Your content marketing plan should ensure that every piece of content you publish achieves a goal. You want to improve the customer experience by educating and informing them. You also want to use the content to build trust and build credibility.

Well-planned content can do all of that and more if you first create a solid content marketing plan. These are the eight steps to follow.

Step one: audit your current content

It is important to study the content you have now and the effect it is having on your results. In this case, your bottom line consists of conversions, such as list registrations, as well as sales or whatever calls to action you’ve included.

Step two: research your audience

Even if you’ve done some research already, you need to keep doing your audience research. The audience may have the same demographics today as they did yesterday, but due to technology and education, their views sometimes change.

Step three: understand your purpose

In this case, you want to understand your overall purpose, and then how each piece of content you create serves that purpose. Start with some of the content you already have. What was your thought process when you created it and how did it fit in with your goals?

Step Four: Develop an Editorial Calendar

A comprehensive editorial calendar includes product development, blog content, sales pages, social media content, and more. Include every last bit of content you will need for each product or service you want to promote on each site you want to put it on. You can create a master editorial calendar and then break it down into different categories to make it less overwhelming.

Step five: develop the content

Get down to business developing the products and content. Well-developed content will educate, inform, engage, and inspire action. Make sure you can match every piece of content you create, in whatever form, with a reason for existing. Don’t just create text content. You also want to create content in other formats such as pictorial, voice, and video. The more forms of content you can create, the better for your audience.

Step six: promote your content

Now you need to promote every last content you publish. Promote through social media and other avenues to make sure everything gets the attention you want. The attention each content receives will mean more visitors, more newsletter subscriptions, and more sales.

Step seven: measure the results

It is important to always measure the results of everything you do. The reason is that you can change things on the fly. That’s the great thing about online content marketing – the ability to improve on the fly. If something doesn’t work, don’t assume it’s the product or the content. Change little things about the design and the use of words, and test, test, test.

Step eight: refine and refine

As you find things that work for you and your audience, your job will get easier and easier. You will discover what works for your audience and you can improve at creating and promoting content on the fly.