The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner

Content planners develop a strategy for publishing, creation and distribution. They also are accountable for evaluating and tracking strategy effectiveness.

This type of content informs the audience about the services and products provided by the company. It also helps the viewers solve problems and meet their requirements.

A marketing content planner could be a spreadsheet or a third-party tool. The difference lies in the way you utilize it.

1. Identify Your Goals

The famous quote, frequently credited to Benjamin Franklin although perhaps never heard by him, holds true: "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail." Efficiency, structure and clear communication are necessary to transform a strategic vision into an efficient content marketing engine.

Setting goals is one of the most crucial steps to take in this process. Start with the most basic business goals or use the SMART framework to make them more specific and achievable. This is also a great time to review current content goals and ensure that they align with current strategy.

Having a clear understanding of your goals will also help you monitor how well each piece of content performs. This will help you identify the things that work 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 objectives, and provide high-quality content to your audiences.

2. Identify Your Audience

It is crucial to understand who your audience is to develop content that is relevant, engaging and efficient. This can be accomplished by conducting research to determine the characteristics of your ideal customer personas. This can be accomplished by using surveys, data analyses and other methods of gathering data about your clients.

You can then apply the results of your research to identify the kinds of content that will be the most efficient for you and your business. This could include everything from blog posts to social media posts, podcasts, and webinars. Once you've decided which formats are most effective you can begin drafting your content strategy.

A tool for content planning can aid you in keeping track of your marketing goals and ensure that the appropriate people are working on the right projects. It can also increase productivity by allowing teams to focus on the most important things and staying clear of distractions. CopyPress provides a no-cost Content Analysis Report that you can utilize today.

3. Identify Your Ideal Platforms

It's crucial to adapt your content for the platform you prefer. Instagram users are searching for visually appealing content, whereas TikTok viewers enjoy short and trendy videos. You can discover your target audience's preferred platforms through conducting market research.

A successful marketing content planner will outline every step needed to turn your ideas into a finished asset. It will outline a plan to help you meet your goals and ensure that everyone in your team is on the same page.

A content planning tool such as Monday and Kapost can assist with this by allowing you to create, assign tasks and collaborate, as well as monitor progress on a single dashboard. There are also more in-depth tools like Wrike that offer drop-down menus and provide project timelines, a table of actionable items and a message board. Both of them offer the free version as well as more comprehensive subscriptions if your team requires more advanced features.

4. Find Your Content Types

Whether you're a solo influencer or a large marketing team, a content planner can help you keep track of your ideas and ensures everyone is on the same page. It's also a great way to manage content for longer lead-time projects like quarterly or annual campaigns.

A good content marketing consultant planner will help you identify which types of content to produce and the best way to create them. This involves determining the structure of your content marketing agency, for instance blogposts, infographics or podcasts, case study, or social media releases. This should include a schedule of when these pieces are expected to be produced and published.

You should also be keeping track of the metrics that relate to your goals for content marketing like traffic and engagement. This will enable you to analyze your results and make adjustments. Ahrefs is a great tool to help you determine what is working and what isn't. It can also provide insights into the performance of your competitors.

5. Identify Your Content Goals

When you have clear content objectives your team will stay on track and ensure they're meeting their goals. A clear set of goals will help you reach your goals for content marketing whether it's to boost seo content marketing traffic by enhancing blog posts or to increase retention of customers by arranging webinars.

A professional content planner can assist you to define your goals by laying out an organized workflow and allowing collaboration. It could also include tools such as image-generation software and text-to-image instructions, or social management apps to make the process easier.

A marketing content planner will help you to identify your metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as other important elements. This will allow you to evaluate the effectiveness of your content and react to improve your campaign. Some examples of measurable metrics include bounce rate web traffic, website traffic as well as social media shares and newsletter sign-ups. All of these metrics should be monitored throughout the duration of your content's lifecycle including publication, production, and distribution.

6. Identify Your Resources

A well-thought-out content strategy will be useless if you don't have the resources to execute it. During planning, make sure that you have the budget to accomplish all the tasks you've outlined. This could include team or salary payments, production costs for materials and web space, and paid marketing tactics.

Once you've got the budget in place, you can begin assigning responsibilities to each task. You might assign different employees to do keyword research, copywriting, editing as well as design. You can also employ a tool like Sprout to make it easier of scheduling content across various platforms and channels.

Sprout allows you to connect your social media accounts and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn corporate pages, as well as Google Business Profiles, all from a single dashboard. Sprout's scheduling tools also include an image library to simplify asset management and save time during the creation process.

7. Identify Your Key Performance Indicators

It's important to ensure that your marketing efforts are worth it if you're spending many hours creating content. Identifying and tracking the content marketing right performance indicators will aid in assessing the effectiveness of your content and boost your results over time.

For instance, a typical KPI for content marketers is the number of return customers. This metric can be used to gauge the effectiveness of your content at converting customers, and it can also be used to identify any areas of improvement for future campaigns.

Additionally, it's crucial to decide on the type of content you'd like to create based on your objectives and your target audience. This could be social media posts, blog articles or infographics, as well as videos. After you've identified these various content formats, it's important to create a plan that includes the frequency and distribution methods for each. This will ensure that the correct people are viewing your content at the right time.

8. Find out the tracking methods you are using

A marketing content planner is a valuable tool for any business looking to improve their marketing efforts. It lets you keep the track of your goals for marketing as well as your target audience and your resources, while giving you the ability to evaluate your strategy's effectiveness over time.

A social media content calendar can help you determine when your posts are due to be published, which can help ensure that your content is posted regularly. It also allows you to plan ahead for any holidays or other events that could affect your audience's engagement.

A keyword content strategy is an excellent tool to optimize your SEO strategies. It will help you identify the most relevant keywords for your content and increase your visibility and search engine rankings. It will also help you evaluate the effectiveness of your keyword strategy for content over time.

9. Determine Your Measurements

Whatever your preference, whether you opt to organize your content by keywords or themes, your marketing plan should be able to help you identify the most important metrics for each piece. This will help you assess the effectiveness of your content so that you can continue to improve it. A cloud-based marketing content planner, such as Optimizely CMP can aid in managing collaboration between team members and create reports that can be useful in making future content planning decisions.