Content marketing plays a significant role in the success of marketing your business. In order for content marketing campaigns to success you need to plan your content ahead of time. With having a quick content creation process and improving content quality, you can engage your audience in new ways and maximize your marketing budget.

Quarterly Content Plan

By defining your content campaign metrics you'll be able to ensure that every single piece of content and every campaign is data-driven which will ultimately raise the chances of success, but how? Your metrics should be tied to the content foals you set for the quarter these can include:<ul><li>Page views</li><li>Time on-page</li><li>Bounde rate</li><li>Social media shares and engagement</li><li>SEO performance</li><li>Newsletter signups and engagement</li></ul>

Define Content Campaign Metrics

Before determining what kind of content you'll publish you must have set goals in mind for your content every quarter. These could be:<ul><li>brand awareness</li><li>customer acquisition</li><li>sales</li><li>customer retention</li><li>engagement levels</li></ul>Every content marketing campaign you run must be designed to accomplish specific goals that align with your future business plans.

Set Content Goals

A content workflow is a series of tasks that you must perform to ensure that each piece of content is perfectly crafted and created on time. A well-designed content production workflow ensures that content creation runs smoothly and efficiently so ask yourself the following:<ul><li>Did your content production run smoothly?</li><li>What parts of the workflow you feel needs improvement?</li></ul>

Review Content Production Workflow 

In order to create a quarterly content plan you should review your previous quarter's performance metrics for your social media, mailing list, and blog pages. But how?<ul><li>Check everything from traffic on your pages on your pages to direct social media engagement to click-throughs to your website.</li><li>Analyze your content so that you can better understand the kind of content your audience is looking for.</li><li>Have a spreadsheet solely for keeping track of your content's performance eaach quarter.</li></ul>

Review Last Quarter's Content Metrics

Content marketing has two critical stages:<ul><li>content production; and</li><li>content promotion</li></ul>In order to create an effective content promotion plan you can do the following:<ul><li>Understand the platforms where your audience frequents</li><li>Outline the type of campaigns you'll run to track the performance of your campaign</li><li>Define your content promotion KPIs; and</li><li>Create a content promotion calendar</li></ul>

Create a Content Promotional Plan

It's vital to conduct research to ensure that you're targeting the right audience. Some things that you should note down while conducting audience research and building personas that represent your ideal customer are:<ul><li>their demographics</li><li>psychographics; and</li><li>firmographics</li></ul>By doing so you will better understand your audience and help you create personalized experiences for them.

Evaluate Your Content's Target Audience

Creating a quarterly content plan will increase your output content ten times more by knowing what type of content to create, these can include:<ul><li>social media</li><li>webinars</li><li>how-to guides</li><li>blog posts</li><li>infographics</li><li>videos</li><li>podcasts</li><li>email newsletters and campaigns</li><li>user generated content</li><li>white papers</li></ul>

Decide What Types of Content to Create

You should set aside the time to work out how much you're prepared to spend on the following:<ul><li>content strategy</li><li>content creation</li><li>content promotion</li></ul>But how much should you budget for content marketing? It really depends on several factors: the type of content you plan on creating, the volume of publishing, and the size of your business. However, marketing budgets in general should be between 7-12% of your total revenue.