#7 Key Steps in Creating Content Marketing Plan for Start-upsThe best way to know your audience is to build a buyer persona

Creating a content marketing plan from scratch is not an easy task, if you are not aware of the basics of content marketing. Even if you know a thing or two about it, the entire process of content marketing plan creation can be onerous. Many a time, start-ups don't know where they should start from in order to outline a successful content marketing plan.

Stated below is a step-by-step process to create a successful content marketing strategy framework for your start-up.

Steps to Creating Content Marketing Plan

These practical points will help you make a result-oriented, cohesive content plan without much hassle.

Build a Buyer Persona

You have a product or service that you want to sell through content marketing. But can you really sell it without knowing who your ideal customer is and what they do?

The best way to know your audience is to build a buyer persona. A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal buyer. How would you build a buyer persona for your product or service?

My friend, you need to use a combination of raw data and educated guess to create the persona of your ideal buyer. You need to collect detailed information about your buyer persona, such as age, gender, salary, location, goals, challenges, fears, etc.

2- Create Customer Empathy Map

After locating your target audience, the next step is to get the insights into your target audience's minds. Customer empathy map is the best tool to make educated guesses about what your ideal customer thinks, feels, hears, sees, and does. It also helps you understand the pain points of your buyer persona.

To create an effective content marketing plan for your start-up, you need to create customer empathy map. The content based on customer empathy map generates high engagement and converts more leads into customers.

3- Understand Your Buyer's Journey

Most buyers don't purchase products on their whims. They go through a systematic process that includes getting information about products, comparing different products, evaluating products, and then making the purchase decision. If you want to create a result-oriented content marketing plan for your start-up, you must thoroughly understand your buyer's journey.

It is often a three-step process:

• Awareness stage — the buyer realizes they have a problem and need a solution
• Consideration stage — the buyer considers and evaluates different available options
• Decision stage — the buyer buys a product

4- Map Your Content To Buyer's Journey

After building the buyer persona, creating the customer empathy map, and understanding your buyer's journey, the next comes to map the content to your buyer's journey. You need to have content for the all three stages of your buyer's journey. Else, your content marketing plan won't bring handsome results.

For the awareness stage, you should consider creating eBooks, whitepapers, how-to videos, blogs, checklist, etc. Data sheet, demo videos, case studies, and FAQs are ideal for consideration stage. And live demo, free-trial, and estimates should be planned for the decision stage.

5- Create Engaging Content

The success of your entire content marketing plan depends on the content you are going to create. As you need to create different types of content, including blogs, checklists, case studies, etc., you must ensure that all the content has the same language and tone of voice that your buyer persona speaks.

Here are four content creation rules that you need to comply with:

• The content must relate to your target audience
• Stay focused as web readers have a shorter attention span
• Depending on the stage of buyer's journey, content should fulfil its objective
• Content should be engaging and persuasive

6- Promote Your Content

Your content marketing strategy will not be successful if you don't promote your content aggressively. Some content marketers try hard to create useful content that their target readers would happily consume, but overlook promotion part. A successful content marketing plan doesn't complete unless it has a detailed outline for content promotion.

Following are a few effective ways for content promotion:

• Send content to your email list
• Blast your content on social media networks
• Ask to include your content in weekly, monthly roundup
• Run paid ads

7- Track, Analyze, and Optimize

No content marketer in the world can make a successful content marketing plan in one go. Like any other marketing strategy, content marketing too requires tweaking so as to become successful. You must track and analyze your content marketing strategy and optimize it to get optimum results.

Also, you should adopt agile mindset if you want to create a result-oriented content marketing plan for your start-up.

Content marketing is one of the best marketing tools available for marketers. It is more economical as compared to other traditional marketing channels. Follow these simple steps and create a successful content marketing plan for your start-up to accelerate growth.