Love the fresh start you get after the holidays, but dread coming back to the office knowing just how much pressure you’ll be under to make up for all that lost time? The CMI editorial team feels your pain, so we put together a little seasonal present to help you hit the ground running – without undoing the stress-busting benefits of taking some well-deserved time off.
We’ve collected some of our most popular strategy, planning, and measurement templates to help make your content marketing efforts easier to manage throughout the year. You can also access additional templates for creating, distributing and sharing content that we published earlier this week.
Strategy
While it’s always exciting to create content that gets a lot of views, “likes,” shares, or downloads, these actions don’t always have a direct impact on your business’ bottom line. If you want your content efforts to achieve the results your stakeholders expect, it’s essential that you develop and document a content marketing strategy.
In fact, in our 2017 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends research, we found that 61% of the most effective B2B marketers are those who have a documented strategy that their teams can reference on an ongoing basis.
Need to build your strategy from scratch or just ensure that your current efforts are properly aligned with your business goals? The following templates will guide you through the key steps in the process:
Core strategy
While there are no one-size-fits-all processes for developing a content marketing strategy, three core components should frame all of your content efforts: your business goals, your target audience, and the needs of that audience. This Mad Libs®-style template created by Meghan Casey is a fun way to fill in the most relevant details.
Get the template: Keep Your Content On-Strategy With This Single Statement [Templates]
Mission statements
A content marketing mission outlines your company’s reason for creating content and the priorities and perspectives to uphold in pursuit of that mission. Use the worksheet to hone the unique content marketing value your business will provide.
This template is part of our e-book: Launch Your Own Content Marketing Program: Why, Who, & How
Audience personas
You also need a template for documenting your personas. Fill in the blanks with the key information you’ve gathered or create a similar form with the information that’s most useful for your business.
This template is part of our e-book: Launch Your Own Content Marketing Program: Why, Who, & How
Planning
Once you know what you want to accomplish, you need to figure out how to get it done. Your plan is one of the five fundamental elements of content marketing and, as such, it should cover everything that happens within your team to enable remarkable content – i.e., all the details that are invisible to your audience but set the stage for content they’ll love.
Like your strategy, content marketing plans should be customized to the needs of your organization. But, on the whole, content planning typically focuses on three key areas: your team workflow, your editorial processes and guidelines, and your systems.
Editorial guidelines
At a minimum, your editorial planning process should outline the defining characteristics of your brand identity (as it relates to the content you will publish), the preferred voice and style of your content, and the editorial standards governing your content efforts.
Use the publishing guidelines cheat sheet below to determine and document this information.
This template is part of our e-book: Launch Your Own Content Marketing Program: Why, Who, & How
Content workflows
A content workflow outlines the individual tasks involved in producing a piece of content along with the routing process to ensure that each asset moves through all stages of production as smoothly as possible. While you will likely need to adjust your workflow to account for all the various content formats you create, the template shared by Robert Mills can serve as a jumping-off point.
Content request form
Even the most efficient teams can’t always accommodate every request for content, especially in large enterprises. Use a content request form, like this one shared by Gina Balarin, to help your content team prioritize projects,…
COMMENTS