Everything about online marketing needs content. You need content for social media posts, blog posts, guest articles, white papers, eBooks, and more. Use many types of content to help get the word out about your products and services, while educating your audience about the issues in your industry. This will help you develop yourself as an authority and your business solutions as answers to your audience’s needs.

The best way to accomplish this is to develop a content marketing plan. You can create a content marketing plan for any type of business quickly and easily.

* Set Goals for the Future – What do you want to accomplish with each piece of content that you want to create? First write down some ideas, such as increase traffic by 50 percent within 6 weeks, increase sales by 60 percent within 4 weeks, or get more targeted newsletter subscribers within a specific period of time. Be specific about your goals in terms of the exact results you want to achieve and how you’ll achieve them.

* Assess Where You Are Today – Everyone has to start where they are today. How many subscribers do you have now? How many people have purchased your product or service to date? What type of content do you have and what types of results is it producing right now? Can you pinpoint exactly which pieces of content are getting the type of results you want? Perhaps none of your current content is getting any results. Note that, so that you know where to begin.

* Know your Target Customer – Take a closer look at who you want your exact customer to be. Create a persona describing that perfect customer so that when you create any marketing content you know who you’re creating it for. You may find you have several subsets of audience personas for the same product; that’s okay, but looking at them will help you develop even better content.

* Understand Your Sales Funnel and Your Audience’s Buying Cycle – You have your product / sales funnel, plus your consumers’ buying cycle to consider. Content should be created for each stage of the funnel and the cycle, because each type of content has a different purpose.

* Know the Purpose of Each Piece of Content – When you know the purpose of each piece of content you create, you’ll be able to direct it to the right person, at the right time, and put it in the right place. These actions will ensure that you receive the results you’re looking for.

* Create an Editorial Calendar – Once you have an idea of what type of content you want to create, get out a calendar and start writing in what needs to be written or created. For example, if you’re promoting a video eCourse, you may need to produce some shorter videos along with articles to give your audience the information they need to choose your course.

* Have the Content Developed – Once you have a calendar, you can just go day by day and create the content you need. Or you can send it to someone else to do it for you such as a contractor. If you want to hire a contractor, you’ll need to create content in advance to allow for the turnaround time of each contractor that you hire.

* Promote Your Content – Don’t just post the content and leave it at that. Instead, once the content has been published tell everyone about it. Promote it to your list; promote it to your social media followers. You may want to try using Twitter Ads and Promoted Posts on Facebook. Also ensure that you set up SEO on your site using a good plugin like SEO Yoast.

* Measure the Results – Using the analytics systems that you have already in Google Analytics, your email marketing software, and any other software that you use for your business, test and measure whether what you’re doing is working or not.

* Optimize and Adjust – When you look at the results of your work, take a look at what you can improve upon and adjust. Try changing one small thing, or doing more of something that is working really good to improve your content marketing plan.

* Rinse and Repeat – Like with most things that work, you should do it again. Keep the process moving forward month after month, year after year, based on analytics and the products and services that you want to promote.

Creating and following a content marketing plan will improve your business exponentially. You’ll be able to stay ahead of everything based on your products and services, including planned launches and so forth. It’s important to be proactive to ensure that the results that you want are obtained.