The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner
Content planners create a vision for content creation, publication, and distribution. They are also responsible to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of a strategy.
This type of content informs the audience on the products and services that the company offers. It also helps the audience solve problems and meet their needs.
A marketing content planner is a spreadsheet or it can be a third-party software. The difference is in how you use it.
1. Determine Your Goals
The famous quote, usually believed to be the work of Benjamin Franklin although perhaps never heard by him, holds the truth: "If you fail to plan, you will fail." Structure, workflow efficiency and clear communication are required to transform a visionary strategy into an efficient content marketing engine.
One of the most crucial steps to take in this process is to identify your goals. You can start with a high-level goal for your company or use the SMART Framework to make them more specific. It is also a good opportunity to revisit the goals for content and ensure they are in line with the current strategy.
Understanding your goals will help you track the performance of each piece of content. This will help you identify what is working and what requires improvement which will allow you to make necessary adjustments and improve the overall performance. This will ensure that you're achieving your goals and providing quality content to your audience.
2. Identify Your Audience
It is crucial to know who your audience is in order to create content that is relevant, interesting and effective. The best method to accomplish this is to conduct research and identifying the traits of your ideal customer personas. This can be accomplished by surveys, data analysis, and other methods of gathering information about your customers.
Based on the results of this research, you can then identify the types of content that are most effective for your company. This could include anything from blog posts and social media posts to webinars and podcasts. Once you've decided the most effective formats you can begin drafting your strategy for content.
A tool for content planning can help you keep track of your marketing goals and make sure that the appropriate people are working on the right projects. It can also boost productivity by allowing teams to remain focused on what's important and avoiding distractions. CopyPress provides a no-cost Content Analysis Report that you can utilize today.
3. Choose Your Ideal Platforms
It is crucial to tailor your content to the platform you prefer. Instagram users are seeking visually appealing content, while TikTok users enjoy short fashionable videos. Conducting some market research will help you discover your ideal users and their preferred platforms.
A content planner for marketing will help you plan all the steps necessary to turn your ideas and concepts into a completed product. It will provide a framework to help you achieve your goals and ensure that everyone in your team is on the same level.
Content planning tools like Monday and Kapost aid you in this. They let you create tasks and assign them, work together and monitor their progress through a single dashboard. There are also more advanced tools, such as Wrike, that offer drop-down menus and provide an actionable table as well as a message board and an overall project timeline. Both come with a no-cost version, as well as more extensive subscriptions for teams that require more advanced capabilities.
4. Identify Your Content Types
No matter if you're an individual influencer or an enterprise marketing team, a planner for content can help you keep track of your ideas and ensures that everyone is on the same page. It's also a great way to manage content for long lead-time projects like quarterly or annual campaigns.
A good content plan can help you identify the types of content that need to be produced and how they should be executed. This involves determining the format of your content, like podcasts, blogposts, infographics or case studies, or social media releases. It should also include a timeline for when these pieces must be created and published.
It is also important to monitor metrics related to your objectives for content marketing like traffic and engagement. This will allow you to analyze your results and make necessary adjustments. Ahrefs is a fantastic tool to help you identify what works and what doesn't. It also gives you insights on your competition's performance.
5. Find Your Content's Goals
If you set clear objectives for your content, it will help your team remain on track to reach their goals. If it's increasing traffic to SEO by updating blog articles or improving customer retention by hosting webinars, having clear goals will help you reach your goals in marketing content.
A good content planner will assist you in defining your goals by laying out a well-organized workflow and allowing for collaboration. It can also include tools such as images-generation software and instructions for text-to-image or social management applications, to streamline the process.
In addition to setting goals and creating an expected workflow, a content planner can also assist you in identifying your key performance indicators (KPIs). This will allow you to monitor the effectiveness of your content and adjust in a way that will improve your campaign. Bounce rate, website traffic, and social media shares are examples of measurable metrics. All of these metrics should be tracked throughout the time of your content's existence, including production, publication and distribution.
6. Identify Your Resources
A well-thought-out content strategy is useless without the resources to execute it. During planning, make sure that you have the funds to accomplish all the tasks you've laid out. This may include team or salary payments, production costs for materials and web space, and paid marketing tactics.
Once you have a budget in place, you can begin assigning the responsibilities for each task. You can assign different employees to conduct keyword research, copywriting, editing as well as design. Alternatively, Sprout can be used to automate the process of scheduling content across different platforms.
Sprout lets you connect your social media accounts and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn corporate pages as well as Google Business Profiles, all from one dashboard. The scheduling tools of Sprout also have an image library to make it easier to manage the management of assets and cut down time during the creation process.
7. Determine your Key Performance Indicators
If you're planning to spend a lot of time creating content, it's crucial that your marketing efforts pay off. rewrite article software can increase your success by tracking and identifying the most important performance indicators.
For instance, a popular KPI for content marketers is the number of returning customers. This metric can be used to determine if your content can convert customers into customers and to pinpoint areas for improvement in future campaigns.
It is also important to identify the types of content you'd like create based on your goals and the audience. This could include blog articles as well as infographics, videos, and social media posts. Once you have identified the various formats of content, you should make a plan for each 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 planner is a valuable tool for any business looking to improve their marketing efforts. It assists you in keeping in mind your goals, audience and resources while allowing you to see how effective your strategy is over time.
A social media content calendar can help you decide when your posts are due to go live, which helps ensure that your content is posted consistently. You can also prepare for holidays and events that could impact your followers.
A keyword content plan is a fantastic method to improve your SEO strategies. It can help you determine 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. Determine Your Measurements
Whatever your preference, whether you opt to organize your content according to keywords or themes your marketing strategy should help you identify the most important metrics for each piece. This will help you determine the extent to which your content has been in order that you can continually improve it. A cloud-based marketing planner like Optimizely CMP can also make it easier for team members to work together and create reports useful to make future content decision-making.