When was the last time you looked at your content marketing plan?
I could not tell you the number of strategic plans that I’ve helped write for businesses. Many. Many.
And yet I’d be hard pressed to come up with examples of the times when we actually followed these plans for more than a few months. Some of these efforts to develop plans took weeks and months to develop, and yet, as time passed, the plans were forgotten, shoved in a drawer somewhere, and instead the fires of the day would be fought.
The examples of plans that did get followed are also the plans that were frequently revisited and revised. These were often plans that took only a couple of hours put together. They were easy to understand and communicate. Some were a single page. Those were the best ones.
Content marketing plans in particular can get stale or irrelevant quickly. That’s not a reason to not have a plan. It’s a reason to keep your plans updated, fresh, and focused.
It is not merely OK for your content marketing plan to change—it’s absolutely necessary. The sign of a successful campaign is one that comes into focus directed by what people are actually reading and responding to. Then it refocuses again and again. Shift, change, refocus. Let your plan reflect those changes.
If you do not change your plan, what you publish can become irrelevant to your prospective customers.
There’s an easy fix: pay attention. I’d also recommend putting a reminder on your calendar once every four months to review your content marketing plan, your editorial calendar, and your web statistics. Within an hour or two you should be able to see what people are reading, adjust your plan, and update your calendar.
More frequently is better.
It’s worth the time and effort. A regular review should help you to significantly increase the effectiveness of your publishing efforts and keep you in touch with what is and isn’t working.
Content marketing isn’t a “fire and forget” marketing effort. It’s something that requires regular review and management. But it’s also a marketing approach that lets the efforts you’ve made in the past continue to pay off for you in the present and future. That makes it worth a few hours every couple of months.
How’s your content marketing plan working? What are you doing to refocus and magnify the effects of this campaign?
Maybe it’s time to pull that plan out of the drawer and keep it pinned up your wall.
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Randy MurrayContent Marketing: Review & Analyze Your Mission Quarterly by Randy Murray, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
