Here you will learn about content planning, a key part of any digital marketing strategy. In this post we will walk you through the steps to plan and create content that can be used as part of your overall marketing goals. With our knowledge and tools you will master this piece of content marketing.
Content Planning: What, Why, How
Creating content that’s aligned to your marketing, social media and goals is essential if you’re going to serve your target audience. That’s why content planning is so important, it’s a blueprint for strategic message deployment across any campaign or initiative.
Content planning provides the details of what will be created, when something will be published and how widely an output will need to be distributed – essentially mapping out all the areas of content marketing. With this document in hand you can prioritise tasks and ensure your messages reach the right people.
Your Content Marketing Strategy
To be successful a content marketing strategy needs to be the foundation for planned content. That means creating and circulating pieces to appeal to potential customers and influence their buying behaviour. In other words it’s an actionable plan to create content that’s relevant to your target audience’s needs, wants and interests in line with what you want as a business or organisation.
So how do you build a content marketing system? It all starts with your professional goals. This will give you guidance on production decisions around the materials that tie back to those goals. The process isn’t just about corporate goals but about understanding who exactly is in that target audience – so you can see into customising content that reaches them not random broad brush ideas that get ignored because they’re not relevant to any particular demographic/audience segment.
You need the right approach if you want to get maximum return from implementing strategies because these need scalability options that enhance sustainability through other key assets like development led thinking already invested in resources at every stage especially during the initial development stages before the implementation phase altogether called a “Content Marketing Strategy” itself.
Your Business Goals
Starting a journey without a destination in mind would be pointless wandering. The same applies to content planning – unless you have defined business goals, your content creation and distribution will be aimless. You need to define these goals first so they can shape the strategy around your content production.
Typical goals in this area include increasing brand awareness, connecting with target audience, building trust between customers/consumers and companies, growing sales and website traffic and establishing thought leadership at an expert level on topics related to their services/products & values etc.
To ensure all content remains aligned to company mission statements by providing guidance on how to make decisions at each stage of creating/distributing the content. A solid foundation must always exist that serves as the guiding pillars so everyone stays focused on the strategic objectives set out before hand for the creative workflow from start to finish!
Know Your Audience Inside Out
Creating content that speaks to your target audience requires insight into their demographics, wants and needs. That’s where buyer personas come in. It’s an accurate representation of the traits of your intended audience that can be used as a guide to create relevant stories through blog posts or other media. To make this easier there are templates available that summarise the research done on individual personas to help you generate ideas for marketing initiatives to them. Knowing your audience is like finding the secret ingredient in a recipe – it makes all the difference!
Content Plan Building Blocks
As we get into content planning, we need to understand the basics. A solid foundation for a good content plan must be established: from goal setting to audience recognition and different types of content – social media posts, video clips, blogs etc., scheduling to distribution channels. Every piece fits into the puzzle.
We need to be flexible and adjust our plans to our target audience’s requirements so we can engage with them when we deliver this information. And then we need to organise everything via editorial/content calendars. Well managed timetables help meet deadlines and ensure consistency of production – which means better workflow overall in the development of all content plans.
Content Calendar Anatomy
content calendar is an essential part of a successful content strategy. It’s the central hub to organiser, schedule and publish all activities related to the content creation. This keeps everything running like a well oiled engine.
By publishing consistently you can build up a professional image which helps not just the creators but also other team members who have access to it as they can see their tasks in one place, coordinate better by avoiding duplicate work and stick to deadlines and collaborate better amongst themselves and increase productivity overall! Having this one source everyone involved can stay up to date and make sure goals are met with no discrepancies.
Scheduling for Success
Organising your content in time is key to meeting marketing goals. To make it successful and stress free use software tools like Sprout Social and CoSchedule to create a content calendar with automated scheduling. Consistency is key so everything runs to schedule – just like trains to their timetables!
Mixing Content Types
Following the principle of “Variety is the spice of life” in content planning will help you create a engaging mix that won’t bore your audience. Think about different formats – blog posts, infographics, videos and podcasts – to social media posts – so there’s something for everyone!
To achieve this mix of content types you need to diversify channels and topics and tones that match your goals and buyer journey stages. You can vary the length or depth depending on how much time people have to read/consume each piece.
Ultimately it’s about having a mix of different flavours: different forms as mentioned earlier but tailored to customer preferences – and not forgetting the keywords along the way!
Content Creation Process
Content creation is like a relay race. It starts with idea generation and then moves to workflow optimisation and then delegation to team members to create high quality content. All this requires coordination to produce quality output from the content creation stage itself.
We need to take all these stages seriously to produce great pieces that will deliver our message and support the planning of well crafted content.
Ideation and Brainstorming
At the start of content creation is ideation and brainstorming, a stage where your creativity can take off with topic ideas. It’s about getting into problem solving mode and thinking what can be done in your area.
Good idea generation is more than just generating lots of ideas. They need to relate to each other as part of a overall strategy so they will resonate with your target audience. Content concepts should stay close to this overall approach so maximum impact with the viewers.
Workflow Optimisation
Now you have plenty of content ideas, the next stage is to optimise your workflow. This means arranging and refining each element so it will maximise efficiency and productivity. Like a well oiled machine when done right streamlining can mean your content creation process runs smoothly with no hiccups or glitches.
You need to delegate roles for every part of the content creation process including the strategising/planning stages. Researching audience/topics, creating visuals and text assets, promoting content online and measuring with analytics tools.
Visibility: SEO and Distribution Tactics
As we go along visibility becomes an important consideration. We need to use SEO and distribution tactics as our guiding light. Like lighthouses in rough seas these approaches will make your work stand out from other digital content online and get to your target audience and spark engagement.
Keyword Mastery for Organic Traffic
Visibility involves a process of researching and optimising the best keywords for your content. These words are like beacons that guide visitors to it, so if you include them in what you write then search engine rankings will improve and organic traffic will follow. Luckily there’s lots of help available. Specialist tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, Moz’s Keyword Explorer & Ahrefs’ will make research easier and more accurate when using industry standard practices to maximise SEO efforts. If you follow these principles then your potential readers will find exactly what they’re looking for without any hassle – and increase your online presence at the same time!
Multi-Channel Distribution
Visibility requires content to be distributed across multiple channels like social media and email. Each platform is an opportunity to showcase your content and connect with the public. Guest blogging is another way to increase engagement through multiple outlets to reach a wider audience.
Measuring Content Impact: Analytics and Feedback
Now we’re done let’s review the results of our content. We need to measure success by looking into analytics and customer feedback. Check if we’re on track with what was planned for content marketing, measure impact so we can see how successful these marketing initiatives were and make adjustments based on the results.
Performance Metrics
Using Google Analytics will give you valuable insights into your content’s impact. Tracking engagement rate, pay-per-click performance, audience growth and social media follower count are all good metrics to measure its reach. Looking at these metrics will give you an idea of how it’s being received by the audience. To accurately measure the impact of this content monitoring these stats will give you an idea of what changes or improvements need to be made for it to continue to be successful over time.
Adjusting Based on Insights
Using feedback and analytics you must be flexible with your content to get the best results. Just like a captain changes the course of the voyage based on their compass readings you must regularly adjust yours to keep moving forward.
Content Life cycling: Repurposing and Updating
Now we’re at the end of our journey attention turns to how to extend the life and keep up with trends of existing content. This means updating it so its value remains intact.
Content Transformations
Refreshing your content by reformatting it and sharing across platforms will increase its engagement. This simple step of reimagining the same message in different ways will give your content more reach.
Content Freshness
You must keep your valuable content up to date to fully get the most out of its lifecycle. Revising it regularly will make sure the information remains interesting, relevant and valuable to the audience.
Content Templates and Tools
Now we’re at the end of our journey let’s look at the content planning templates and tools to help you with your marketing. These will help you manage, schedule and organize your content plans so you can get more out of this journey.
Template Selection Guide
Using the right template will help you organize your content strategy. A good plan layout will make sure each step of the content planning process is covered and considered. With a solid format you can streamline the whole process and get the most out of it without missing any important details.
Tooling for Efficiency
Content planning can be efficient and collaborative with project management software, analytics platforms and template solutions. These tools will help you manage content planning activities while making decisions with data points.
Wrap Up
Now we’re at the end of our journey it’s time to review everything we’ve learned. We’ve covered content planning from the basics to the nitty gritty of creating and sharing content and analysing results.
