Transcript: Planning a Long-Term

Content Strategy

Video 1: Why is long-term content planning important?

Hi there, I’m AJ with HubSpot’s marketing team.

So you’re looking to create a long-term content strategy for your business. You’ve come to the right place. By the end of
this video, you’ll understand the importance of taking the time to plan a well thought-out content roadmap. You may be
eager to get started with creating content, but if you don’t have a strategy in place, then you shouldn’t expect to be
successful in the long run. Knowing how to plan and organize your content initiatives will set you and your business up
for long term success with your content strategy efforts.

To start, planning provides a roadmap for your content. You’ll be making confident and more tactical decisions regarding
what topic you’ll be talking about, what format your content will take, and when you’ll be publishing it.

With a content plan, you and your team can stay organized and even factor in ad-hoc content requests like company
initiatives or other on-demand marketing tasks.

To get the most out of your content planning efforts, think of your long-term content plan like a savings account. If your
goal is to retire someday, then you need a plan. In order for that plan to be successful, you need to be dedicated to
putting away a certain amount of money on an ongoing basis. The more consistent you are with contributions, the
better your return on investment.

The same can be said about your content. If you make a plan and are consistent in executing, then you’re giving yourself
the best chance at achieving a positive return on investment from your content creation efforts. Think of each piece of
content you create as an installment towards a growing library of helpful, educational content. The more content you
create, the stronger your authority and relevance, turning you and your business into thought leaders within your
industry.

It’s important to note that obstacles and roadblocks will come up along the way. It happens to everyone. But having a
plan will make it that much easier to regain alignment, as well as understand your team’s bandwidth and priorities for
what needs to get done and when.

And speaking of priorities, a long-term content plan helps you stay organized.

Most often, marketing teams place a focus on more than one content initiative at any given time. A long-term plan
accounts for all upcoming initiatives and allows for an agile content creation process.

When you're organized, you can align your content marketing goals with the overall goals of the business. In essence, it
gets the marketing team in-line with the current initiatives of the entire organization.

Content is not just about supporting the marketing team; it should be about supporting the sales team, customer service
team, product and services team, and so on.

By aligning your content marketing goals to the overall goals of the organization, you can rest assured, knowing that
your focus will provide an immediate impact to where it matters most — creating the best end-to-end experience
possible for your audience and customers. How do you do this? Tell a story. Content is the fuel that keeps the inbound
methodology running. The inbound methodology is composed of three stages: attract, engage, and delight. Inbound
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Content Strategy

businesses use this methodology to build trust, credibility, and momentum. It’s about adding value at every stage in
your customer's journey with you.

If you want to learn more about the inbound methodology, then check out the resources section below.

With this inbound approach, you'll grow a well-informed audience. And when this audience is ready to make a
purchasing decision, they’ll likely consider your products and services. And even if they don’t become a customer, by
you taking the time to educate them, it’s possible they’ll share your content with someone else who may find it helpful,
another opportunity for you to convert this person into a lead, customer, and promoter of your brand.

Video 2: How to create a long-term content plan

Let’s review three things you need to do to set yourself up for success; setting marketing goals, auditing or assessing
your organization's initiatives and assets, and identifying the buyer’s journey for your buyer personas. A buyer persona is
a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real data and some select educated speculation about
customer demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals. The buyer’s journey is the active research process
someone goes through leading up to a purchase.

To learn more about buyer personas and the buyer’s journey, check out the resources section below. I’ve included a link
to HubSpot’s free Make My Persona tool.

The ultimate objective here is to have a unifying document you can use to keep track of your long-term content
marketing initiatives.

First, let’s talk about setting your marketing goals.

Setting marketing goals provides you long-term vision and short-term motivation. It helps you organize your time and
resources so that you can make the most of your content creation efforts.

Each piece of content created for a marketing initiative should be tied to a goal that is also directly related to the
overarching goals of the organization. Alignment like this creates purpose and focus with each piece of content you
create.

Let’s take a second to think about this. Assume your company’s quarterly customer goal is 100 new customers. You
know the number of leads needed to generate 100 new customers is 250 website leads, and that the number of unique
website visits needed to generate 250 website leads is 1,500. Now, you need to take into consideration what content
you need to create to hit your unique website visits goal.

Each goal you set should be a SMART goal. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely.

A potential SMART goal example could be, “Increase monthly unique website visitors from 1,000 to 1,500 by the end of
the year.”

The second step in creating a long-term content plan is auditing or assessing your organization's initiatives and assets.

Your audit will consist of two parts. First, a content audit to organize and evaluate your current assets, and second, and
event-based audit to account for upcoming activities or events your business plans to host.
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Content Strategy

Let’s begin with the content audit.

Your goal with the content audit is to identify all the assets your business uses to attract and engage your audience. Your
goal here is to identify gaps or opportunities in the content your business is currently using to help turn your audience
into customers. And while your entire business may be creating and using this content, understanding and organizing it
is generally a function of your marketing department.

There comes a point for every marketer who has been generating content for a while when they realize they have no
idea where all of their content is or how much they actually have.

Content has likely been created by you or your predecessors for a long time. However it’s possible content has also been
created by other individuals in the marketing department, or subject matter experts from other departments, and is
scattered just about everywhere.

By doing your content audit, you’ll be able to identify resources that you already have, which could save you hours of
content creation time in the future. No use in duplicating your efforts.

And don't forget to stay organized when conducting your content audit. To keep things streamlined, organize your
content audit by these categories: content title, buyer’s journey stage, lifecycle stage, content format, targeted buyer
persona, topic, and any additional notes that provide value or context.

Now, it’s time to do some digging for content assets such as guides, worksheets, or sales collateral. I recommend
systematically combing through the following dark corners where content can typically hide, like that old file manager or
marketing folder on your computer. Ask your sales team what type of collateral they use. Check in with the more
tenured employees (you’ll be surprised at the wealth of knowledge here). And pore through your customer relationship
management system, also known as a CRM, and your content management system, also known as a CMS.

Okay, I think you get the picture here. Let’s take a look at a content audit from a company called Kids Talk, created by
Maren Schmidt. Maren offers advice and resources backed by 30 years of experience working with young children.

Notice how Maren already has content spanning the awareness, consideration, and decision stage of the buyer’s journey
for multiple buyer personas. Additionally, each piece of content corresponds to a specific lifecycle stage. Moreover,
Maren has many different types of content formats to offer her buyer personas, like an ebook, a study guide, and a
webinar. Notice how Maren uses the “Notes” field to explain the contents of her content offer, though she may not
need this for each piece of content in her audit.

Now that Maren has documented her assets, she’ll be able to refer to this audit in the future to pinpoint what content
she already has as well as easily identify gaps for future content creation projects.

The second part to completing your audit is to conduct an audit on your event-based initiatives. This means you’ll need
to take into account any upcoming projects, priorities, or events that would involve content creation.

By doing this exercise, you'll identify content that could support each initiative. Additionally, it will give you the
opportunity to see how you can connect this content back to the buyer’s journey through an inbound marketing
campaign.
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An event-based audit should be organized by the following areas: upcoming monthly priorities, initiative overview,
theme or topic, prospective blog post topics based on buyer personas, and an inbound marketing campaign that ties
your efforts together.

Take a look at what Maren did for her event-based audit.

You can see that Maren has a few events and workshops she may need content for. You can also see that the content is
grouped into an overall theme for the next three months with associated blog post topics that integrate with an inbound
marketing campaign called “Preparing Your Home the Montessori Way,” which is an ebook.

Try and imagine for a minute if Maren only planned the month, initiative overview, and theme without topics for blog
posts that associate with a relevant inbound marketing campaign.

Yes, she would have noted there are a series of events coming up in the next few months, but she would have missed
out on the opportunity to tie everything together with a series of blog posts that could connect to a relevant content
offer and provide value to her marketing offer library.

There’s one last important step needed to create a sustainable long-term content plan, and that’s identifying the buyer’s
journey for your buyer personas.

Remember, you’re creating content that’s meant to attract and engage your buyer personas through their buyer’s
journey: from the awareness stage where this person has a problem or a list of questions that they’re trying to learn
more about, through the consideration stage where you’re discussing possible solutions to their problem or list of
questions, and ending in the decision stage where you’re recommending next steps. The consideration and decision
stage is generally where you’re talking about what your organization’s products and services have to offer, while the
awareness stage is more industry-level education. Identifying this content will help give you content ideas to work with
in the future.

But before you can identify the buyer’s journey, you first need to know your buyer personas.

Keeping this in mind, let’s take a look at one of Maren’s buyer persona’s, Montessori Mom Meena.

Here’s an overview of Meena as a buyer persona.

Meena’s a working professional, a married woman, and a devoted mother to at least one child under the age of six.

Meena generally skews female, is between the ages of 28 and 35, and lives in an urban environment. She also has a
bachelor's degree and earns around $60,000 per year.

Meena wants to understand child development and do what’s best for her children, understand how to set limits for
behavior, and have effective communication tools to use with her kids.

Meena’s challenges are her children won’t listen and she has to deal with tantrums, all of which overwhelm her as a
parent.
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Content Strategy

Maren knows that Meena looks to her friends for suggestions on solutions they use with their children. However,
Meena’s resourceful and uses Google to find answers to problems she’s looking to solve.

Great. Now that you know who Meena is, let’s take a look at what her buyer’s journey might look like in more detail.

To start, you know it’s important for Meena to do what’s best for her children. So what about an awareness stage ebook
which offers a list of parenting problems you can avoid? This is something that would bring value to Meena’s search.

Once Meena’s been educated on parenting problems to avoid, she’ll be looking for more content. What about following
up with consideration stage information like a questionnaire regarding family needs to better understand a possible
solution—in this case, Montessori? The questionnaire outlines both the needs of the child, as well as the parent.

But maybe Meena needs a little bit more information to progress into the decision stage— something that educates her
more on how to best prepare for Montessori. What about a free consideration stage workshop that explains how to
prepare your home the Montessori way? That could do the trick.

With a solution to her problem, now Meena’s ready to make a decision. What about offering Meena a one-hour strategy
consultation to discuss next steps for her child and Montessori? That could be a helpful service to offer Meena.

That’s an example of a complete buyer’s journey. It’s important to note that a buyer’s journey is ever-evolving. The
more you learn about your buyer personas, the more you’ll be able to refine and grow their buyer’s journey resources
over time. But it starts with first identifying content needed to complete the buyer’s journey, which you can then plan
out over the course of a year to keep your content creation sustainable.

If you’re interested in seeing how Maren organized and project managed her priorities in support of launching an
inbound marketing campaign, then check out the resources section below. I’ve included a link to Maren’s long-term
content planning worksheet. It’s in the form of a Google spreadsheet. This way you can use it as a template if you don’t
already have a solution for planning your long-term content creation efforts.