A No-BS Guide on How to Create a Results-Driven Content Marketing Plan

Imagine yourself on an international road trip without a roadmap or GPS. Chances are you’ll get lost, wasting both time and fuel, and struggling to reach your destination.

The same applies to content marketing.

You need to build a results-driven content marketing engine that’ll help you not only attract organic traffic to your website but also convert that traffic into leads or paying customers.

Without a strategic approach and a well-crafted plan, you’ll find yourself navigating the content landscape aimlessly, with no clear direction or end goal in sight.

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To achieve outstanding content marketing results, it’s a must to build a results-driven content marketing plan. This plan will act as a roadmap, guiding your content marketing efforts toward success.

To help you out, I’ve put together this comprehensive guide, where I’ll be sharing the exact steps you need to follow to build a results-driven content marketing plan.

In this article:

So, without further ado, let’s drive straight into it.

How to create a results-driven content marketing plan

Follow these exact steps to create a plan that acts as a roadmap for building an incredibly powerful content marketing engine:

Build the foundation of your content marketing plan.
Define your content marketing goals.
Conduct audience research
Conduct competitors’ research
Audit your already-existing content – skip this step if you haven’t published content before.
Design your content marketing funnel.
Conduct keyword research
Categorize keywords into buckets or clusters.
Create a content calendar
Build your content marketing team.
Focus on content distribution
Measure your content marketing efforts.

Let’s touch down on each of these steps one by one.

1. Build the foundation of your content marketing plan.

One big mistake so many companies make is that they dive straight into the keyword research or content creation part. I believe there’s no point in doing any of that if you don’t know much about your offering or if your messaging is all over the place.

Don’t make the same mistake they do. The first step should be to build a solid foundation upon which your content marketing engine will stand.

This involves:

Understanding your industry

The first and most important step in the process is understanding your industry. This includes analyzing the historical data, current state, and key trends to understand the landscape in which your business operates. I highly recommend staying updated on the latest industry news, developments as well as emerging technologies.

You can use a variety of tools to conduct market research like Google Trends, Think with Google, Answer the Public, etc. You can also tap into Reddit, Quora, or industry-specific forums or communities (Slack or Discord)

Mason Yu, Fractional Head of Outreach at Omniscient Digital, shares the reason why he loved conducting market research. According to him, “When you get deeply involved in the industry, you’ll be able to strategically go after trending topics and add nuance to your brand point of view. Rather than solely relying on commonly used strategies like competitive keyword analysis or content gap, you’ll be able to capitalize on these underserved opportunities, which may or may not be targeted by competitors.

Many times, these topics may be undiscovered by third-party aggregators and keyword tools, and it will feel like a risk. However, if you know your industry well, you’ll know that they are topics demanded by your ideal audience. Additionally, when actually writing the content, you’ll be able to add examples and expert points of view that add further value, giving your content that much more of an edge.”

Knowing the ins and outs of your product or service

You can’t market your product or service if you don’t know much about it. So, the next step is to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs of your offering. This includes understanding its core features, benefits, use cases, strengths and weaknesses, and how it solves your target audience’s problems.

You can do this by trying out your products or services for yourself. Also, let a few of your customers try them out for free in exchange for their honest feedback.

Another great tactic (highly recommended) is to let your new marketing hires work directly with your customer support team, if you have one.

Tim Soulo, CMO at Ahrefs, has made it mandatory for every new marketing hire to spend the first two months working in customer support before they get their first marketing assignment. This way, they can gain firsthand knowledge of the product as well as customer pain points.

Working on your messaging

The next step is to work on your brand’s messaging. It needs to be aligned with your target audience’s pain points and problems. Also, it needs to effectively communicate your brand’s value proposition. Last but not least, you must make sure that it’s not all over the place.

Some of the most crucial elements of a brand’s messaging are:

Mission statement – a short statement answering the ‘why’ of your business.
Vision statement – a statement that outlines your goals for the future.
Values – what your brand believes in and how you do business.
Brand Positioning statement – a statement answering the ‘what,’ ‘who,’ and ‘how’ of your business. Christina Donati, Content and Partner Marketing Lead at Alloy and part-time SaaS freelance writer, believes brand positioning and content marketing strategy are distinct entities often confused with one another. Rather than treating them as interchangeable, your positioning should be the bedrock that breathes life into your content marketing strategy. Positioning is like the magnetic force that pulls your product or service ahead of the competition. It encompasses defining and articulating what sets you apart, how you compete, and the distinctive flavor your offering brings to the minds of your ideal customers. Here’s my advice: don’t wait around. Establish your brand positioning right from the start and adhere to it consistently. Consistency is key. Even if your business has been operating for a few years, it’s never too late to conduct a positioning exercise to ensure your key messages align with your target audience’s expectations.”
Differentiators – what makes your brand stand out from the rest – goes hand in hand with competitors’ research.
Your brand’s voice – how you want to position yourself in front of others.

Setting up your marketing assets

What if your website’s UX is poor? Or what if your social media profiles are outdated? Worse – what if you don’t have a consistent brand image across different platforms?

Marketing is not a linear journey anymore. Gone are the days when customers swiped their credit cards instantly after viewing an ad or visiting an online store. That’s not the case anymore.

After landing on your website for the first time, it’s highly likely they will check out your socials. Or if you run a local business, they will likely check out reviews on your Google Business Profile.

You need to put your best foot forward across the different channels where your customers will likely look up your business. So, I’d recommend getting your marketing assets ready before you kickstart your content marketing efforts. This includes (but is not limited to):

Your website – make sure it’s optimized.
Social media profiles – focus only on the platforms where your customers hang out.
Email marketing platform – to run email marketing campaigns, you’ll need to set up a MailChimp or ActiveCampaign account.
Landing pages – if you plan to run paid ads and redirect your audience to dedicated landing pages.
Content marketing tech stack – you’ll likely need content marketing tools to aid your efforts. Some of my favorite content marketing tools are SparkToro (audience research), Ahrefs/SEMRush (SEO tools), Keyword Insights (building buckets or clusters), BuzzSumo (finding trending topics).

Once you have built a solid foundation, it’s time to move to Step II, i.e.:

2. Define your content marketing goals

Ask yourself: what do we aim to achieve out of your content marketing efforts? Is it more brand awareness? Or increased sales? Maybe you want to better position yourself in the market.

Defining your content marketing goals will help you build a strategic roadmap and align your efforts toward achieving specific outcomes. While there are several goal-setting techniques, my favorite one is setting SMART goals.

SMART goals are goals that are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. To help you better understand the concept of SMART goals, here’s an example of a goal that’s not SMART:

“We need to drive more traffic to our website.”

Like seriously, what does it even mean? Sure, you want to increase traffic on your website. But how will your team measure your efforts? Or how will they understand what your expectations are?

Now, let’s transform this goal into a SMART goal:

“Increase organic website traffic by 20% within the next three months through our blog.”

As you can see, this goal is Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic & Timely. Depending on what your expectations are or what you want to achieve out of your content marketing efforts, you can define SMART content marketing goals.

While doing so, make sure you’re defining both short and long-term content marketing goals. Short-term goals are goals that you would like to achieve in a short time span. Whereas long-term goals, as the name suggests, are goals that you would like to achieve in the next few years.

Set long-term goals first. If I were building a content marketing engine from scratch, I’d outline my five-year plan, in which I’d define my content marketing goals. For instance, one of my long-term goals would be –

“Attract one million monthly visitors to our website within the next five years through our blog.”

After outlining my long-term goals, I would define my short-term goals. To reach one million monthly visitors in five years, I would need to set a six-month goal –

“Increasing organic website traffic by 15% within the next six months through the blog.”

You can further break down these short-term goals into objectives to ensure a focused and actionable approach.

Setting these goals will guide you and your team in the right direction and give you a sense of the key performance indicators (KPIs) you need to track to meet them.

Pro tip: I’ve seen so many businesses target high-volume, yet irrelevant keywords, just to attract junk traffic to your website. Rather than having a goal of attracting more traffic, we’d advise you to focus on targeted and high-quality traffic to your website. Sean Flannigan, Content Marketing Manager at Shogun, believes, “Your content marketing goal needs to align with your business goals. This way, you and your team will focus more on attracting good-fit traffic to your website and work on converting as much of that traffic into paying customers.”

That being said, let’s move on to the next and an important step in the process.

3. Conduct audience research

You can’t sell to people you don’t know anything about. If you don’t know who your target audience is, you’ve already lost half the battle against your competitors. That’s the reason I’m asking you to conduct extensive audience research in this step.

Let’s say your company sells health supplements for men who are looking to build lean muscle and improve their athletic performance. Without conducting audience research, you’ll not have a clear understanding of who these men are, what challenges they face in their everyday lives, what’s stopping them from hitting their goals, and how they like to consume information.

And if you don’t know anything about their challenges or what their everyday lives look like, you’ll face a hard time creating content that resonates with them and addresses their needs.

That’s where audience research comes in. Conducting audience research is the key to unlocking valuable insights about your customers. Gathering these insights will help you build content that they actually want to read and find valuable.

Zeeshan Akhtar, Head of Marketing at Mailmodo, stated, “I can’t stress enough how important conducting audience research is. And I don’t say that lightly. You need to know everything about the people you’re selling to. Who are these folks? What are their pain points? Where do they hang out? The quality of audience research you do for your niche or industry will decide how well your brand and product marketing happens.

Tools like Sparktoro and BuzzSumo help with this process but don’t rely only on these. Talk to a few folks who are your ideal customer persona. Interview them with an open mind. The insights from these meetings will be priceless.”

This brings us to the question – how to conduct audience research. A few proven audience research strategies are:

Interview your already-existing customers.
Use an audience research tool like SparkToro or Facebook Audience Insights.
Gain insights into trending topics with tools like BuzzSumo or Answer the Public.
Explore Reddit, Quora, or relevant Slack/Discord communities.
Stalk your competitors’ socials – dive into their followers tab or comments sections of posts.

Conducting audience research will help you understand how your audience thinks. Also, as you do audience research, you’ll realize that there are different sets of potential customers with different pain points and challenges.

Let’s consider the same example we did above. If your company sells health supplements for men who are looking to build lean muscle and improve their athletic performance, then one set of customers may be fitness enthusiasts who want to enhance their performance at the gym. Whereas another set may be people struggling with obesity.

You need to divide your target audience into different categories. Marketers like to call these categories – “buyer personas.”

If your first set of customers is fitness enthusiasts who want to increase their performance at the gym, then here’s what their buyer persona would look like:

You can turn this into a visual format using tools like HubSpot’s free Make My Persona. Similarly, you can build different buyer personas for your business.

Tip – If you’re just getting started, you may have limited resources and budget. So rather than building dozens of buyer personas and targeting every single one of them, I’d recommend identifying your top two or three buyer personas and focusing your content marketing efforts only on them. Once you’ve achieved some good results and have more budget to allocate for your content marketing efforts, you can start targeting additional personas.

4. Conduct competitors’ research

I’m a big believer in the quote, “keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” Conducting competitors’ research can help you gain valuable insights like:

how well their blog is performing.
what kind of topics they’re covering.
which blog posts are helping them attract the most traffic.
what keywords and clusters they are targeting.
what their content marketing funnel looks like.
what their content distributing strategy looks like.
how they are promoting content.

Vitaliy Verbitskiy, the Head of Marketing at Videowise, highlights the importance of conducting competitors’ research. He states:

For instance, if you run a digital marketing agency in the US, then one of your core competitors is – Thrive Internet Marketing Agency.

Let’s learn more about their content marketing efforts. You can use a variety of tools to conduct competitors’ analysis.

First, I used Ahrefs to gain insights into their top-performing blog posts:

According to Ahrefs, they were attracting the most traffic to their service and location pages. Here’s their New York City SEO location page. Similarly, you can use other SEO tools like SEMRush or Moz.

You can also use these tools to analyze their:

Domain rating.
Monthly website traffic.
Backlinks.
Traffic value.
Organic keywords.
Paid ad campaigns.
Competitors.

The next thing I did was – track their performance on SimilarWeb – a platform that allows you to access behind-the-scenes analytics for almost every website online.

Here are the top countries they are attracting traffic from:

Also, here’s their audience demographics:

I also binge-read their blog to see what topics they’re covering and who they’re targeting. By conducting competitive analysis, you can get so much information that you can use to build your own content marketing engine. You can analyze your competitors’ marketing campaigns to see what worked for them and what didn’t, helping you put your money and efforts to good use.

Read this comprehensive guide by CXL that’ll teach you how to perform competitive analysis.

Once that’s done, it’s time to conduct a content audit, considering you have published content before. If not, you can skip the next step and move on to the one after that.

5. Audit your already-existing content – skip this step if you haven’t published content before.

After defining your content marketing goals and conducting extensive audience and competitors’ research, your first instinct may be to start creating new content immediately.

We get it – it’s not just you; it’s every single one of us. We want to start creating new content like there’s no tomorrow.

But before you go ahead and do that, it’s important to take a step back and analyze all content on your website. That’s what a content audit is all about.

Conducting a content audit can help you:

create a content inventory of your already-existing content – this way, you will know what topics to avoid in the future.
gain insights into the performance of your already-existing content.
identify gaps and opportunities for improvement.
discover what kind of content delivered outstanding results in the past – you can figure out the topics your audience is interested in the most.
identify the content pieces that need to be refreshed – Google loves refreshes.
prepare a list of content pieces that can be repurposed. If you have any eBooks or whitepapers, you can repurpose them into blog posts.

You may also want to make sure that the content pieces you published in the past match the style and tone you’re aiming for in the future.

To conduct a content audit, you can use SEMRush’s Content Audit tool – which allows you to audit content on your website based on your sitemap data. You can also analyze different sections of your domain. For example, if you just want to analyze your blog, you can choose the section as a subfolder called /blog or whatever specific URL structure you have for your blog.

Don’t have a sitemap? You can use WordPress sitemap generators like Yoast SEO, XML Sitemaps, XML Sitemap, and Google News. Afterwards, you can sort your content by different criteria like the stage of funnel, content format, content type, date of publication, etc.

Here’s an example shared by Search Engine Journal on one of their blog posts –

Once you have collected this information, you can move on to collecting and analyzing data for these pieces and interpreting it to make decisions like – whether we should keep, remove or update a specific piece. Here are two of my favorite guides that explain how to conduct a content audit:

The Step-by-Step Guide to Conducting a Content Audit by SEMRush
How to Conduct a Content Audit by Search Engine Journal

Next step – building your content marketing funnel.

6. Design your content marketing funnel.

Different customers have different needs and are in different stages of their buying journey. Some are in the awareness stage, actively seeking information – they are not looking to purchase anything. Whereas some are in the consideration stage and are evaluating different options or are confused about whether they should make a purchase or not. Others – they may be ready to make a purchase.

Let’s look at what different stages of a content marketing funnel look like for a pest control business:

Awareness stage (top of the funnel) – At this stage, your customers are looking for information on common pests as well as prevention methods.
Consideration stage (middle of the funnel) – At this stage, they are curious whether they should hire a pest control company or are evaluating different options.
Decision stage (bottom of the funnel) – At this stage, they are ready to hire a pest control agency.

Michal Leszczynski, Head of Content Marketing & Partnerships at GetResponse, shares the importance of building a content marketing funnel, “Not all your potential customers may be looking up high-intent keywords. Some may not even know that they are looking to purchase anything. They may be looking up keywords that are more focused on understanding their problem or finding solutions. You need to focus on these keywords, but at the same time, you need to make sure you’re bringing them further down the funnel using high commercial intent keywords.

For example – “Mailchimp vs. GetResponse” This query indicates that someone’s already aware of a problem and has even narrowed their search to two particular vendors. They’re ready to buy or at least try the solutions.

Keep in mind that you’ll want to have a variety of content on your website for multiple stages of the funnel. The topics that attract a lot of traffic or backlinks (e.g., statistics pages) may help you lift your BoFu content to the top of SERPs.”

Here’s a graphic of what a content marketing funnel looks like by Search Engine Journal:

You need to create content that helps you meet all your customers, no matter the stage they are in.

Monday.com, a project management software, has a dedicated content marketing team that has knocked this out of the park. They have an extensive content library to meet different customers at different stages of their journey. Let me share a few pieces they have created for different stages.

Here’s a piece they wrote for customers in the awareness stage:

Here’s one they did for people in the consideration stage:

They have a dedicated Success Stories section on their website for people in the Decision stage. Here’s a post:

Depending on your goals, industry, business model, and a variety of different factors, you need to identify relevant keywords that help you meet your customers across different stages.

7. Conduct keywords research

The next step is to prepare a list of keywords your target audience is looking up on Google or other search engines.

How can you identify the right keywords to drive SEO traffic? By conducting extensive keyword research.

A good strategy is to look at the keywords your competitors are targeting using SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush.

For instance, if I am an SEO specialist at a project management startup, I’d look up keywords Monday.com is targeting. I can easily get my hands on this data using Ahrefs:

You can use keywords from your competitors’ research as a starting point for further research. For example, I found out that ‘email template’ is one of the keywords Monday.com is targeting.

I looked up this keyword in the “Keywords Explorer” section to see other relevant keywords (related to this) that I can target. You can easily find ideas in Ahrefs’ “Keywords ideas” section.

It’s a great way to conduct keyword research. You can also use filters like keyword difficulty, volume, global volume, traffic value and many others to narrow down your search.

This approach is good, yet not the best for middle or bottom-of-funnel keywords.

To discover such keywords, you can use strategies like:

Talk with your customer support team about what challenges your existing customers face the most.
Talk with your sales team about what questions your potential customers have or what challenges they face.
Interview your already existing customers.
Explore Reddit, Quora, or relevant Slack or Discord communities to see what your target audience is talking about.

List down all these keywords in a spreadsheet like this:

Personally, I’d have separate sheets for different stages. However, this approach varies from company to company. Once you have prepared a list of keywords you want to target, the next step is to categorize them into buckets or clusters.

8. Categorize keywords into buckets or clusters

Ben Pines, the Director of Content at Wordtune, has achieved some serious results by categorizing keywords into buckets or clusters.

And it’s not just Ben. Ask just about any content marketer with an impressive track record, and they will tell you how important it is to follow this approach.

Afnan Rehan, a freelance content strategist with an impressive track record states, “Clustering keywords helps a ton with building and maintaining authority. If you’re posting randomly about a variety of topics, it’s difficult for both readers and search engines to see you as a credible source. Your content efforts will be diluted and, frankly, the content itself will be so shallow that no one would probably want to read beyond a few lines.

Building topic clusters instead gives you a lot more room to really educate your audience on all aspects of a topic. Once they see you as a credible source and you become the go-to for all information related to a certain topic, there’s no doubt you’ll be top of mind when they need a product or service.”

Just think about it – if you run a branding agency, then there’s no point in publishing just one article on your blog around brand strategy or writing about something completely different (maybe social media marketing). However, if you keep writing more articles about brand strategy, it’ll increase the chances of Google considering your website as an authoritative source on brand strategy. Some keywords you can target are:

brand strategy definition
brand marketing strategy
types of branding strategies
multi brand strategy

Also, building clusters saves you the trouble of writing different articles around similar topics. For example, you don’t want to create two different articles around “brand strategy definition” and “what is brand strategy.” This also saves you from losing out on valuable online market share, as you can rank for multiple similar keywords – both short-tail and long-tail.

But while doing so, make sure you’re not grouping keywords that have different search intent.

Here are a few interesting guides from leading brands showing how to build clusters:

Keyword Grouping: Why Do You Need it & How to Do it Right by Search Engine Journal
How to Do Keyword Clustering & How it Helps by SEMRush
The Advanced Guide to Keyword Clustering by Moz

9. Create a content calendar and build your content marketing team

Once you have built clusters, it’s time to prepare your content calendar. There’s no single out-of-the-box strategy that tells you how to build a results-driven content calendar. Instead, it depends on different factors like what your goals are, budget, hands on deck, etc.

My advice would be to look at your monthly or quarterly goals and, based on that, build your content calendar.

Natalie Marcotullio, Head of Growth and Operations at Navattic, plans her content calendar every month. She stated:

A big mistake many businesses make is – they hire a bunch of freelance writers at cheap rates and publish dozens of articles every month on their blog. However, I’d advise against that.

No matter how competitive your industry is, at the end of the day, Google or other search engines rank content that genuinely delivers value to their audience. So, what I’d recommend is – if you have a limited budget, start with four or five high-quality posts per month and then scale as you. But make sure these four or five posts are excellent.

You can use a project management tool like Asana, Notion, Monday.com to build your content calendar from scratch. And once you have planned the topics you’d like to cover, it’s time to start assigning them.

But wait, who should you assign it to?

10. Build your content marketing team

You need to have a team of writers you can assign to. If you don’t have the budget to hire full-time in-house writers, then it makes sense to collaborate with freelance writers who hold experience in your niche. Hiring freelance writers has several benefits like:

You don’t have to pay a full-time salary.
They work with you on per project basis.
You can bring in diverse perspectives and voices to your content.
You can scale or cut down your team anytime.

But managing freelance writers is no easy feat, considering you have to deal with other stuff like link building, guest posting, measuring your content marketing efforts, etc. To smartly manage freelance writers, you need to have a dedicated content marketing manager on your team – who will be the point of contact.

To hire talented freelance writers, you can join:

Superpath – a Slack community for content marketers.
Peak Freelance – a Slack community for writers.
ProBlogger Job Board
Reddit Hire a Writer community.

Also, here are a few resources:

How to Manage Freelance Writers by Wordable
How to Work with Freelance Writers: Rates, Relationship & Sourcing by Superpath

Different companies train their freelance writers differently. But I loved Diana’s approach, who is the head of content at VEED.IO. She assigns one freelance writer a specific area.

She also gives every single one of her writers access to VEED’s business plan – which can help them explore the platform’s features.

Once you start publishing content, the next step is to distribute it the smart way.

11. Focus on content distribution

I love distributing content. Every time you publish a new blog post or lead magnet, I recommend distributing it across different channels.

Why?

That’s because it helps you gain traction. It’s very likely your newly published blog post will not have any organic visitors. But you need to show Google or other search engines that your blog is worth reading and delivers outstanding value.

You can give search engines good signals by distributing your content across different channels. For example, I like publishing on LinkedIn every time a blog post I wrote goes live.

People in my network who take the time to head over to my blog post via LinkedIn are already engaged and more likely to spend time reading the post. Similarly, you can share your content on Twitter, Instagram, or wherever your audience hangs out.

Deborah, the Content Marketing Manager at Zapier, rolls out a list of newly published blog posts in her weekly newsletter:

Note – these are already-engaged people and are likely to spend more time reading your posts. And it’s important to note that ‘time on page’ is one of the ranking factors Google takes into consideration. So, when your already-existing audience spends a good amount of time reading your posts, it’ll give Google good signals and indicate that your post is engaging and valuable.

12. Measure your content marketing efforts.

Last but not least, I can’t stress enough how important measuring your content marketing efforts is. Doing this helps you understand how well your content is performing, whether it’s helping you achieve your goals or not, what kind of content your audience resonates with, and more.

If you skip this step, then you’ll never be able to understand what mistakes you are making and how you should refine your systems and processes. You’ll never be able to tweak your strategy for better results. Running a content marketing program without measuring your content is like driving with your blindfolds on.

Hence, you should make measuring your content marketing efforts a critical part of your plan. And based on the data and information you collect, you can fine-tune your strategy and make informed decisions.

To measure your content marketing efforts, you can use marketing dashboard tools like:

Google Analytics
Databox
DashThis
Google Looker Studio: Ryan Prior, Head of Marketing at Modash, uses a Looker Studio dashboard daily to check in on each subfolder performance, and separate brand vs non-brand data. He mentioned, “We have various groups of pages like /blog/, /features/, /find-influencers/ and others. Looker Studio makes it easy to create filtered charts that separate each and show month-over-month growth. We also use it to segment brand vs. non-brand traffic.”

Skipping this step can hinder your ability to identify mistakes you and your team are making. You’ll also struggle to identify what kind of content resonates with your audience and what doesn’t. Without this information, you’ll face a hard time tweaking your content marketing strategy and refining processes for the best possible results.

Conclusion

This 12-step guide provides you with a basic yet powerful framework that you can build your content marketing engine upon. Depending on your goals, industry, target audience, and various other factors, you need to adapt and customize these steps to fit your specific needs.

To help you further, I’ve put together some interesting reads:

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A No-BS Guide on How to Create a Results-Driven Content Marketing Plan

How to create a results-driven content marketing plan