If you have a business in 2025, the best way to market it is through content creation.
Content creation is important for businesses, and that’s an undeniable truth. But simply creating content to appear on people’s social media and search feeds is far from what experts call content marketing.
In fact, a wrong understanding of content marketing has a negative effect on your overall marketing initiatives.
- A study by Contentful suggests that 59% of the brands are using outdated customer information, and 57% of them don’t get the personal details right.
- Another study by Trustmary includes that 80% of the brands are creating content for the wrong audience.
It’s clear that content creation alone isn’t enough. It must be tailored to a specific audience and solve specific problems at specific stages and times. So, how do you create a content marketing plan that converts your audience into paying customers? Here’s a content marketing guide to help you.
What’s The Secret Behind Content Marketing That Converts?
There’s a huge difference between content that converts and creating content in general. If you want your audience to convert with content, then here’s how we suggest you start thinking:
(i) General Content Creation: For example, you have a food truck you want to market to locals through Instagram, so what you do is simply click pictures and upload them twice or thrice a week on your social platforms.
(ii) Content Marketing: You hired a content marketing service agency that helped you define your brand, segment target audiences, and select marketing channels. Then they helped you create content that you publish, A/B test, analyze performance of, and optimize.
The result of the second method is: Three to six months later, you have more people coming in to have a bite of the viral hot dog you serve fresh from your food truck.
That’s the difference between general content and content that converts. But how does this magic happen?
What’s The Secret Behind Content Marketing?
Here’s what drives people to your storefront:
| Intent Driven | Persuasive | Action-Driven |
| A clear content marketing guide is all about understanding the audience’s intent. It’s a process that helps map their intent at different stages of understanding, acknowledging, and solving their problems. | Content marketing focuses on micro conversion. It engages the audience through smaller actions and persuades them over time by building trust. | Content marketing focuses on relevant content. It focuses on emotional responses or actions from the audience through value-added and relevant content. |
When you want your audience to convert, it starts with understanding the purpose of your content clearly. But it’s not an easy process, and it doesn’t improve in one day.
| Constant Refinement And Improvement Are Key To A Successful Content Marketing Plan. |
However, choosing content marketing doesn’t mean ruling out the possibility of creating general content. If your general content educates, entertains, or shares value with the audience, it can be part of your content marketing.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is more about creating content with the goal of conversion.
That’s where brands have to draw some boundaries and stick to a buyer’s journey-driven content. They must follow a strategy to create, publish, and promote content with funnel stages in mind.
The right content marketing is a perfect alignment between the content marketing funnel and the buyer’s journey.
Credit: SEMrush
Content Marketing Guide: A 7-Step Roadmap for Beginners
It goes without saying that businesses enjoy the prolonged benefits of content marketing. However, the most challenging part is creating one. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you create one.
Source: SemRush
1. The Foundation: Content Marketing Mission And Goals
Your content marketing guide must start with the mission statement and goals of your business. There are two different core stages to follow for defining your content marketing objective.
- Goals
- Mission statement.
| Goals: The most usual content marketing goals of an organization include lead generation, building brand awareness, and improving sales. |
In short, the content marketing guide must include goals that align with your business requirements.
Mission Statement: Typically, marketers follow the S-M-A-R-T (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) technique to outline their content marketing mission statement and goal.
The following are some common examples of content marketing goals with their respective metrics.
Start by outlining your content marketing goals and choosing metrics to build a mission statement using the SMART action plan.
2. Know Your Audience To Avoid ‘No Audience’ On Sales Pages
None of the content marketing tips will work unless you do your audience research right.
Here’s where targeting becomes prominent. Once you know your audience, you are ready to differentiate between generalized content and targeted content.
When creating audience-targeted content, it helps to dig into your marketing plan and the different analytics tools you have.
Start by checking your website’s analytics using tools like Google Analytics. This should help you identify your major audience and who typically notices your business online.
If you have extensive followers on social media, try to get analytics insights from that platform as well.
This Will Help You Draft Your First Audience Data And Help You Know The Following:
- Who is your audience?
- Things your audiences like and dislike.
- You’ll get insight into their online behaviour and pain points.
- Location of your audience and the language they speak.
The insights you get from Google Analytics, Ahrefs, and social media analytics can help you segment your audience.
Customer segmentation helps content marketers understand the audience and create audience personas to tailor content accordingly. Once you have the data, you can put your audience into different segments.
Source: SemRush
3. Build Content Pillars And Themes
Once you have the audience data, it’s time to build content themes and pillars according to target segments. Marketers use a content funnel to distribute content for different stages of the buyer’s journey.
- Top funnel – Awareness stage.
- Middle funnel – Consideration stage.
- Bottom funnel – Decision stage.
Each of these stages requires content with a unique focus, specific call to action, tone, and tenor.
For example, educational blog posts, infographics, podcasts, and eBooks work as the best form of awareness stage content.
On the other hand, how-to guides, case studies, and downloadable assets work better for the middle of the funnel content.
The bottom funnel mainly includes content that converts. Through this stage of content marketing, audiences find product reviews, pricing comparisons, product alternatives, solutions, and landing pages.
Creating content pillars is a very critical phase of content marketing. Content marketers can build the foundation of their campaign by brainstorming ideas and segmenting them across the content funnel stages.
But how do you create digital marketing content marketing pillars?
Here’s A Process:
- Derive insights from your buyers’ journey, content marketing funnel, and your audience research.
- Think of problems you can solve based on the data derived.
- Next, brainstorm content ideas based on the problems you can solve.
- Finally, distribute the ideas across the funnel stages.
In fact, a thorough content audit would help you decide the amount of content you must create, update, and prune according to the content marketing guidelines you’re building.
You can use brainstormed ideas to fill the content gap you presently have.
4. Create Content Formats, Planning & Calendar
Now that you have the theme decided and content pillars distributed across the funnel stages, it’s time to plan your content marketing activities.
At this stage of creating your content marketing guide, you’ll identify formats, planning, and creating a content calendar.
Before You Start Writing Those Blog Posts, You Must Prepare The Following:
- Prepare your content formats
- Plan out the topics
- Research keywords
- and prepare a publishing calendar.
This step is crucial for making your efforts measurable and time-bound.
Once you have a calendar, you can also refine your content ideas on the go if certain things need a last-minute improvement.
Choosing Content Format
Here are a few parameters based on which you can create content formats.
(i) Medium-based content format selection: This is where you select content based on three different media. Your content can be either video or audio, or for readers.
(ii) Consider platforms: If the primary publishing channel for your content is your business website, you’ll rely more on blog posts, infographics, eBooks, and FAQs. Go for podcasts, reels, or TikTok if most of your audience is on video-dominant platforms.
(iii) Consider your content marketing goals: Blog posts are best if your content marketing objective is to gain traffic. On the contrary, if your content marketing objective is to nurture leads or reduce the rate of cart abandonment, go for newsletters and emails.
(iv) User-generated content: In fact, user-generated content can also be part of your content marketing goals, where the target audience reshares and creates content on your behalf.
However, first, you must create shareable content that your users can share and collaborate on.
Prepare Content Topics, Keywords & Briefs
Once you have your content formats figured out and the type of content to publish, finalise your topics and keywords.
Let’s say you’re creating awareness stage content, and you want to write blog posts. In that case, focus on creating informative content with keywords that reflect the audience’s intention to gather information.
Here’s how the keyword research for different funnel stages of your content marketing works:
Now that your keywords and topics for different content pillars are ready, create content briefs. Add in style guides, references, and research materials to provide your writer with a context for how they’ll write it.
Once you have your topics, content pillar, keywords, and content brief ready, prepare a content calendar. You can use Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to create your content calendar.
Ensure to provide everything from the content topic to the brief, editorial date, and due date for publishing.
At this point, make sure that all the stakeholders responsible for research, writing, editing, approving, and publishing the content have access to the calendar.
This Is What A Content Calendar For Your Content Marketing Typically Looks Like:
5. Content Creation: Execute Your Content Marketing Guideline
Once you’ve done all the previous parts, you’re finally ready to create that blog post, or that YouTube video that educates, persuades, and converts your audience.
Content that converts is clear with its objective. When you’re creating content for a content marketing funnel, you’re bound to maintain some rules.
The content brief should include the format, the topic, keywords, and the CTAs. This helps clearly follow the purpose of specific content for a specific stage of the content marketing strategy.
However, the key parameters of creating high-performing content remain the same. Use the following infographic by Digital Terai as a reference for creating high-quality content that converts.
6. Distribution And Promotion
You have your content ready and published. It’s also indexed for the search algorithm to crawl. But it’s hardly getting any traffic or impressions. This is possible if you’re skipping the promotion part of content marketing.
It’s essential to consider content distribution channels and promote your content once it’s live.
Prepare a clear and audience-focused content distribution strategy to promote your content.
There are three media to follow when selecting promotional channels for content marketing.
Marketers Can Promote Their Content Through:
- In-house publishing channels.
- Earned media channels.
- Paid media promotion.
SourceBrands typically go for social media channels, YouTube, different forums, and directories to promote their content.
The promotional part of your content marketing guideline also involves creating some content and promotional materials.
7. Measure, Analyze, And Iterate
Here’s the truth all beginner content marketers must know. Content marketing isn’t a one-way process. It doesn’t end with the promotion of strategically created content and promoting it.
Since it’s a time-bound process, marketers must observe the performance of their content marketing guidelines within a predefined time frame. If the needle doesn’t move, the content marketing strategy needs a reevaluation.
It could require rethinking the keywords or working on the content brief. Sometimes, the publishing calendar and the resources may go off track, leading your content marketing to failure.
That’s why analysis of content marketing based on predefined metrics is key to success.
If you’re creating a content marketing guideline to generate traffic, analyze the traffic once the due date of the result arrives.
If it’s about leads, check your newsletter and email open rate. Reevaluation of content marketing strategy according to the content marketing metrics and goals helps you drive your marketing in the right direction.
Content Marketing Takes Time!
Patience is key to successful content marketing. Building a content marketing guide and its strategic implementation takes time. But what’s more frustrating is the lack of results.
However, it helps to remember that content marketing isn’t for instant gratification. It takes time for successful content marketing to produce results.
Marketers also must document their content strategy and action plans so that they can rework and optimize when needed. This blog post should help you build a content marketing strategy that converts with a simple beginner content guide.
Let us know your considerations for creating a successful content marketing plan in the comments