7 Steps to Your Motorcycle Content Strategy Plan

7 Steps to Your Motorcycle Content Strategy Plan

There are over 31 million bloggers in the United States. Each one regularly produces blog posts with content for consumption. That’s a lot of noise that you’ll need to break through with your motorcycle content. Blindly forging ahead with your content creation is a quick way to spin your wheels, burn rubber, and go nowhere. What you need is a motorcycle content strategy.

These seven steps will walk you through the process of creating a content strategy. With a strategy in place, you’ll figure out what works and what doesn’t. You’ll also know who you’re talking to and what type of content you should create. Then finally, how to use data analysis to determine the success of your efforts.

1. Audit Your Content

Creating content without understanding what your audience of motorcyclists want means you’re just adding to the noise that other marketers, motorcycle dealers, and motorcycle riders are creating. Before you can make a plan moving forward, you need to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Audit your past content to determine what was successful and what flopped.

Look at several metrics when analyzing your content. Look at what attracts the most attention. Then look for the content that delivers the best results to get you closer to your goal. Finally, look for areas where you can improve.

2. Determine Your Goals

Your next step is to determine your goals. These are the results that you hope to achieve from your hard work. Keep your goals simple and clear statements. It helps to start with goals that are related to your overall vision for your motorcycle business.

Move on to short and long-term goals. Prioritize long-term strategic goals over your specific operational goals. You may be familiar with the traditional goal-setting method of SMART. While this method works, it isn’t the best guide to follow in today’s technology-driven world. Instead, consider trying a new method for goal setting called CLEAR.

3. Choose Your Audience

Who are you trying to attract with your content? For most businesses, it’s new customers or clients. It’s probably no different with your motorcycle industry business. Perhaps you’re looking to attract people looking to buy a new motorcycle. Or maybe you want to attract bikers looking for aftermarket parts. Then there are those who need their motorcycle repaired.

To find your ideal audience demographic, you need to understand their problems, concerns, lifestyle, and needs. Make audience personas that can help you create content that speaks to all types of motorcycling enthusiasts. For a successful content marketing campaign, you should target more than just buyers.

Harley Davidson does this well. The company focuses a portion of its content on current and future owners who are interested in new bikes. Then it focuses another portion of its content on current motorcycle owners who want to customize their bike. Then there’s a third demographic the motorcycle dealerships focus on. These are the people who are interested in the other items. This a large part of Harley’s ecommerce business; selling clothing, gear, and household items. This is an area where other brands like Honda and Suzuki fall short.

4. Create Your Editorial Plan

By now, you know what works, what doesn’t, and who you want to talk to. It’s time to create your new editorial plan. This ensures you allocate your resources effectively and accurately plan your new content production timeline.

Prioritize

Identify your most critical tasks and put them at the top of your priority list. This prevents tasks from falling through the cracks. It also can boost your results by ensuring the most effective and important tasks always get done.

Choose Relevant Topics

You need to choose topics that will appeal to your four audience groups. Some will be more interested in generalized information. Others will want specifics, such as spec articles. Then some want how-to articles and guides on products. Your motorcycle content strategy will want to speak to all of these.

Create a calendar of your planned topics. This will help you create content with planned topics that speak to each audience group. It can help to create an editorial calendar where you fill in your planned content topics.

5. Plan Your Content Production

Before you create each piece, think about why you’re creating it and who it’s meant for. Then write that piece to speak directly to your targeted audience. Diversify the type of content you create. When combined, your content should create a better customer experience.

6. Distribute Your Content

It isn’t enough to create the content. You need to promote and distribute it. Otherwise, it’s like shouting in an empty room, you’re loud, but there’s no one to hear you. There are three ways you can promote your content: earned media, owned media, and paid media.

Owned media are outlets that you have complete control over because they’re yours. This would be your blog, email marketing, and social media platforms. You’ll get organic traffic from this type of promotion.

Earned media is similar to owned media because they are the same type of platforms. The difference is that other people own them, so you need to earn your promotion. You’ll do this by getting shares, mentions, reviews, and features in external publications. This is more easily done through social media marketing where all it takes is a simple click on share.

The final option is paid media. As the name implies, it’ll cost you money. You’ll gain traffic from search engine ads, display ads, social media ads, and appearances in paid publications. You can also use influencer marketing to have a broader reach to a targeted audience.

7. Analyze Your Content Performance

After you have followed your new content plan for several weeks or even months, you’ll want to analyze its performance. There’s no specific time frame that I can give you because you’ll need to wait long enough to have a decent-sized data pool. If you have a high-traffic website, you can get this data relatively quickly. Websites with very little traffic will have to wait longer. This will ensure you’re on the right track and allow for adjustment. There are four metrics that you can look at to judge the performance of your content.

Develop Your Motorcycle Content Strategy

When you follow these seven steps in your digital marketing strategy, you’ll be well on your way to having a solid and successful motorcycle content strategy. You’ll have content that speaks directly to your target audience of motorcycle enthusiasts and help guide potential customers through the buying process from being an interested reader to being a purchaser.

Once you have your content plan in place, I can help you create the content. As a rider and enthusiast myself, I can speak directly to your audience in a relatable way. This will engage your audience more and entice them to return.

Contact me today and let’s work together to improve your motorcycle business.