The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner
Content planners design a strategy for content creation, publication, and distribution. They also need to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of a plan.
This type of content educates the audience about the company’s products and services. It also helps the viewers solve problems and meet their requirements.
A marketing content planner can be a spreadsheet, or a third-party tool. The difference lies in the way you make use of it.
1. Determine Your Goals
Benjamin Franklin’s famous phrase “If you don’t plan, you are planning for failure” is true. Structure, workflow efficiency and clear communication are essential to transform a visionary strategy into a successful content marketing engine.
One of the most critical steps in this process is to identify your goals. You can start with high-level goals for your business or make use of the SMART Framework to make them more specific. It’s also a good time to review your current content goals to make sure they’re in alignment with your current strategy.
Being aware of your goals will also aid in monitoring how each piece of content performs. This will help you determine which elements are working and which requires improvement which will allow you to make the necessary adjustments and improve the overall performance. This will ensure that you are reaching your goals and providing quality content to your audience.
2. Identify Your Audience
Knowing your audience can enable you to create content that is relevant, engaging and effective. The best method to accomplish this is to conduct research and identifying the traits of your ideal customer personas. This can be done by using surveys, data analyses and other methods to collect data about your clients.
By analyzing the findings of this research You can then determine the kinds of content that are most effective for your company. This can include everything from blog posts to social media posts, podcasts and webinars. Once you’ve identified which formats are most efficient, you can start creating your content plan.
A tool for content planning can aid you in keeping track of your marketing goals and ensure that the appropriate people are working on the correct projects. It can also improve productivity by allowing teams to remain focused on what’s important and avoid distractions. CopyPress provides a free Content Analysis Report that you can download today.
3. Find Your Ideal Platforms
When creating digital content, you need to make it a perfect fit for your ideal platform. Instagram users are seeking visually appealing content, whereas TikTok users enjoy short fashionable videos. You can find out the preferred platforms of your target audience by conducting some market research.
An effective marketing content planner will account for all the steps needed to turn your ideas into a finished asset. It will give you a structure to help you meet your goals and ensure that everyone on your team is on the same page.
A content planning tool such as Monday and Kapost can help with this by allowing you to design tasks, assign them to others and collaborate, as well as keep track of progress on one dashboard. There are more sophisticated tools, such as Wrike, that offer drop-down menus that include a table with actionable items as well as a message board and a general project timeline. Both come with a free version and more comprehensive subscriptions for teams that require more advanced capabilities.
4. Identify Your Content Types
A content planner is an excellent tool for anyone, no matter if you’re an influencer on your own or with a team of marketing professionals in a large company. It helps to keep you organized and ensures everyone is on the right level. It’s also a great way to manage content for longer lead-time projects like quarterly or annual campaigns.
A good content planner can help you identify which types of content to produce and how to execute them. This includes determining what format your content should be, such as blog posts, infographics case studies, podcasts or social media press releases. This should include a schedule of when these pieces are to be created and published.
You should also monitor metrics related to your goals for content marketing, such as engagement and traffic. This will enable you to analyze your results and make adjustments. Using a tool like Ahrefs can help you see what’s working and what’s not. It can also provide insights into your competitors’ performance.
5. Find Your Content’s objectives
If you have clear goals for your content that can help your team stay on track to achieve their goals. It doesn’t matter if it’s increasing the number of visitors to your website by rewriting blog posts or increasing customer retention by organizing webinars, having clear goals will help you reach your goals for content marketing.
A good content planner can help you establish your goals through laying out the workflow in a way that is organized and allowing collaboration. It can also include tools such as images-generation software and instructions for text-to-image, or social management apps, to streamline the process.
A marketing strategy content content planner will help you to identify your performance metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as other important factors. This will let you monitor your content’s effectiveness and make changes 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 should be monitored throughout the content lifecycle, including production and publication.
6. Identify Your Resources
If you do not have the resources required to implement your content strategy, it will be worthless. When planning, make sure you have enough funds to accomplish the tasks you’ve laid out. This can include salary or team payments production costs as well as web space and marketing tactics.
Once you have a budget, you can begin assigning the responsibility for each task. For instance, you may be able to assign keyword research and copywriting, editing 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 corporate pages and Google Business Profiles, all from a single dashboard. Sprout’s scheduling tools also include an image library that can simplify managing assets and reduce time during the creation process.
7. Identify your Key Performance Indicators
It’s crucial to make your marketing efforts worthwhile if you’re going spend a lot time creating content. You can increase your success by analyzing and tracking the most important performance indicators.
For example, a common KPI for content marketers is the number of returning customers. This metric is used to determine if your content converts customers and to pinpoint areas for improvement in future campaigns.
Additionally, it’s important to identify the types of content you want to create based on your objectives and audience. This could be blogs, social media posts, articles, infographics, or videos. Once you have identified the various formats of content and formats, you must create a plan for each one that includes frequency and distribution. This will help you ensure that your content is noticed by the appropriate people at the right times.
8. Find Your Tracking Methods
A marketing content planner is an essential tool for any business looking to improve their marketing efforts. It assists you in keeping the track of your goals, audience and resources while allowing to assess how efficient your strategy has been over time.
A calendar for social media will help you plan your content and ensure 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 way to optimize your SEO tactics. It can help you determine the most relevant keywords to use in your content and boost your search engine ranking and visibility. It can also help you evaluate the effectiveness of your keyword content strategy over time.
9. Identify Your Measurements
No matter if you decide to organize your content according to keywords or themes, your marketing plan should help you identify the most important metrics for each piece. This will allow you to determine the success of your content so that you can keep improving it. A cloud-based marketing content strategy content planner, like Optimizely CMP can help you manage collaboration between team members and generate reports that are useful for making future decisions regarding content planning.