A Start-to-Finish Guide on How to Develop a Content Plan in 7 Steps.

In the modern world, to achieve any goal there is the need to plan and structure a roadmap to get there or achieve them. Planning requires research, analysis, and determination to compile. However, it is crucial to plan with the end goal in mind.

Content marketing has a lot of layers, and content planning is one of the layers. Content planning involves defining and deciding what, where, and when to publish your content. An effective content plan defines the tasks you prioritize, organizes the content creation processes, and keeps track of your content progress.

Content Planning

Content planning is a crucial factor in your content creation success. You can create top-notch content and fail to make it work because you do not have a solid content plan.

Why do you need a content plan?

Content planning can help you overcome challenges you encounter as a business or brand owner. The advantages of content planning include the following :

1. Schedule management: Content planning helps schedule your content so you can focus on crucial tasks. It is more efficient to organize your content on weekly, monthly, or quarterly periods than trying to come up with something every day. The process of scheduling can save you a lot of time and resources.
2. Content relevance: Content planning can help you streamline the content to ensure that each created content is unique and relevant. It also helps you in the content-generation process.
3. Optimized engagement: With a content plan, you should be able to give each content piece the attention it needs to gain and maintain the required engagement.

Content planning is not limited to only social media platforms. As a business or brand owner with the need to reach potential customers, you can plan your content across the following platforms:

1. Websites
2. Blogs
3. SEO tools
4. Analytics
5. White Papers

Content Planning vs. Content Strategy

Content Strategy

A lot of times, the term content planning is used interchangeably with the term content strategy. However, there are differences between these two terms. While content planning deals with defining your marketing assets and content creation, content strategy deals with your content marketing goals and the process of achieving them. Content strategy is what you want to accomplish and how you want to achieve them. Content planning involves defining content for the goals so that you can achieve them.

For example, one of your business or brand goals is to achieve brand visibility. To achieve this, your content strategy might be to focus on the use of SEO to increase the visibility of your website on the search engine result page (SERP).

Now that we have understood the differences between content planning and content strategy, how do we create a solid content plan for a business or brand?

How to create a winning content plan in Seven (7) Steps.

Step 1: Define your content goals

It is easy to try to create a content plan. However, to create an effective content plan, you need to match the plan with your business or brand goals. The importance of creating content is to engage with your potential or existing customers.

A simple content plan can be that you want to post five times a week on your social media handles to gain brand visibility. A content plan can also publish an article on your blog with relevant SEO to gain visibility on the search engine result page.

If you do not have content goals, you can set one up. Your content goals must be precise. You can use the popular acronym SMART for goal creation:

1. Specific
2. Measurable
3. Actionable
4. Relevant
5. Time-bound

Some examples of SMART content goals are:

• If you want to grow your youtube subscriptions by 10% in a month: Publishing and promoting my content on youtube and other social media platforms
• If you want to grow your organic traffic by 20% every month: To publish up to 5 blog posts per week with relevant SEO keywords.
• If you want to grow Instagram followership: Create and publish relevant information every day of the week. Use relevant images to match the captions.

Content Planning

Step 2: Brainstorm and find the right content ideas and topics

After understanding your content goals, you must find the appropriate subjects to help achieve them. To create a list of relevant content subjects to achieve your content goals, you can do the following:

1. Just write anything that comes to your mind regarding your business.
2. Write anything that matches your content and marketing goals.

Still, it is not a walk in the park to sit and think of topics. One way to go about it will be to:

1. Spy on your competitors: What are they posting? Can you put a spin on their topics to create yours?
2. Do keyword research: This is one of the best methods to understand what your customers are looking for that matches your business or brand goals. What keywords are they typing into the search bar of search engines?
3. Audience research: What does your audience like to read? Follow up on their conversations on other blogs and forums.

Step 3: Categorize your content

Every brainstormed topic may not be practical to your business or brand. While some collected topics are a great fit for your business or brand, some may need fine-tuning.

Categorize the collected topics into the following:

1. Yes topics
2. No topics
3. Maybe topics

The “yes topics” can be developed for publishing. The “no topics” can be discarded or refined to match your content goals. The “maybe topics” can be refined or defined to complement your content goals.

Step 4: Create a template

Your content plan can be created with simple materials like notebooks or pieces of paper. However, for better organization, it is recommended that you use a spreadsheet or available content management tools.

There is no particular template or structure for content planning. You can add the elements you want while creating your template. Still, some particular elements must be present. The template created is usually termed a content calendar or editorial calendar.

Editorial Calendar

For every content piece you create a plan for, the following should be present:

1. Publication Date
2. Content Title
3. Content Format/Content Type
4. Person in Charge (If you are working in a team)
5. Status

It is also important to note that your editorial calendar can be dependent on the platform type.

For example, if you are creating a content calendar for social media, your template will contain the following:

1. Post Caption
2. Date/Time
3. Hashtags (Subject to change)
4. Post format (image or video)

If you are creating a content plan for your blog, your template will contain the following:

1. Blog Title
2. Type of article (General, how-to, list, etc.)
3. Author
4. Meta description and Title tag
5. Seed Keyword
6. Secondary Keywords
7. Calls to Action (CTAs)

Step 5: Set Deadlines and Assign Tasks

If you are a one-person team, you might only need to assign deadlines for better implementation. If you are a team member, you need to assign tasks and deadlines to implement the content plan effectively.

Assigning tasks and deadlines can help you and your team stay on track while planning your content. Clear expectations should be set while doing this. Who is in charge of daily posts? Who will be in charge of content management? Who will be in charge of source images or videos for the content?

You can spell the above categories in your editorial calendar with the assigned team member and deadline.

Step 6: Schedule your content

The essence of putting your planned content into a content calendar is for easy access to your content. You should also schedule your content using in-built tools or third-party tools.

Most platforms have built-in scheduling features:

1. Meta Business
2. Instagram Business
3. Twitter
4. Youtube
5. Email marketing tools such as Mailchimp and Convertkit
6. WordPress
7. YouTube
8. Anchor
9. Linkedin

Step 7: Measure your results

Content planning is a task that has no end. Over time, you have to monitor and refine your content strategy.

To know if your content planning helps your content development processes you should measure your results. You should monitor how each piece of content performs based on chosen metrics.

For example, the metrics for social media will be:

1. Reach
2. Impressions
3. Engagements(Likes, shares, comments, and mentions)
4. Follower growth

For Blog posts, your metrics will be:

1. Page views
2. Average time user spent on the page
3. Bounce rate
4. Back Links

For email marketing, your metrics will be:

1. Open rate
2. Click through rate
3. Bounce rate
4. CTAs

Ready to create your first content plan?

Content planning takes time. To enjoy the process, learn how to develop content, recognize what your audience likes, understand the format of content that works for your business or brand, and have fun while at it.