Your content marketing plan should ensure that every piece of content you put out accomplishes a goal. You want to improve customer experiences by educating and informing them. You also want to use content to establish trust and build credibility.

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

Step One: Audit Your Current Content

It’s important to study the content you have now and what effect it is having on your bottom line. In this case your bottom line consists of conversions such as list sign-ups, as well as sales, or any call to action that you included.

Step Two: Research Your Audience

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

Step Three: Understand Your Purpose

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

Step Four: Develop an Editorial Calendar

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

Step Five: Develop the Content

Get to work developing the products and content. Content that is well developed will educate, inform, engage, and inspire action. Ensure that you can match every bit of content that you create, in any form, to a reason for existing. Don’t only 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 piece of content that you put out there. Promote via social media and other avenues, to ensure that everything gets the attention you want it to. The attention that each piece of content gets will mean more visitors, more newsletter sign-ups, and more sales.

Step Seven: Measure the Results

It’s important to always measure the results of everything you do. The reason is that you can change things on the fly. That’s what’s so great about online content marketing – the ability to improve as you go. If something isn’t working, don’t assume it’s the product or the content. Change small things about layout and word usage, and test, test, test.

Step Eight: Refine and Perfect

As you find things that work for you and your audience, your job will become easier and easier. You’ll figure out what works for your audience and you’ll be able to get better at content creation and promotion as you go.