Master the Marketing Planning Process: A Step-by-Step Guide

Marketing planning process

Marketing planners play a critical role in developing content that ranks and drives visibility for their business, by understanding which keywords people search for.

Marketing planning plays an essential part in any organization’s success.

An effective paid and organic search strategy begins with careful keyword planning based on data.

Gather Keyword Ideas

Content marketing relies heavily on keywords for its success, from search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to content development strategies.

Potential customers use search engines like Google or Bing to locate solutions to their problems, so conducting an in-depth keyword study before devising any content strategies is critical to its success.

To identify relevant keywords for your website, start by going through all pages and adding them to a spreadsheet.

From here, analyze these keywords in terms of search volume and difficulty; these will have the highest chances of ranking on the first page and driving consistent traffic to your site.

After narrowing your list, consider search intent. Search intent is defined as why people search for specific keywords – for instance “best CRM” indicates someone looking to purchase software and compare options and prices.

Keyword Planner and Semrush provide excellent ways to generate keyword ideas by entering competitors’ URLs into Keyword Planner or analyzing what their PPC ads bid on using Semrush, providing insight into which words people are searching for when looking up competition – giving you a solid basis of keywords with which you can build a winning content strategy that drives more targeted visibility.

Prioritize Keywords

As a marketer, you must know what consumers are searching for if you want to create an effective keyword strategy.

For instance, a plumbing company could identify which search terms their target market uses such as “how to fix a toilet,” when to call a plumber, and “plumber near me”.

Marketers must then review their gathered keywords and remove any that don’t align with their desired tone, audience or business model.

A keyword analysis tool can also be utilized to assess competition levels as well as monthly search volume (MSV).

Further, it’s vital that you consider what kind of SERP features are appearing for each keyword search query since Google now displays customized results depending on the intent of a search query – for example, they might display local shopping results based on product availability and pricing in nearby stores.

An effective keyword plan must also include secondary keywords, which are closely related terms that provide additional search visibility and allow your website to rank for more pertinent queries.

AI tools like Scripted are great ways of discovering these secondary terms; simply input some topic ideas, and it will generate additional related topics for consideration.

Create a Content Strategy

Content marketing helps businesses develop their brand voice and influence customer perception of them.

The process includes deciding on what types of content will be published across which platforms and when, as well as who the target audience for this information is.

Deliberating an audience-specific content plan makes creating topic ideas much simpler while streamlining creation; content strategies also identify keywords that best support business goals.

Content strategy allows businesses to increase organic traffic by creating relevant and high-quality content tailored to users’ search queries.

A well-planned content strategy is key to any online marketing initiative’s success, making a well-defined content plan essential to its success.

Content strategies must address the goals of the company, such as building credibility, generating leads or driving sales.

Furthermore, they should address the audience you’re targeting – be that stay-at-home moms or B2B clients – by meeting their needs, concerns, and frustrations directly and providing solutions.

At this stage, it can be useful to analyze the website content of competitors to identify what types of content are performing well and gain insights into their strategies.

It would also be advisable to check which terms potential customers are searching frequently to quickly optimize for SEO purposes.