The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner
Content planners develop a strategy for content creation, publication, and distribution. They also are accountable for monitoring and evaluating the effectiveness of their strategy.
This type of content informs the public on the products and services provided by the company. It also helps the audience solve issues and meet their needs.
A marketing content planner is a spreadsheet or it can be a third-party program. The difference lies in the way you utilize it.
1. Determine Your Goals
The famous quote, frequently believed to be the work of Benjamin Franklin although perhaps never spoken by him, holds true: "If you fail to plan, you will fail." Efficiency, structure and clear communication are essential to transform a visionary strategy into an efficient content marketing engine.
The process of identifying your goals is among the most important steps to take in this process. You can either start with the most basic goals for your business, or you can use the SMART Framework to make them more specific. It is also a good time to review the goals for content and make sure they still align with current strategy.
Understanding your goals will enable you track the performance of each piece of content. This will help you determine what is working and
what is content marketing needs to be improved, allowing you to make the necessary adjustments and improve your overall performance. This will ensure that you're achieving your goals overall and delivering quality content to your audience.
2. Identify Your Audience
It is essential to know who your target audience is to create content that is relevant, interesting and effective. This can be done by conducting research to determine the characteristics of your ideal customer personas. This can be done using surveys, data analysis and other methods to gather details about your customers.
Based on the findings of this research and the results of this research, you can determine the types of content that are most effective for your company. This can include everything from blog posts to 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 tool for content planning can help you keep on top of marketing goals and ensure the appropriate people are working on the most relevant projects. It can also improve productivity by helping teams focus on what's most important and keep them from distractions. CopyPress provides a free Content Analysis Report that you can use today.
3. Identify Your Ideal Platforms
When creating digital content, you need to adapt it to the ideal platform. Instagram users prefer visually appealing visuals, whereas TikTok audiences enjoy trendy short-form videos. Conducting some market research will help you discover your ideal users and their preferred platforms.
A successful marketing content planner will outline all the steps needed to transform your ideas into an actual asset. It will outline a plan to help you achieve your objectives and ensure that everyone on your team is on the same team.
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 monitor their progress on a single dashboard. Alternatively, there are more in-depth tools like Wrike that offer drop-down menus and provide overall project timelines, an actionable table and a message board. Both come with a no-cost version, and more extensive subscriptions for teams that need more advanced capabilities.
4. Find Your Content Types
A content planner is a fantastic 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 you stay organized and ensures that everyone is on the same page. It's also a great tool to manage content for long time-based projects, such as annual or quarterly campaigns.
A well-designed content plan will help you identify the kinds of content that must be created and the best way to get them executed. This includes determining the format your content should be presented in, such as blog posts, infographics podcasts, case studies, or social media press releases. This should include a timetable of when these pieces are to be created and published.
It is also important to monitor the metrics that are relevant to your objectives for content marketing, such as traffic and engagement. This will enable you to examine your results and make necessary adjustments. Ahrefs is a great 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 set clear goals for your content that will help your team keep on track to meet their goals. Whether that's increasing SEO traffic by updating blog articles or increasing customer retention by organizing webinars, having clear goals will help you achieve your goals in
marketing content strategy content.
A good content planner will help you define your goals by laying out the workflow in a way that is organized and allowing collaboration. It can also include tools such as image-generation software, text-to-image prompts, and social management apps to make the process easier.
In addition to setting goals and establishing an expected workflow, a marketing content planner can assist you in identifying your metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). This will let you assess the effectiveness of your
content marketing strategy and make adjustments to improve your marketing campaign. Some examples of measurable metrics include bounce rate, website traffic, social media shares, and newsletter sign-ups. These metrics should be monitored at all stages of the lifecycle of content, including production and publication.
6. Identify Your Resources
A successful content strategy won't be effective without the resources to execute it. During planning, make sure that you have the funds to accomplish all the tasks you've set out. This can include team or salary payments, production costs including web space, marketing strategies.
Once you have a budget in place, you can assign responsibilities for each task. You might assign various employees to conduct keyword research, copywriting and editing as well as design. Alternatively, you can also use a tool like Sprout to make it easier of scheduling content across multiple channels and 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 a single dashboard. Sprout's scheduling
tools also include an image library to simplify managing assets and reduce time when creating posts.
7. Identify your Key Performance Indicators
It's important to make your marketing efforts worthwhile if you're going spend lots of time writing content. You can increase your success by analyzing and identifying the right key performance metrics.
For instance for a return customers is a common KPI used by content marketers. This metric can be used to assess how well your content converts customers and to pinpoint areas for improvement in future campaigns.
Additionally, it's crucial to decide on the type of content you want to create based on your objectives and audience. This could be blogs, social media posts, articles or infographics, as well as videos. Once you have identified the various formats of content and formats, you must make a plan for each one that includes frequency and distribution. This will ensure that your content is being read by the right people at the best times.
8. Identify Your tracking methods
A marketing content planner is an essential tool for any company looking to improve their marketing efforts. It allows you to keep track of your marketing goals as well as your audience and your resources, while also providing you with the ability to evaluate your strategy's effectiveness over time.
A social media content calendar can help you decide when your posts are due to go live, which will help ensure that your content is published regularly. You can also plan ahead for holidays or events that could impact your followers.
A keyword content strategy is a powerful tool to improve your SEO strategies. It can help you determine the best keywords for your content, which will improve your search engine ranking and visibility. It can also help you determine the effectiveness of your content strategy based on keywords over time.
9. Find Your Measurements
Your marketing strategy should help you determine which metrics are the most relevant for each piece, regardless of whether you structure your content according to the theme or keywords. This will help you understand the extent to which your content has been so that you can continuously improve it. A cloud-based marketing content planner, such as Optimizely CMP can help you manage collaboration between team members and create reports that are useful for making decisions about future content planning.