The 30-60-90 Day Content Strategy and Marketing Plan
Your first 90 days as a content strategist or marketer in a new company
If you’ve recently joined a new company as a content strategist, marketer or manager, and you’ve been asked to create a 30/60/90 days plan, this article is for you.
I’ll keep it fluff-free, as there’s a lot to cover.
The 30/60/90 days content marketing plan
I always start with the big picture and I use frameworks and processes as much as possible, to make it easier to scale up the activities later on.
In big lines, here’s what you’ll do in your first 90 days:
The exact timeline may vary depending on what’s already available, but in general, you’ll go through these phases:
Image: 30-60-90plan
Weeks 1–2: Orientation
You’ll get familiar with the environment, your colleagues, product or services, customers, market and competitors.
You’ll hear about your company’s mission, positioning and message, about their general goals and KPIs, and you’ll briefly look at the existing processes and tools.
Note: This Brand, Marketing and Content Strategy Toolkit will help you align your strategy and make sure you tell a coherent story. See a preview below.
Image: Brand, Marketing and Content Strategy Template
Weeks 3–5/6: Analysis
You’ll dive deeper into the areas that are related to content strategy and marketing, in order to get a good understanding of stakeholders and dependencies.
At the end of this phase, you’ll have a clear understanding of your baseline measurement and the areas that will require more effort and resources.
In big lines, this phase will cover the:
SEO and social media audit
Audit of CRM data - not the cleanup, this will come later
Product usage data - to understand what your customers are doing
Interviews with sales reps and (key) account managers
Interviews with the customer support team
The ideal customer profile or persona (depending on the strategy that you plan to use, ABM vs. inbound or a combination of these)
Customer journeys
Competitor analysis - can be focused on content only, or overall analysis, depending on your scope
Weeks 6/7 - 9: Making decisions
The next 3–4 weeks will be dedicated to creating the actual strategy and deciding what areas to focus on. In big lines, you’ll develop:
Target market and segments
Message design (creative strategy)
Tactics and channels
Content needs
Budget
Measurement plan
POC proposal — if you want to do some test campaigns to see what works and what doesn’t
Weeks 10–12: Action
The last 3 weeks of your 90-day plan will be dedicated to implementing the strategy. You’ll therefore focus on:
Developing the content for the POC
Implementing the POC
Analyzing the results
Deciding how to scale up
Now let’s dive deeper into some of these areas and see not just what you should do, but how to do it.
How to’s per focus area
Product
This assumes you’re working for a SaaS company, but if you’re in a different niche, simply replace Product with Services or whatever applies to your situation.
You’ll want to get to know:
Features,
Product tour / demo,
Client requests,
USPs and differentiators,
Positioning,
Roadmap,
Bugs
From a content perspective, you’ll want to check how the USPs and differentiators are reflected into your website content and sales collateral. In which materials or content types, who uses these materials and in which situation.
Customers
You’ll want to understand:
Current accounts,
Acquisition channels
Who closed them, how
How were they onboarded,
What objections they had,
What won them
What content & sales collateral were used
Market & competitors
Here, the most important thing is to understand how your customers see you as opposed to how you perceive your company.
So you’ll focus on:
Positioning,
Differentiators,
Strengths and weaknesses,
Feature overview,
Why they win, why we win,
Industries they target
Goals & KPIs
Business & marketing goals,
Content marketing KPIs & targets (organic traffic; conversions — subscriptions, downloads, demos, webinars, deals, revenue; CR, CAC, retention rate, CLV, AOV per segment)
Tools
CMS,
CRM / ABM,
Customer support,
Marketing automation / e-mail,
SM sharing,
Analytics & reporting
Project management,
Team collaboration & feedback
Processes
You’ll want to understand how your teams work, so you’ll look into the processes within the:
Marketing team,
Sales team,
Dev team,
Customer support team,
Content lifecycle processes, including SEO and social media
So here's the summary of week 1 and 2:
Image: week12
Content audit, SEO and SM audit
The content audit process is described in detail here:
How to Do a Content Audit and Extract Actionable Insights
For the SEO & social media audit, you’ll want to look at:
Technical & on-page SEO
Search console metrics for inbound content — are we attracting the right traffic?
Engagement metrics for social — which content types are engaging which accounts?
Which generate comments from accounts in tier 1 or 2? What gets more shares?
What gets more backlinks? Who links back to us? To which content pieces and types?
Can we reproduce those backlinks and expand them to other use cases, industries, geographies?
I’ll detail this topic in a separate article, as it’s a lot to cover.
CRM data
Is our CRM data up to date and clean? Are the contacts connected to account information?
Do we have enough info on the target accounts (must wins)?
What data are we collecting from inbound leads? Via which tools and channels?
Are we enriching this data manually? If yes, who and when does that?
How is data shared further from the CRM to other tools?
Are we powering marketing automation flows? Do we use it for paid ads?
Product usage data
Are we tracking the right things? If not, implement through GTM.
Based on available data, which features & use-cases should we prioritize for content marketing?
What do the best accounts use more frequently and others don’t? Patterns, cadences.
Do we need to add product or conversational bumpers?
Sales reps, (K)AM & CS interviews
Current accounts and acquisition channels
Particularities per account
Clusters — by industry, company type and size, geography, use cases, challenges (pain points). Are these addressed in dedicated LPs? If not, why?
Why they chose us over competitors
How they were onboarded, what objections they had, what won them.
FAQs — are these addressed on our website? If not, why?
ICP & Decision-making units
Gain deep understanding of our current customers. What profiles, industries, company sizes they are
What features they use
How often they contact us and for what issues
How they found us and why they chose us
Did they switch from a competitor? If yes, which one?
What are we helping them with?
What does that mean for them in terms of benefits? Does it provide functional, emotional or social benefits? What do our ideal customers value more and why?
How is this reflected in our content?
Customer journeys
What does the full journey look like for a 1:1 account vs a clustered one, vs an inbound one?
What are the touchpoints?
Where is content involved and how do they consume it?
What content types, with what performance?
What’s missing from the journeys, where are the higher drop-off rates, what are the bottlenecks?
What can we fix to get quick wins?
Competitor analysis
Content — channels, types, frequency
Clients featured in case studies/testimonials
Social presence, emails, events.
Where are they featured, who talks about them, who rewards them with prizes? What do reviewers say about them?
How do the analyst reports rate them compared to us
Target accounts
This example is for a B2B SaaS company that targets mid-sized and large companies, so the overarching strategy is a mix of ABM and inbound.
Set up tooling for ABM marketing
Identify & narrow down 1:1 strategic accounts
Identify and cluster tier 2 accounts
Define personas for inbound accounts
Tools: Statista
Strategy & roadmap
I described the process of developing a content strategy in previous articles. You can see an example here.
Building a Scalable Content Strategy: A 5-Step Framework
Tactics, channels, sequences per tier
How are we reaching these accounts?
What tactics are we using?
In which channels do we test and what?
What’s the sequence of events?
POC proposal
Objectives,
Tooling,
Budget,
Success metrics & hypotheses,
Target accounts,
Action plan — channels, sequences, content types, timeline
Tools:
Predictive: DemandBase
Intent: G2 Buyer intent data
Personalization: DemandBase
You can see below an example of strategic decisions that you'll have to make for one of the target accounts tiers, the clustered one (industry focus).
Image: Sample 30-60-90 plan content marketing
POC implementation
Content development, optimization and reuse
Campaign setup per tier, per sequence
Measuring and reporting per tier
Results analysis
What went well, what did we learn?
Which accounts are more receptive, which industries, company sizes?
Which content types work best, for which touchpoints?
Scale up plan
Templates for faster content creation,
Replicate sequences which worked better,
Scale first in industry/category which is more engaged
Content development
Content briefs for blog articles
Templates for case studies
Lifecycle process & roles
Input flows — sales, account managers, content team
Automated flows — nurturing, loyalty, referrals
That’s it. My recommendation is to choose one account or cluster to focus on at the beginning, depending on your company’s priorities. For example, if they want to expand in the Automotive industry, focus on that one first for the POC and scale up plan.
If you need help in developing a content strategy or marketing plan for your company, get in touch with our team.