Whilst content planning isn’t the most exciting aspect of the marketing process, it is an essential strategy for increasing the amount and quality of your content.
Making plans for the content you want to put on your website will mean that you will grow your brand, connect with your audience and stay on top of your monthly workload.
Review Review Review
It’s so important to use your analytics to review the last quarter’s performance for your blog posts, social media posts and mailing lists before writing the next quarter’s content plan.
By checking the traffic, engagement, click through’s and conversions, you will find out how successful your strategy has been. This will help you to tweak your ideas and make improvements.
The best way to carry out a successful review is to create a spreadsheet or use a tool to track the figures that are important to your business.
Set Goals
Think about what you want to accomplish before you write your content plan and set goals each time.
Your goals should always be SMART and be easy to measure. Ideas for targets could be related to:
- Sales
- Brand Awareness
- Growing your customers or keeping existing ones
- Increasing Engagement
Data and Metrics
Content does not improve your marketing by chance, it is based on metrics that can be used to measure the success of your campaign.
It isn’t about luck, but it is about data. For example:
Time spent on page – the time spent by a visitor on a page is a good indicator of engagement.
Bounce Rate – a good measure of how many visitors leave without clicking on anything.
Social media activity– a good measure of how many people find your content useful or relevant.
Who is your audience?
You must understand who you are trying to reach to design your content and build a profile to help you plan the right content.
- Demographics: Common physical attributes such as gender, geography, age, and marital status.
- Psychographics: Common psychological features such as their interests and values.
- Firmographics: Common descriptive attributes of an ideal B2B customer such as sector, location, size and customer base.
Types of Content
Deciding on the type of content to include is essential. Consider what your competitors are doing and what is successful for them.
- social media
- blog posts
- guides
- infographics
- memes and GIFs
- videos – YouTube, Tik Tok, reels, stories
- podcasts
- emails
- user-generated content (UGC)
- webinars
Content Workflow
This consists of the tasks that must be performed by your team to ensure that each piece of content is of high quality and created on time. This will include writing, filming, editing and graphic design.
When you review the success of your workflow you may even find that some aspects can be streamlined with templates.
Content Promotion
Once you have published your content you need to consider how it will be promoted. Without this, it will not reach your intended audience so think about how you can share across platforms or use mailing lists.
It’s a good idea to create a calendar to help you to know when to promote each piece of content published.
You can see that it takes a lot of work, skill and time to produce effective content that will help your brand grow. If you have any questions about how to manage your content and improve your SEO then don’t hesitate to get in touch with our creative team at SEO & Web.
