The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner
Content planners develop a strategy for content creation, publication and distribution. They are also accountable for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of strategies.
This kind of content teaches the audience about the company's products and services. It also helps the viewers solve problems and meet their needs.
A marketing content planner may be a spreadsheet or third-party tool. The difference is in the way you use it.
1. Determine Your Goals
The famous quote, frequently believed to be the work of Benjamin Franklin although perhaps never said by him, is true: "If you fail to plan, you will fail." Moving from a strategic plan to an effective content marketing engine requires structure, workflow efficiencies and clear communication.
One of the most critical actions in this process is identifying your goals. Start with the high-level business goals or employ the SMART framework to make them more specific and achievable. This is also a great time to review current content goals and make sure they still align with current strategy.
Understanding your goals will allow you track the performance of each piece of content. This will help you identify what works and what can be improved, allowing you to make the necessary adjustments and improve your overall performance. This will ultimately ensure that you're achieving your goals and providing quality content to your viewers.
2. Identify Your Audience
Knowing your audience can aid in creating content that is relevant, engaging and effective. The best method to accomplish this is by conducting research and identifying the characteristics of your ideal customer personas. This can be accomplished through surveys, data analysis, and other methods of gathering data about your customers.
Based on the results of this research, you can then identify the kinds of content that will be most effective for your business. This can include everything from blog posts, social media posts, podcasts and webinars. Once you've identified which formats will be most effective, it's time to start drafting your content plan.
A tool for planning content can assist you in tracking your marketing goals and ensure that the right people are working on the right projects. It can also improve productivity by allowing teams to remain focused on what's important and avoiding distractions. It's easy to get started with a free Content Analysis Report from CopyPress today.
3. Find Your Ideal Platforms
It's crucial to adapt your content to the platform you prefer. Instagram users want aesthetically pleasing visuals, whereas TikTok users enjoy stylish short-form videos. Conducting some market research will help you identify your ideal users and their preferred platforms.
A well-designed marketing content planner will account for all the steps required to transform your ideas into a finished asset. It will provide a framework to help you meet your objectives and ensure that everyone on your team is on the same page.
Content planning tools such as Monday and Kapost help you with this. They let you create tasks and assign them, work together and monitor their progress through one dashboard. There are also content creation ai tools sickseo , such as Wrike, which offer drop-down menus that include an actionable table as well as a message board and a project-wide timeline. Both provide an initial free version and more comprehensive subscriptions in case your team requires more advanced features.
4. Identify Your Content Types
If you're a single influencer or a large marketing team, a content planner can help you organize your ideas and ensures that everyone is on the same page. It's a great tool to use for managing content for projects that have an extended lead time for example, annual or quarterly campaigns.
A good content plan can assist you in determining the types of content that must be created and how they should be executed. This involves determining the structure of your content, like podcasts, blogposts, infographics case studies, as well as social media releases. It should also include a timetable for when these pieces must be produced and published.
You should also keep track of metrics related to your content marketing goals such as engagement and traffic. This will allow you to analyze your results and make the needed adjustments. Using a program like Ahrefs can help you see what's working and what's not. It also gives you insight into the performance of your competitors.
5. Determine Your Content Goals
If you've got clear objectives for your content your team will remain on track and ensure they're meeting their goals. A clear set of goals will help you meet your goals in marketing content whether it's to boost SEO traffic by enhancing blog posts or improve customer retention through the organization of webinars.
A good content planner will assist you in defining your goals by creating an organized workflow and allowing collaboration. It can also include tools like image-generation software, prompts for text-to-image and social management software to simplify the process.
A content planner for marketing will aid you in identifying your performance metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important factors. This will let you monitor your content's effectiveness and make adjustments to improve your campaign. Some examples of measurable metrics include bounce rate websites, traffic to websites as well as social media shares and newsletter sign-ups. These metrics should be monitored throughout the content lifecycle, including publication and production.
6. Identify Your Resources
If you do not have the resources required to implement your content strategy, it will be worthless. While planning, make sure that you have the budget to complete all of the tasks you've laid out. This could include salary or team payments and production costs for the web space and materials, and paid marketing tactics.
Once you have a budget in place, you can start assigning the responsibilities for each task. For example, you might decide to assign tasks such as keyword research and copywriting, editing and design to different members of your team. Additionally, Sprout can be used to automate the process of scheduling your content across multiple platforms.
Sprout allows you to connect your social media accounts and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn company pages, as well as Google Business Profiles, all from a single dashboard. The scheduling tools offered by Sprout include an image library that can simplify managing assets and reduce time during the creation process.
7. Identify your Key Performance Indicators
If you're planning to invest a lot of time creating content, it's important that your marketing efforts pay off. The right way to identify and track the performance indicators will aid in assessing the effectiveness of your content and boost your results over time.
For instance, a popular KPI for content marketers is the number of repeat customers. This metric can be used to determine if your content is converting customers to you and to pinpoint areas for improvement in future campaigns.
Additionally, it's crucial to decide on the type of content you want to develop based on your goals and your target audience. This could include blog posts videos, infographics, or social media posts. Once you've identified the various content formats, it's important to devise a plan that includes the frequency and distribution method for each. This will ensure that the correct people are seeing your content at the right time.
8. Identify Your tracking methods
A marketing content planner is a useful tool for any business looking to improve their marketing efforts. It lets you keep in mind your marketing goals as well as your target audience and your resources, while giving you the ability to evaluate your strategy's effectiveness over time.
A calendar for social media will aid you in planning your content and ensure it is consistently released. You can also prepare for holidays and events that could impact your followers.
A keyword content strategy is a great tool to improve your SEO strategies. It will help you determine the best keywords for your content, which can increase your search engine rankings and visibility. It can also help you measure the effectiveness of your keyword content strategy over time.
9. Determine Your Measurements
Whatever your preference, whether you opt to organize your content according to keywords or themes the marketing plan you create will help you identify the most important metrics for each piece. This will help you understand the extent to which your content has been, so that you can continue to improve it. A cloud-based marketing planer, like Optimizely CMP can also make it easier for team members to work together and produce reports that can be used for future content decision-making.