The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner
Content planners develop a strategy for the creation of content, publication and distribution. They are also responsible to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of a strategy.
This kind of content informs viewers on the products and services provided by the company. It also assists the audience in solving problems and meet their requirements.
A marketing content planner can be a spreadsheet or third-party tool. The difference lies in how you use it.
1. Determine Your Goals
Benjamin Franklin's famous line "If you don't plan, you plan for failure" is true. Moving from a strategic plan to an efficient content marketing engine requires structure, workflow efficiencies and clear communication.
One of the most critical steps to take in this process is to identify your goals. You can start with a high-level goal for your business or utilize the SMART Framework to make them more specific. It is also a good opportunity to revisit current content goals and ensure they align with current strategy.
Understanding your goals will help you monitor the performance of every piece of content. This will help you identify what is working and what needs to be improved, allowing you to make the necessary adjustments and improve your overall performance. This will help you achieve your goals and provide quality content to your audiences.
2. Identify Your Audience
It's important to know who your target audience is to create content that is relevant, informative and efficient. 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 collecting details about your customers.
Based on the results of this research You can then determine the types of content that will be most effective for your company. This could include anything from blog posts, podcasts, social media posts, and webinars. Once you've decided on the format that are most effective, it's time to start creating your content plan.
A content planning tool can aid you in keeping track of your marketing goals and ensure that the most qualified people are working on the right projects. It can also improve productivity by helping teams remain focused on what's important and avoiding distractions. CopyPress offers a free Content Analysis Report that you can download right now.
3. Identify Your Ideal Platforms
When creating digital content, it's crucial to make it a perfect fit for your preferred platform. Instagram users are seeking visually appealing content, while TikTok users love short trendy videos. You can discover the platforms that your audience prefers through conducting market research.
A well-designed marketing content planner will take into account all the steps needed to turn your ideas into a finished asset. It will give you the framework you need to meet your goals and ensure that everyone in your team is on the same page.
Content planning tools such as Monday and Kapost can help you with this. They allow you to create tasks and assign them, work together, and track their progress in one dashboard. There are also more in-depth tools like Wrike that allow for drop-down menu functionality and provide overall project timelines, a table of actionable items and a message board. Both come with a no-cost version, as well as more extensive subscriptions for teams that require more advanced capabilities.
4. Find Your Content Types
A content planner is a fantastic tool for any person, whether you're an influencer on your own or a team of marketers in a large enterprise. It helps you stay organized and ensures that everyone is on the same page. It's also a great tool to manage content for long lead-time projects, like annual or quarterly campaigns.
A well-designed content plan will aid in identifying the kinds of content that must be created and the best way to get them executed. This includes determining the format of your content, like podcasts, blog posts, infographics, case study, or social media releases. It should also include a timetable for when these pieces must be created and published.
It is also important to monitor the results of your objectives for content marketing like traffic and engagement. This will help you evaluate your results and make the needed adjustments. Ahrefs is a fantastic tool to help you determine what works and what doesn't. It can also give you insight into the performance of your competitors.
5. Find Your Content's objectives
If you've set clearly defined content objectives, your team can remain on track and ensure they're meeting their objectives. A clear set of objectives will help you achieve your goals in marketing content whether it's to boost SEO traffic by enhancing blog posts or increase customer retention by arranging webinars.
A good content planner can aid in defining your goals by laying out an organized workflow and allowing collaboration. It can also incorporate tools like image-generation software and text-to-image instructions or social management software to make the process easier.
A content planner for marketing will aid you in identifying your performance metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and other important elements. This will enable you to assess the effectiveness of your content and adjust accordingly to improve your campaign. Some examples of measurable metrics include bounce rate websites, traffic to websites and social media shares and newsletter sign-ups. These metrics must be tracked at all stages of the content lifecycle including production and publication.
6. Identify Your Resources
A successful content strategy will be useless without the resources to execute it. During planning, make sure that you have the funds to complete the tasks you've set out. This could include salary or team payments, production costs including web space, marketing tactics.
Once you've got the budget in place, you can start assigning tasks to different people. For example, you might be able to assign keyword research editing, copywriting, and design to different members of your team. Alternatively, 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 and Google Business Profiles, all from a single dashboard. Sprout' SICK SEO include an image library to simplify asset management and save time during the creation process.
7. Find your Key Performance Indicators
It is crucial to ensure that your marketing efforts are worthwhile if you're going spend many hours creating content. Identifying and tracking the right key performance indicators can help you determine the effectiveness of your content and improve your results over time.
For instance, a typical KPI for content marketers is the number of return customers. This is a measure that can be used to determine how effective your content is at converting customers, and it can also be used to identify any areas that could be improved for future campaigns.
It's also important to determine the type of content you'll create based on both your goals and your target audience. This could include blog posts videos, infographics, or social media posts. Once you've identified the different content formats and formats, you must create a plan for each that includes frequency and distribution. This will ensure that your content is being seen by the appropriate people at the right times.
8. Identify Your tracking methods
A marketing content plan is a useful tool for any company looking to improve its marketing strategies. It lets you keep the track of your goals for marketing, your audience, and your resources, while also providing you with the ability to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy over time.
A social media calendar can aid you in planning your content and ensure that it is consistently released. It also allows you to plan ahead for any holidays or other events that could affect the engagement of your followers.
A keyword content plan is a fantastic method to improve your SEO strategies. It will help you identify the most relevant keywords for your content and increase your search engine rankings and visibility. It will also help you evaluate the effectiveness of your keyword content strategies over time.
9. Find Your Measurements
Your marketing plan should help you determine which metrics are the most relevant for each piece, regardless of whether you structure your content according to themes or keywords. This will allow you to assess the effectiveness of your content and keep improving it. A cloud-based marketing content planner, like Optimizely CMP can aid in managing collaboration among team members and produce reports that are useful for making future content planning decisions.