The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner
Content planners develop a strategy for content creation, publication and distribution. They are also responsible to evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of a strategy.
This type of content informs the audience about the services and products provided by the company. It also helps the audience resolve issues and meet their needs.
A marketing content planner could be a spreadsheet, or a third-party tool. The difference is in the way you make use of it.
1. Set Your Goals
The famous quote, usually believed to be the work of Benjamin Franklin although perhaps never heard by him, holds true: "If you fail to plan, you will fail." Efficiency, structure and clear communication are necessary to transform a visionary strategy into an efficient content marketing engine.
Identifying your goals is among the most important steps in this process. You can begin with a high-level goal for your business, or you can utilize the SMART Framework to make them more specific. It's also a good opportunity to review your existing content goals to ensure they are still in alignment with your current strategy.
Understanding your goals will help you to monitor the performance of every piece of content. This will help you identify the things that work and what needs to be improved. This will allow you to make the necessary adjustments and improve your overall performance. This will ultimately ensure that you are reaching your goals overall and delivering quality content to your viewers.
2. Identify Your Audience
It is essential to know who your target audience is in order to create content that is relevant, informative and effective. This can be accomplished through conducting research to discover the characteristics of your ideal customers personas. This can be accomplished through surveys, data analysis and other methods of gathering information about your customers.
You can then apply the results of your research to identify the content types that will be most effective for your business. This can include everything from blog posts, podcasts, social media posts and webinars. Once you've decided which formats work best then you can begin creating your strategy for content.
A tool for planning content can assist you in tracking your marketing goals and make sure that the appropriate people are working on the right 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 use today.
3. Find Your Ideal Platforms
When creating digital content, it's important to adapt it to your preferred platform. Instagram users are looking for visually appealing content, whereas TikTok users love short, fashionable videos. Performing some market research can help you discover your target users and their preferred platforms.
A content planner for marketing will help you plan the steps needed to transform your ideas and concepts into a completed product. It will give you a structure to help you achieve your goals and ensure that everyone in your team is on the same page.
Content planning tools like Monday and Kapost aid you in this. They let you create tasks and assign them to others, collaborate, and track their progress through one dashboard. Additionally, there are sophisticated tools like Wrike that offer drop-down menus and provide project timelines and tables of actionsable items and a message board. seo copywriting software come with a free version, as well as more extensive subscriptions for teams that need more advanced capabilities.
4. Find 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 also a great method to manage content for long time-based projects, such as quarterly or annual campaigns.
A good content planner will assist you in determining the kinds of content to create and how to implement them. This involves determining the format of your content, for instance podcasts, blogposts, infographics, case study, or social media releases. It should also include a timetable to determine when these pieces need to be published and produced.
It is also important to monitor metrics related to your goals for content marketing such as traffic and engagement. This will allow you to examine your results and make changes. Utilizing a tool such as Ahrefs will help you understand what's working and what's not. It can also provide you with information about the performance of your competitors.
5. Find Your Content's objectives
If you've got clear content objectives, your team can remain on track and ensure that they're achieving their objectives. If it's increasing traffic to SEO by updating blog articles or increasing customer retention by organizing webinars, having clear goals will help you reach your goals for content marketing.
A good content planner will help you define your goals by laying out an organized workflow and allows collaboration. It can also incorporate tools like image-generation software, text-to-image prompts, and social management apps to simplify the process.
In addition to setting goals and establishing an expected workflow, a marketing content planner can also help you identify your performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). This will allow you to assess the effectiveness of your content and react accordingly to improve your marketing strategy. Bounce rate, website traffic, and social media shares are examples of metrics that are quantifiable. These metrics should be monitored at all stages of the content's lifecycle, including publication and production.
6. Identify Your Resources
If you do not have the resources needed to implement your content strategy, it will be useless. When planning, make sure you have enough budget to accomplish the tasks you've outlined. This can include salary or team payments, production costs as well as web space and marketing tactics.
Once you have the budget in place, you can start assigning responsibilities to each job. You can assign different members of your staff to do keyword research, copywriting and editing or design. Alternatively, Sprout can be used to automate the process of scheduling your content across various platforms.
Sprout lets you connect your social media accounts and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn company pages and Google Business Profiles, all from one dashboard. The scheduling tools of Sprout also have an image library to make it easier to manage managing assets and reduce time in the process of creating.
7. Identify your Key Performance Indicators
If you're planning to invest a lot of time creating content, it's crucial that your marketing efforts yield results. 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 is used to determine if your content converts customers and to identify areas for improvement in future campaigns.
Additionally, it's crucial to decide on the type of content you'd like create based on your objectives and your target audience. This could be blog posts as well as infographics, videos, and social media posts. Once you've identified different content formats you need to create a plan for each one that includes frequency and distribution. This will ensure that your content is being read by the appropriate people at the right times.
8. Find Your Methods for Tracking
A marketing content plan is a useful tool for any company seeking to improve its marketing efforts. It can help you keep track of your goals, audience, and resources, while allowing you to see how effective your strategy is over time.
A social media calendar can aid you in planning your content and ensure that it is released regularly. You can also prepare for holidays and events that could affect your followers.
A keyword content plan is an excellent method to improve your SEO strategies. It will help you find the best keywords to use in your content and boost your visibility and search engine rankings. It also helps to measure the effectiveness of your keyword content strategies over time.
9. Find Your Measurements
Your marketing strategy should help you determine which metrics are the most important for each piece of content, regardless of whether you structure your content based on the theme or keywords. This will allow you to determine the success of your content to continue to improve it. A cloud-based marketing planner like Optimizely CMP can also make it easier for team members to collaborate and produce reports that can be used for making future content decision-making.