The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner
Content planners are accountable for creating a vision of content creation publication, distribution and publication. They are also accountable for evaluating and tracking strategy effectiveness.
This kind of content informs the public about the services and products offered by the company. It also helps the audience solve issues and meet their requirements.
A marketing content planner can be a spreadsheet or a 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 are planning for failure" is a true statement. The structure, efficiency of workflow and clear communication are necessary to transform a strategic vision into a highly efficient content marketing engine.
One of the most critical actions in this process is identifying your goals. Start with the high-level business goals or the SMART framework to make them more specific and attainable. It is also a good time to look over your the goals for content and ensure they are in line with the current strategy.
Having a clear understanding of your goals will enable you to monitor how each piece of content performs. This will help you identify what works and what needs to be improved, allowing you to make the necessary adjustments and improve your overall performance. This will ensure that you're meeting your goals and providing high-quality content to your customers.
2. Identify Your Audience
It is essential to know who your audience is to develop content that is relevant, engaging and efficient. The best way to do this is through conducting research and identifying the traits of your ideal customer personas. This can be done through surveys, data analysis and other methods of gathering details about your customers.
Using the results of this research You can then determine the kinds of content that are most effective for your company. This could include everything from blog posts to social media posts, podcasts, and webinars. Once you've identified which formats are most effective, it's time to begin creating your content strategy.
A tool for planning content can help you keep the track of your marketing goals and ensure that the appropriate people are working on the most relevant projects. It can also improve productivity by helping teams remain focused on what's important and staying clear of distractions. CopyPress provides a no-cost Content Analysis Report that you can download right now.
3. Choose Your Ideal Platforms
It's important to tailor your digital content to the platform you prefer. Instagram users are seeking visually appealing content, whereas TikTok viewers enjoy short, trendy videos. You can discover your target audience's preferred platforms through conducting market research.
best content marketing software marketing content planner will outline all the steps required to convert your ideas into an actual asset. It will give you the framework you need to meet your goals and make sure that everyone in your team is on the same page.
Content planning tools like Monday and Kapost help you with this. They allow you to create tasks and assign them to others, collaborate, and track their progress on a single dashboard. There are other more sophisticated tools, like Wrike, which offer drop-down menus that include an actionable table such as a message board and a general project timeline. Both offer the free version, as well as more comprehensive subscriptions if your team requires more advanced features.
4. Find Your Content Types
A content planner is a great tool for anyone, whether you're an influencer on your own or as part of a team of marketers within a large corporation. It helps to keep you organized and ensures everyone is on the same level. It's also a great method to manage content for long lead-time projects, like quarterly or annual campaigns.
A well-designed content plan will assist you in determining the types of content that must be produced and the best way to get them executed. 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 expected to be produced and published.
You should also monitor the metrics that are relevant to your goals for content marketing such as engagement and traffic. This will help you evaluate your results and make the needed adjustments. Using a program 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've set clear content objectives your team will remain on track and make sure they're meeting their goals. Clear objectives will help you achieve your goals in marketing content whether it's to boost the number of visitors to your blog by updating posts or increase customer retention through the organization of webinars.
A good content planner will help you establish your goals by drawing out the workflow in a way that is organized and allowing collaboration. It can also include tools such as image-generation software, prompts to convert text into images, and social management apps to simplify the process.
Aside from setting goals and creating an expected workflow, a marketing content planner can help you identify your performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). This will allow you to monitor your content's effectiveness and make adjustments to improve your campaign. Some examples of measurable metrics include bounce rate, website traffic, social media shares, and newsletter signups. These metrics should be tracked throughout the entire time of your content's existence including production, publication, and distribution.
6. Identify Your Resources
A great content strategy won't be effective when you don't have the resources to execute it. When planning, ensure you have enough money to complete the tasks you've outlined. This may include team or salary payments and production costs for the web space and materials and paid marketing strategies.
Once you have a budget in place, you can start assigning the responsibilities for each task. You could assign different members of your staff to conduct keyword research, copywriting and editing, or design. Alternatively, you can also employ a tool like Sprout to ease the process of scheduling content across multiple channels and platforms.
You can connect your social media accounts to the Sprout tool and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn company pages and Google Business Profiles all from one dashboard. Sprout's tools for scheduling include an image library that streamlines the management of assets and helps save time during the creation process.
7. Determine your Key Performance Indicators
It's important to ensure that your marketing efforts are worthwhile if you're planning to spend lots of time writing content. You can improve your results by tracking and identifying the most effective key performance indicators.
For instance, a typical KPI for content marketers is the number of return customers. This metric can be used to assess how well your content is converting customers to you and to pinpoint areas to improve your future campaigns.
It is also crucial to decide the kind of content you will create based on both your goals and the audience you intend to reach. This may include blogs, social media posts, articles and infographics as well as videos. Once you've identified various formats for your content, you should create a plan for each one that includes frequency and distribution. This will help you ensure that your content is noticed by the most relevant people at the appropriate times.
8. Identify Your Tracking Methods
A marketing content plan can be a valuable tool for any business looking to improve its marketing efforts. It lets you keep the track of your goals for marketing as well as your target audience and your resources, while providing you with the ability to assess your strategy's effectiveness over time.
A social media calendar will aid you in planning your content and ensure that it is released regularly. It also lets you plan ahead for any holidays or other events that could impact your audience's engagement.
A keyword content strategy is a great tool to improve your SEO strategies. It can help you find the most relevant keywords for your content, which can improve your search engine ranking and visibility. It will also help you determine the effectiveness of your content strategy based on keywords over time.
9. Determine Your Measurements
Your marketing plan should allow you to identify which metrics are most relevant for each piece, regardless of whether you structure your content according to themes or keywords. This will allow you to determine the extent to which your content has been, so that you can continually improve it. A cloud-based marketing content planner, such as Optimizely CMP can make it easier to manage collaboration between team members and generate reports that can be useful in making future decisions regarding content planning.