Inbound Marketing For Australian SMBs

4 Content Marketing Templates To Plan 90 Days of Marketing

How was your first quarter of 2012? Did you achieve your lead, customer and revenue goals? Did you get through all your tasks?

Staying on top of your inbound marketing; (content, social media, blogging) is key to building marketing momentum and a sustainable business. But often, with lack of time and resources, it's difficult to stay on track. I know, I'm guilty of it myself.

What works for me is if I plan out my content ideas and put it in a calendar, every 90 days, or quarter. As we have just started the 2nd quarter I thought this would be the perfect time to share how I plan out my content and brainstorm ideas.

The Content Marketing 90 Day Planner includes four templates for you to use as a starting point or for inspiration - whatever works.

7 Steps To Planning Your Content for 90 days

1. Firstly set aside 4 hours.
2. Next, spend 30 minutes reviewing past results - what keywords, blog topics, social media posts were successful.
3. Know your buyer personas - what's important to them, what would they be interested in reading.
4. Then, write down your goals for the next 90 days. What are your monthly revenue targets? How many customers does that equate to? How many leads will you need? And finally how can you expand your reach to generate these leads? Use the first tab in the Content Marketing Planner, "Goals-Progress" for this.
5. To plan out your quarterly or monthly lead generation offers (ebook, guide, webinar etc), blogging and email marketing use the 2nd tab in the Content Marketing Planner, "90 Day Planner".
6. The 3rd tab in the Content Marketing Planner, "Editorial Calendar" is where you can brainstorm blog topics (Ive included some suggestions to help you get started), and plan out all your content marketing.
7. And finally, the 4th tab in the Content Marketing Planner, "Social Media Plan", is a complete calendar for the next 90 days. Across the top I have suggestions for social media posts - you can change this to whatever you like. Basically the way it works, is you put the themes across the top use  each theme once a week (blog of course should be daily). This takes the most time to plan out but if you refer to points 2 and 3 above this will help. And all you really need to do is come up with 13 posts for each theme. At the end you'll have your social media posts all planned for next 90 days. (Note: because of the way Facebook's EdgeRank algorithm works I would suggest manually posting these each day. But if you need to post date use either; Hootsuite or Hubspot's Social Media Publishing App.)

So there you have it 7 steps and 4 great content marketing templates to help you plan out your next 90 days of content marketing. What did you think? Did you find this helpful? Do you have something to add? Please let me know in the comments section below.

If you know someone who would benefit from these templates, then please share by linking back to this blog article. Thank you.

Download the Content Marketing Templates and Calendar here