The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner
Content planners are responsible for defining a vision for content creation, publication and distribution. They also have to evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of a strategy.
This type of content informs the audience about the products and services that the company offers. It also aids the audience to solve problems and meet their requirements.
A marketing content planner may be a spreadsheet or a third-party tool. The difference lies in how you make use of it.
1. Identify Your Goals
The famous quote, frequently credited to Benjamin Franklin although perhaps never spoken by him, holds true: “If you fail to plan, you will fail.” Moving from a strategic plan to an effective content marketing engine requires structure, workflow efficiencies and clear communication.
One of the most important steps in this process is identifying your goals. You can begin with a high-level goal for your business, or you can use the SMART Framework to make them more specific. It is also a good time to look over your current content goals and ensure that they in line with the current strategy.
Understanding your goals will allow you monitor the performance of every piece of content. This will help you determine what is working and what isn’t working and allow you to make the necessary adjustments and improve the overall performance. This will help you meet your overall goals, and deliver quality content to your users.
2. Identify Your Audience
Knowing your audience will enable you to create content that is relevant, engaging and effective. The best way to do this is through conducting research and identifying the characteristics of your ideal customer personas. This can be done using surveys, data analyses and other methods to gather details about your customers.
You can then use the results of your research to determine the kinds of content that are most effective for your company. This could range from blog posts and social media posts to webinars and podcasts. Once you’ve decided the most effective formats then you can begin creating your content strategy.
A content planning tool can assist you in tracking your marketing goals and make sure that the most qualified people are working on the right projects. It can also improve productivity by helping teams focus on the most important things and avoid distractions. It’s easy to start by downloading a no-cost Content Analysis Report from CopyPress today.
3. Identify Your Ideal Platforms
It’s important to tailor your content for the platform you prefer. Instagram users are looking for visually appealing images, whereas TikTok users love trendy short-form videos. Conducting some market research can help you identify your ideal audience and their preferred platforms.
A successful marketing content planner will take into account every step needed to convert your ideas into an actual asset. It will give you a framework to achieve your goals and ensure everyone on your team is in agreement.
A content planning tool such as Monday and Kapost can assist with this by allowing you to design, assign tasks and collaborate, as well as track progress on a single dashboard. There are more sophisticated tools, like Wrike, that offer drop-down menus, tables with actionable items as well as a message board and a project-wide timeline. Both offer a free version, as well as more extensive subscriptions if your team requires more advanced features.
4. Find Your Content Types
A content planner is an excellent tool for anyone, whether you’re an individual influencer or with a team of marketing professionals within a large corporation. It helps you stay organized and ensures that everyone is on the same place. It’s a great tool to use for managing content for projects with an extended lead time for example, annual or quarterly campaigns.
A good content plan can help you identify the kinds of content that need to be produced and how they should be executed. This involves determining the format of your content, such as podcasts, blogposts, infographics, case study, or social media releases. This should include a timetable of the date these pieces will be produced and published.
You should also be keeping track of metrics related to your goals for content marketing, such as traffic and engagement. This will help you analyze your results and make the needed adjustments. Utilizing a tool such as Ahrefs can help you determine what’s working and what’s not. It can also provide insights into the performance of your competitors.
5. Determine Your Content Goals
If you have clear goals 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 objectives will help you reach your goals in marketing content.
A professional content planner can assist you define your goals by drawing out a workflow that is organized and allowing collaboration. It can also incorporate tools like image-generation software and text-to-image instructions, or social management apps, to streamline the process.
A marketing content planner will assist you in identifying your metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs), and other crucial factors. This will enable you to monitor your content’s effectiveness and make adjustments to improve your marketing campaign. Bounce rate, website traffic and social media shares are all examples of metrics that are quantifiable. These metrics should be monitored at all stages of the content lifecycle including production and publication.
6. Identify Your Resources
A successful content strategy will be useless without the resources to make it happen. When planning, ensure that you have enough money to accomplish all the tasks you’ve outlined. This can include salary or team payments production costs including web space, marketing tactics.
Once you have a budget, you can assign the responsibility for each task. For instance, you could be able to assign keyword research editing, copywriting, and design to various members of your team. Alternatively, Sprout can be used to automate the process of scheduling your content across multiple platforms.
You can connect your social media accounts with 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 simplifies the management of assets and helps save time during the creation process.
7. Find your Key Performance Indicators
If you’re going to spend many hours creating content, it’s essential that your marketing efforts yield results. Identifying and tracking the right key performance indicators can aid in assessing the effectiveness of your content and increase your results over time.
For instance for a return customers is a popular KPI used by content marketers. This is a metric used to determine if your content converts customers and to identify areas for improvement in future campaigns.
It’s also important to determine the type of content you will create in accordance with your goals and target audience. This could include blog posts as well as infographics, videos, and posts on social media. Once you’ve identified the various formats of content, you need to create a plan that includes the frequency and distribution methods for each. 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 company looking to improve their marketing efforts. It assists you in keeping the track of your goals, audience, and resources while allowing you to assess how efficient your strategy is over time.
A social media content calendar can help you decide when your posts are scheduled to be published, which can help ensure that your content is released consistently. You can also prepare for holidays and events that could impact your followers.
A keyword content strategy is an excellent tool to improve your SEO strategies. It will help you identify the most relevant keywords for your content and improve your visibility and search engine rankings. It will also help you measure the effectiveness of your keyword content strategy over time.
9. Identify Your Measurements
Regardless of whether you choose to organize your content by keyword or theme your marketing strategy content strategy should identify the most important metrics for each piece. This will help you evaluate the effectiveness of your content and keep improving it. A cloud-based marketing content planner, like Optimizely CMP can aid in managing collaboration between team members and produce reports that are useful for making decisions about future content planning.
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