketing clients:

• What content should I post on social media to increase engagement?
• What type of content should I create to generate more leads and sales?
• How can I raise awareness for my brand and products/services?
• How can I measure the ROI (Return on Investment) from my content marketing?
• What can I do to be more strategic with my limited time and resources for content marketing?

The simple answer to all of these questions is to build a better strategic plan for content marketing! But the tactics to do so will be covered throughout the 12-day challenge. Here’s more information about the challenge.

CHALLENGE OBJECTIVE

The objective of the 12-day challenge is to provide you with guidance and tips for improving (or creating) your Content Marketing Plan — which is a documented strategy to create, publish, monitor, report and optimize content to help you reach your target audiences, fulfill their needs, plus achieve your goals and objectives.

CHALLENGE QUICK LINKS

The 12-day challenge will be covered in our 3-part blog series. Below are the links to each article in the series:

Blog Post #1: Audience Research and Analysis

• Day 1: Content Marketing Mission Statement
• Day 2: Buyer Persona
• Day 3: Buyer Journey Map
• Day 4: User Persona
• Day 5: User Journey Map

Blog Post #2: Tactical Planning

• Day 6: Goals and Objectives
• Day 7: Strategies and Tactics

Blog Post #3: Tools and Processes Planning

• Day 8: Content Marketing Sales Funnel
• Day 9: Content Creation Workflow
• Day 10: Content Publishing Plan
• Day 11: Content Monitoring & Reporting Plan
• Day 12: Content Optimization Plan

THREE GROUPS OF ELEMENTS IN A CONTENT MARKETING PLAN

When building a Content Marketing Plan, our experience and research has lead to the development of three key groups of elements that must be included in your strategic plan. Our definition of an “element” is a core component of a marketing plan that focuses on a strategic marketing area.

Group #1 – Audience Research and Analysis

Since the most important factor in any marketing plan is knowing the needs and challenges of your target audiences, the first group contains five elements related to Audience Research and Analysis. This is the group that we’ll cover in this first post of our 3-part blog series.

Group #2 – Tactical Planning

Once you’ve invested time to thoroughly understand the needs and challenges of your audience, now it’s time to analyze your organization’s and department’s needs in the form of goals, objectives, strategies and tactics. This stage of analysis will be documented in the Tactical Planning section of your Content Marketing Plan. This group of elements will be covered in the second post of our 3-part blog series.

Group #3 – Tools and Processes Planning

After you’ve documented your audiences’ needs and your organization’s needs, the final stage is to create tools and processes that will help you improve your efficiency and productivity related to content creation, content publishing, monitoring, reporting and optimization of future and existing content. The Tools and Processes Planning group of five elements will be covered in the third post of our 3-part blog series.

Now that you’ve seen the objective and overview of the challenge, it’s time to jump right in and get started!

DAY 1 OF 12 — Challenge #1: Content Marketing Mission Statement

On the first day of this challenge, the objective is to create (or revise) a customized sentence (or paragraph) stating the purpose of your content marketing efforts. I call this a “Content Marketing Mission Statement”, while others in the industry may call it an “Editorial Mission Statement.” In either case, its purpose is to provide guidance and vision to your Marketing team, while also letting your audience know exactly what to expect from the content that your organization will produce.

To clarify exactly what a Content Marketing Mission Statement is, it’s important to also learn what it isn’t. This isn’t your organization’s “mission statement” that provides a vision about the direction of the entire organization. This isn’t a description of the top goals of the organization. This isn’t repeating or paraphrasing the top goals of the Marketing department.

While it should be ALIGNED with the organizational and departmental goals, a Content Marketing Mission Statement is only related to the content (stories, information, videos, photos, graphics, audio, text) that the Content Marketing team will produce.

To help you understand it better, here’s an example of the Content Marketing Mission Statement for the Digital Marketing University (DMarketingU) blog:

Our blog is where Digital Marketers find valuable resources and training to help them take action and get better results from their marketing channels and campaigns!

Let’s breakdown the key points about this Content Marketing Mission Statement example:

• It starts with “Our blog”, which let’s the reader and Marketing team know exactly which digital marketing channel is being described.
• It clearly states the target audience as “Digital Marketers”, which provides guidance for the Marketing team as well as the reader to self-identify if the content is right for them.
• The statement lists the content types that will be created by the organization as “resources and training” for the audience.
• Finally, the statement describes the benefits that can be achieved by detailing “help them take action” and “get better results from their marketing channels and campaigns” as the advantages.

Now it’s your turn on day 1 of this challenge to build a Content Marketing Mission Statement with the same pieces. To make it easier for you, try using the same template that I used.

TEMPLATE: Our digital channels are where [WHO: target audiences] find [WHAT: topics/types] for [WHY: benefits].

• The “digital channels” are meant to include your website, blog, social networks, email marketing, and other online marketing methods used to build relationships with your audiences. Or, you can either rename this term or choose just one marketing channel to 
• The [WHO: target audiences] should be replaced with terminology that describes your top target audiences, prospects, customers, buyers or users.
• The [WHAT: topics/types] should be substituted with a list of your key topics that solve problems and provide solutions for your target audiences. It can also describe content types such as videos, photos, graphics, text, audio podcasts and more. Common examples of topics are: information, insights, advice, resources, training resources, directions, news, inspiration, guidance, research, opinions, surveys, entertainment, tools, tips or answers.
• The [WHY: benefits] should be switched with a list of key benefits that your audience will achieve from your content. Typically you will describe the solutions that you provide, such as examples like learning new skills, getting organized, growing profits, generating leads, saving time, saving money, improving your confidence, losing weight, becoming happier.

Using the explanations and examples about each part of the template, take some time to document ideas for your WHO, WHAT and WHY sections of the template. As additional resources, consult your team, peers or marketing collateral for ideas.

Once you’ve documented a list of ideas for each template section, complete the Day 1 challenge by piecing together all the parts of the template into your own customized Content Marketing Mission Statement!

In your existing or new strategic plan, build a better Content Marketing Plan by inserting your new Content Marketing Mission Statement into the beginning of your plan. The reason it belongs at the start is because it provides direction and guidance for all of the future sections of your strategic plan.

Congratulations on completing the tasks for Day 1 of the 12-day challenge! Next in this blog post will be further audience analysis focusing on your buyers.

DAY 2 OF 12 — Challenge #2: Buyer Personas

On the second day of this challenge, the objective is to update (or create) a customized description of your ideal customer based on critical data that you’ve collected, market research and your insights. Some call this profile an “avatar”, but I prefer the term “buyer persona” since you’re bringing this buyer description to life as a valuable resource for your team to get to know.

A typical buyer persona contains the following information:

• A fictional name
• Demographic data
• Observed and trackable behaviors
• Problems and challenges
• Motivations and goals

Why do you need a buyer persona? The benefits include:

• documenting the needs of your customers.
• knowing a buyer’s key demographics, interests and habits for targeting and segmentation.
• documenting a buyer’s problems and desired solutions.
• knowing the behaviors of how your top customers search for solutions.
• knowing the behaviors and thought process how they make decisions.
• using it as a great reference tool while building content and campaigns.

For this Day 2 challenge, pick your top targeted buyer profile that generates the most revenue for you and document the key factors that are important to you, your marketing campaigns, your ad targeting and generating revenue.

Here are the four (4) characteristics to build the foundation of your buyer persona:

1. NAME: Give your persona a fictional name. I recommend a last name related to the description of your profile and the first name simply starts with the same letter as the last name. For example: If your top buyer is purchasing agent, the last name could be “Purchaser” and the first name could be “Paula”, resulting in “Paula Purchaser.”
2. DEMOGRAPHICS: Add 3-5 demographics that you’ve identified as common among your top customers. Use the data averages as your persona’s data point or a range, such as age 30-39 or income of $75,000-$99,000.
3. CHALLENGES: List 2-3 major problems or challenges that has your prospect looking for a solution.
4. OBJECTIONS: Document 2-3 common objections or obstacles that prevent the prospect from becoming a customer.

Beyond the foundation of these first four characteristics of your buyer persona, you may choose to enhance and expand the profile. At Digital Marketing University, we have an online course that includes a chapter on creating the ultimate buyer persona with over 80 fields to help with targeting, segmentation and customized campaigns. In the course, we organize the buyer profile data into sections labeled Profile, Search Journey and Decision Journey. To explore more on this online course, check out “How to Build a Content Marketing Plan: 12-Step System to Success”.

Other resources that might help you enhance your buyer persona include:

• HubSpot: “How to Create a Detailed Buyer Persona for Your Business”
• Hootsuite: “How to Build a Buyer Persona”
• Neil Patel: “How to Create and Reinforce Your Buyer Personas”

Once you’ve created ideas for your buyer persona fields, complete the Day 2 challenge by documenting all of the important characteristics into your new buyer persona and format it appropriately so it’s easy for others to read the information.

In your existing or new strategic plan, build a better Content Marketing Plan by inserting your new Buyer Persona information after the Content Marketing Mission Statement. The reason it belongs in this spot is because you’re building a library of information for your Marketing team and buyer information is critical to most marketing campaigns and content development, so it will be easily accessible near the beginning of your strategic plan.

Congratulations on completing the tasks for Day 2 of the 12-day challenge! Next in this blog post will be further audience analysis about how to create a buyer journey map.

DAY 3 OF 12 — Challenge #3: Buyer Journey Map

On the third day of this challenge, the objective is to create (or revise) a visual diagram of the five (5) stages of a buyer’s experience with your organization to find a solution, make the purchasing decision and become a loyal buyer. I call this visualization a “buyer journey map” to reinforce that we’re concerned with purchasing behaviors, attitudes and decision factors.

A typical buyer journey map contains:

• Information from the buyer persona
• The 5 stages of the buyer’s journey: Awareness, Consideration, Decision, Retention and Advocacy
• A list of factors that the buyer experiences in each stage of the journey

Now you may ask, “Why do I need this in my strategic plan?” The main reason why is because a prospective buyer has different needs at different stages of their journey. Therefore, you need a buyer journey map because the benefits are:

• understanding the unique needs of your ideal buyer at each stage of their journey.
• identifying behaviors, expectations and decision criteria at each stage.
• documenting common objections and barriers that prevent the buyer from moving (converting) to the next stage.
• mapping how a prospect can become an advocate.
• using it as a helpful visual reference tool.

Here’s my recommendation on how to design a buyer journey map for your strategic plan:

1. Create a spreadsheet to use as your visual tool for the map
2. In the first row of the spreadsheet, list the buyer persona first name and last name that you created in the Day 2 challenge, for example “Paula Purchaser”.
3. In the next row, go to column 2 and enter the column header called “Awareness” as the first of five stages in the buyer journey.
4. In the same row but column 3, enter the column header “Consideration”. Complete the stages with “Decision” in column 4, “Retention” in column 5 and “Advocacy” in column 6. Feel free to customize the names of the journey stages if your organization has different preferences. But it’s important not to stop at the Decision stage once a buyer makes the purchase because as marketers we want to build long-term relationships to build loyalty and earn their trust for future purchases and positive feedback.
5. Go to column 1 in row 3. This is where you’ll start entering the “factors” going down vertically in column 1. The factors are major considerations that influence your buyer during their journey. You’ll want to include factors for their thoughts, behaviors, decision criteria and conversion metrics to measure success at each stage. Some factors that I recommend you list in column 1 are:
   • Buyer Behaviors
   • Decision Factors
   • Objections
   • Keywords
   • Metrics
6. Once you’ve completed the first 5 steps above, feel free to enhance the “journey map” with additional factors or stages that are important in your marketing campaigns. In a template that I’ve created for students of my online course “How to Create a Content Marketing Plan: 12-Step System to Success”, I’ve provided 11 key factors for to start their template.
7. The final step is to do the data entry within the table to document your ideal buyer’s information as you believe it should appear in each stage of their journey. I recommend starting in the Awareness stage and filling in all of the information going down next to each factor. Once you complete the Awareness stage, go to the top of the Consideration stage and document its factors, then repeat this process to fill in the table.

The result of the buyer journey map is a visual representation of your ideal buyer’s experience with your brand, products and services as they make purchasing and repurchasing decisions with you.

Once you’ve finished your data entry within your buyer journey map, complete the Day 3 challenge by reviewing all of the information vertically within a stage and horizontally across the stages for each factor to confirm it tells the correct story that you want to share with your Marketing team.

In your existing or new strategic plan, build a better Content Marketing Plan by inserting your new Buyer Journey Map after Buyer Persona. The two tools together will be valuable as a reference tool when creating new content and building your next marketing campaign.

Congratulations on completing the tasks for Day 3 of the 12-day challenge! Next in this blog post will be further audience analysis about how to create a user persona, which contains different data than a buyer persona.

DAY 4 OF 12 — Challenge #4: User Personas

On the fourth day of this challenge, the objective is to create (or revise) a customized description of your ideal user based on critical data that you’ve collected, market research, observed behaviors and your insights. A user persona is different than a buyer persona that you developed in Day 2 of this challenge because of these reasons:

• Not all buyers are users, and not all users are buyers.
• Buyer personas focus on purchasing and retention as the primary goals.
• User personas focus on satisfaction and loyalty as the primary goals.

Now that you’ve learned the differences, here’s more information about the details of a user persona. A typical user persona contains the following information:

• A fictional name
• Demographic data
• Skill sets related to using the product/service
• Observed and trackable behaviors
• Beliefs, attitudes and opinions
• Motivations and goals
• Loyalty factors

By developing a deep understanding of your users’ emotions, challenges, skills and beliefs, you can create more effective content that will improve their satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, the benefits of a user persona are:

• documenting the needs of your users.
• knowing their key demographics, interests and habits for targeting and segmentation.
• understanding their problems and desired solutions.
• knowing the behaviors of your top users before, during and after becoming a user.
• knowing their beliefs and emotions so you can improve their satisfaction and loyalty.
• using it as a great reference tool while building content and campaigns.

For this Day 4 challenge, pick your top targeted user profile and document the key factors that are important to you, your marketing campaigns, your ad targeting and generating revenue.

Here are the five (5) characteristics to build the foundation of your user persona:

1. NAME: Give your persona a fictional first name and last name, such as “Peter Power-User”
2. DEMOGRAPHICS: Add 3-5 demographics that you’ve identified as common among users.
3. SKILLS: List 2-3 major problems that your user wants to solve or may have during their user experience.
4. CHALLENGES: List 3-5 major problems that your user wants to solve or may have during their user experience.
5. SATISFACTION: Document 2-3 common user satisfaction metrics for reporting how successful their needs were met.

Beyond the foundation of these first five characteristics of your user persona, you may choose to enhance and expand the profile. At Digital Marketing University, we have an online course that includes a chapter on creating the ultimate user persona with over 75 fields to help with targeting, segmentation and customized campaigns. In the course, our user persona data is organized in sections labeled Profile, Behavioral Factors and Loyalty Factors. To explore more on this online course, check out “How to Build a Content Marketing Plan: 12-Step System to Success”.

Once you’ve created ideas for your user persona fields, complete the Day 4 challenge by documenting all of the important characteristics into your new user persona and format it appropriately so it’s easy for others to read the information.

In your existing or new strategic plan, build a better Content Marketing Plan by inserting your new User Persona information after the Buyer Journey Map section. With both buyer and user personas at the beginning of your strategic plan, you’ve created a valuable reference tool to assist you and your team with the development of future content based on your audiences’ needs.

Congratulations on completing the tasks for Day 4 of the 12-day challenge! Next in this blog post will be further audience analysis about how to create a user journey map.

DAY 5 OF 12 — Challenge #5: User Journey Map

On the fifth day of this challenge, the objective is to create (or revise) a visual diagram of the three (3) stages of a user’s experience with your product/service plus the unique steps inside each stage. The three stages that every organization has with their users’ journeys are Before, During and After usage. But, the steps inside each stage are unique for your organization!

A typical user journey map contains:

• Information from the user persona
• The three (3) stages of the user’s journey: Before, During and After
• The unique steps inside each stage, such as Awareness, Consideration and Evaluation in the BEFORE stage; Trial, Purchase, Training, User in the DURING stage; Advocate and Repurchase in the AFTER stage.
• A list of factors that the user experiences in each stage and step of the journey

Because your users will have different needs at different stages of their experience with your product/service, you need to document those needs to improve your ability to create content for them. Your user journey map is the best tool for this job because it helps you by:

• understanding the unique needs of your ideal user at each stage of their journey.
• identifying behaviors, emotions and thoughts at each stage.
• documenting the unique steps within each stage, which helps with recognizing barriers to advancement to the next step or stage.
• mapping how a trial user can become a power user then an advocate.
• using it as a helpful visual reference tool.

Here’s my recommendation on how to build a user journey map for your strategic plan:

1. Create a spreadsheet to use as your visual tool for the map
2. In the first row of the spreadsheet, list the user persona first name and last name that you created in the Day 4 challenge, for example “Peter Power-User”.
3. In the next row, go to column 2 and enter the stage-name header called “BEFORE” as the first of three (3) stages in the user journey.
4. In the same row but skip to column 5, then enter the stage-name header called “DURING”.
5. In the same row but skip to column 8, then enter the stage-name header called “AFTER”.
6. Go to the next row, which will contain your unique step names based on your product/service user experience. In this row’s column 2, the default recommendation is a step-name header called “Awareness”, followed in the next column by “Consideration” then “Evaluation”. Based on your unique user experience, you may need additional steps before a user starts the usage of your product.
7. In the same row as the other steps, but under the “DURING” stage-name header, put the default step-name headers of “Trial”, “Purchase”, “Training” and “User” in consecutive columns. Customize these step names as needed.
8. In the same row as the other steps, but under the “AFTER” stage-name header, put the default step-name headers of “Advocate” and “Repurchase” in consecutive columns. Customize these step names as needed.
9. Go back to column 1 in row 4, the first blank row under the stage and step headers. This is where you’ll start entering the “factors” going down vertically in column 1. The factors are major considerations that influence your user during their journey. You’ll want to include factors for their thoughts, behaviors, emotions and conversion metrics to measure success at each stage. Some factors that I recommend you list in column 1 are:
   • User Needs
   • User Behaviors
   • User Emotions
   • Conversion Goal
10. Once you’ve completed the steps above, feel free to enhance the “journey map” with additional factors or stages that are important in your marketing campaigns. In a template that I’ve created for students of my online course “How to Create a Content Marketing Plan: 12-Step System to Success”, I’ve provided 11 key factors for to start their template.
11. The final step is to do the data entry within the table to document your ideal user’s information as you believe it should appear in each stage of their journey. I recommend starting in the BEFORE stage in the “Awareness” step and filling in all of the information going down next to each factor. Once you complete the first step in the first stage, go to the top of the next step and document its factors, then repeat this process to fill in the table.

The result of the user journey map is a visual representation of your ideal user’s experience with your brand, products and services as they traverse their way discovering your product, to trying it, then using it, and finally having an opinion about it.

Once you’ve finished your data entry within your user journey map, complete the Day 5 challenge by reviewing all of the information vertically within a stage/step and horizontally across the stages/steps for each factor to confirm it tells the correct story that you want to share with your Marketing team.

In your existing or new strategic plan, build a better Content Marketing Plan by inserting your new User Journey Map after User Persona. The two tools together will be valuable as a reference tool when creating new content and building your next marketing campaign.

Congratulations on completing the tasks for Day 5 of the 12-day challenge! You’ve also completed the Audience Research and Analysis section of the challenge, which contained 5 elements: Content Marketing Mission Statement, Buyer Persona, Buyer Journey Map, User Persona and User Journey Map.

CONCLUSION

To build a better Content Marketing Plan, we recommend including 12 key elements in your strategic plan. We’ve grouped these 12 elements into three groups called “Audience Research and Analysis”, “Tactical Planning” and “Tools and Processes Planning”. Each of the three groups will be separated into different blog posts in our 3-part series.

In this blog post about “Audience Research and Analysis”, we provided five daily challenges for the first five elements. The Day 1 Challenge was to create a Content Marketing Mission Statement. For the Day 2 Challenge, you were tasked with building a Buyer Persona. For additional buyer analysis, the Day 3 Challenge was to create a Buyer Journey Map. Moving over to analyzing your users, the Day 4 Challenge was to build a User Persona. For additional user analysis, the Day 5 Challenge was to create a User Journey Map. 

Next in the 3-part blog series is your “Tactical Planning” where you’ll get to analyze your organization’s and department’s needs in the form of goals, objectives, strategies and tactics. If you’re ready, click here to access the second post in the series.

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