Tips to Design Great Local Content Marketing Plans That Work

Content has always been integral to digital success because it powers many marketing plans, from email marketing to pay-per-click (PPC). The rising focus, however, calls for a shift to local content and marketing. If you do not know where to start, no worries.

Below are a few reliable and easy-to-follow Chicago content marketing agency tips on how to make your own marketing plan, including:

• Knowing how local content marketing works.
• Five tips to help you design your own plan.

There is a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

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How Local Content Marketing Helps Your Chicago Business

If your business is online, it produces content. Whether or not that content creates any value for your business depends on how you make and use it. This is the vital role that content marketing plays. It is concerned with creating materials that you can use to attract customers, such as:

1. Posting infographics on Twitter about something interesting or something you know well.

2. Publishing high-quality materials for a blog or website that are extremely valuable to customers.

3. Creating videos to support blog posts and broaden your reach through YouTube.

Adding "local" to content marketing just means you specialize in creating and publishing materials that appeal to a target area in your community. Hiring a local content marketing agency is great because they can research topics and create materials tailored to your target market.

Local content marketing aims to grant your brand additional exposure through channels such as backlinks, social media, podcasts, videos, and paid ads. A good local content marketing plan systematically creates high-quality materials.

For example, follow the customer’s journey and cover all the stages through your content so that it appeals to a wider audience. That also allows you to slowly win customers’ confidence rather than repeatedly giving them posts from the same blogs, videos, or podcast clips.

5 Tips for Designing a Local Content Marketing Plan That Works

A local content marketing plan takes a lot of careful thought and tough decisions, even for experts. Below are five tips covering the steps involved in this process, as suggested by Chicago content marketing agency experts.

     1. Set Explicit Goals for Your Campaign

Research and writing are not the only steps necessary to create a local content marketing plan. Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals starts the process. If you are not sure of what you want to achieve with a local marketing plan, consider these six goals:

• Increase brand awareness through greater visibility. A good local content marketing plan focuses on simultaneously making interesting, informative, and shareable materials.
• Generate leads by publishing content that meets the needs and interests of your target audience. This is usually done by posting lead magnets on your landing pages.
• Drive website traffic. You can attract new visitors to your website through eye-catching content. Make materials to keep people engaged so that they stay on your website longer.
• Position yourself as a thought leader. By posting content that showcases your expertise, you become a trusted authority in your industry and build credibility with your audience.
• Encourage constant, meaningful user engagement. People respond well to content that intrigues them. Invite people to share their thoughts and reply to interact with them.
• Improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO). Frequent posts invite search engines to repeatedly crawl and index your website, leading to a better ranking over time.

     2. Look Into What Your Audience Wants

Content is not a one-size-fits-all solution to your local marketing needs. To illustrate, a semantic SEO plan boosts content strategy by personalizing your approach. In particular, improve the topics your target market finds most interesting by improving topical depth in the following ways:

• Gather content ideas using artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT and Hebbia.
• Put yourself in a customer’s position and brainstorm some search terms you would use.
• Consider how you link content to make searches quicker and more convenient for searchers.

As you can see from the points made above, coverage is not the only concern in a local content marketing plan. Writing for a specific target market also means matching your content with how they conduct their searches. That means adjusting your writing style, such as using the active voice, to make it more relevant.

     3. Check the Content You Already Have

Once you have a better sense of what you should do, the next step is to audit your current body of content. Borrowing from the previous point, performing an audit is important because you can see how well you address people’s search needs. You can also assess your content’s cohesion.

Here is a summary of elementary points you should aim to cover when auditing website content:

1. Check the topics you have already covered versus those you have not yet addressed.

2. Review existing internal links. Note the ones to which you should link.

3. Identify which content must be updated or scrapped from your website or social media.

4. Gather and categorize existing materials, then group them into smaller topic clusters.

5. Align your current materials with your local content marketing plan for better cohesion.

     4. Make a Timeline and Content Strategy

At this point, you have almost all of the necessary pieces for a local content marketing plan. The one missing piece is a solid strategy for your marketing plan. This starts with setting goals and conducting market research. 

However, developing a content strategy involves steps that affect your marketing plan, such as:

• Choosing the right content management system (CMS). A good CMS allows you to track your content’s analytics to better manage your campaign’s progress. Popular CMSs today include WordPress, Drupal, and Wix.
• Choosing what type of content works best for your brand and local marketing plan. The “best” type differs depending on where and how your target market searches. You must also consider what you learned from your research.

     5. Choose the Best Marketing Channels

A "marketing channel" is any platform where you publish content to achieve your goals. Each offers plenty of advantages and disadvantages that impact how well your plan can perform. Some of these — backlinks, social media, and videos — were previously mentioned.

Today, however, every Chicago content marketing agency expert recommends diversifying your choice of channels, if not opting for omnichannel marketing altogether. This is a difficult choice because it is almost impossible to pinpoint where your target market is at any given time.

By combining different marketing channels, you increase your visibility to new customers while allowing yourself to cover as many bases as possible. Managing different channels is challenging, but using tools or working with a Chicago content marketing agency makes it easier.

Summing Up

Designing a local marketing plan takes a lot of hard work, especially when you need a great content strategy to make your plan work. If you take it slowly and steadily while following the tips outlined above, you can surely make one that works for your business.

Need help creating an effective local marketing plan? Contact Digital Authority Partners (DAP) to learn how we can help.