The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner
Content planners are responsible for creating a vision of content creation, publication and distribution. They are also responsible to evaluate and monitor the effectiveness of a plan.
This type of content educates the audience about the company's products and services. It also aids the audience in solving problems and meet their requirements.
A marketing content planner is a spreadsheet, or it could be a third-party software. The difference lies in how you use it.
1. Set Your Goals
Benjamin Franklin's famous quote "If you don't plan, you plan for failure" is a true statement. Efficiency, structure and clear communication are essential to transform a strategic vision into an efficient content marketing engine.
Identifying your goals is one of the most important steps to take in this process. Start with the high-level business goals or employ the SMART framework to make them more specific and attainable. It's also a good opportunity to look over your current content goals to make sure they're in line with your 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 can be improved. This will allow you to make the necessary adjustments and improve your overall performance. This will ensure that you achieve your goals and provide quality content to your audiences.
2. Identify Your Audience
It is crucial to know who your target audience is in order to create content that is relevant, interesting and efficient. The best way to do this is to conduct research and identifying the traits of your ideal customer personas. This can be accomplished through surveys, data analysis, and other methods of collecting information about your customers.
You can then use the results of your research to determine the content types that are most effective for you and your business. This can include everything from blog posts, podcasts, social media posts and webinars. Once you've identified which formats are most efficient, you can start creating your content plan.
A tool for content planning will assist you in keeping track of marketing goals and ensure the right people work on the right projects. It can also improve productivity by helping teams concentrate on what's important and stay clear of distractions. CopyPress provides a free Content Analysis Report that you can download right now.
3. Identify Your Ideal Platforms
When creating digital content, it's important to make it a perfect fit for your ideal platform. Instagram users are seeking visually appealing content, whereas TikTok viewers enjoy short, fashionable videos. Conducting some market research can help you identify your ideal audience and their preferred platforms.
An effective marketing content planner will account for all the steps needed to transform your ideas into a finished asset. More methods will give you the framework you need to meet your goals and make sure that everyone in your team is in agreement.
A content planning tool like Monday and Kapost can assist with this by allowing you to design, assign tasks and collaborate, as well as monitor progress on a single dashboard. There are more sophisticated tools, such as Wrike, which offer drop-down menus that include a table with actionable items, a message board, and a project-wide timeline. Both provide a free version as well as more extensive subscriptions if your team requires more advanced features.
4. Identify Your Content Types
If you're a single influencer or an enterprise marketing team, a content planner can help you organize your ideas and ensures everyone is on the same page. It's a great tool for managing content for projects that have an extended lead time for example, annual or quarterly campaigns.
A good content planner will assist you in determining the kinds of content to create and how to execute them. This involves determining the structure of your content, like podcasts, blogposts, infographics or case studies, or social media releases. This should include a timetable of the date these pieces will be created and published.
You should also monitor the metrics that are relevant to your objectives for content marketing, such as traffic and engagement. This will allow you to examine your results and make necessary adjustments. Using a tool like Ahrefs can help you determine what's working and what's not. It can also give you insights into the performance of your competitors.
5. Determine Your Content Objectives
If you set clear goals for your content this will assist your team to keep on track to meet their goals. Clare goals will help you meet your goals in marketing content whether it's to increase SEO traffic by enhancing blog posts or to increase retention of customers by organizing webinars.
A good content planner can help you define your objectives by creating an organized workflow and allowing for collaboration. It can also incorporate tools like image-generation software, prompts for text-to-image and social management applications to streamline the process.
In addition to setting goals and creating an expected workflow, a content planner can help you identify your key performance indicators (KPIs). This will let you assess the effectiveness of your content and make changes to improve your marketing campaign. Some examples of measurable metrics include bounce rate websites, traffic to websites, social media shares, and newsletter sign-ups. These metrics must be tracked at all stages of the lifecycle of content including publication and production.
6. Identify Your Resources
If you do not have the resources required to implement your content strategy, it's useless. When planning, ensure that you have the budget to complete the tasks you've laid out. This can include salary or team payments production costs as well as web space and marketing tactics.
Once you have a budget in place, you can begin assigning responsibilities for each task. You can assign different employees to do keyword research, copywriting, editing, or design. You can also use a tool like Sprout to ease the process of scheduling content across different platforms and channels.
You can connect your social media accounts to the Sprout tool and schedule posts to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn company pages and Google Business Profiles all from one dashboard. Sprout's scheduling tools also include an image library that can simplify the management of assets and cut down time in the process of creating.
7. Determine Your Key Performance Indicators
It's crucial to make your marketing efforts worth it if you're spending lots of time writing content. You can increase your success by tracking and identifying the right key performance metrics.
For instance the number of repeat customers is a common KPI used by content marketers. This measure can be used to determine how effective your content is at converting customers. it can be used to determine areas for improvement in future campaigns.
In addition, it is important to identify the types of content you'd like develop based on your goals and the audience. This could include posts on social media, blog articles, infographics, or videos. Once you have identified the different content formats you need to make a plan for each that includes frequency and distribution. This will ensure that the right people are seeing your content at the right time.
8. Identify Your Methods of Tracking
A marketing content planner is a valuable tool for any business seeking to enhance their marketing strategies. It assists you in keeping track of your goals, audience, and resources while allowing you to evaluate how effective your strategy has been over time.
A social media content calendar can help you decide when your posts are due to be published, which can help ensure that your content is released regularly. You can also prepare for holidays and events that could affect your followers.
A keyword content plan is a great way to optimize your SEO strategies. It can help you identify the right keywords for your content, which can boost your search engine ranking and visibility. It will also help you evaluate the effectiveness of your keyword content strategies over time.
9. Identify Your Measurements
Your marketing strategy should help you identify which metrics are most relevant for each piece, regardless of whether you arrange your content by theme or keyword. This will help you determine the success of your content so that you can continue to improve it. A cloud-based marketing content planner, like Optimizely CMP, can also make it easier to manage collaboration between team members and create reports that can be useful in making future decisions regarding content planning.