A long-term plan is a roadmap for your content. By being consistent with your plan, you are giving yourself the best chance at achieving ROI from your content efforts.
The best approach to creating a long-term content plan are the following 3 steps:
By setting marketing goals, you are giving yourself long-terms vision and short-term motivation. For example, if you want 15 new customers every quarter and you know you need 50 leads to turn that out, your goal is to have 1,000 website visits. Now consider the content required to attract those website visits. Keep your goals SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Timely.
Auditing your organizations initiatives is broken in to 2 tasks; a content audit and an event based audit. A content audit is identifying existing marketing assets that can be found in your shared drive, CRM, sales tools, ultimately saving time by utilizing existing content that's at your disposal. Once you've collected the content, you can organize them in to categories:
This list will help identify gaps and opportunities for content creation for your long-term plan.
An even based audit is taking in to consideration any events, priorities or upcoming projects. This exercise will give insight to your buyers journey connecting that back to your initiatives through your inbound marketing.
Remember that you're creating content that's meant to attract and pull your buyer personas through every stage of the buyers journey. With a full content compass or calendar, you can remain reactive and agile with your content that will align with your organizations goals and initiatives.