The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner

Content planners design a strategy for publishing, creation, and distribution. They also are accountable for evaluating and tracking the effectiveness of strategies.

This type of content informs the audience on the services and products offered by the company. It also helps the audience resolve issues and meet their requirements.

A marketing content planner is a spreadsheet, or it can be a third-party software. The difference is in how you make use of it.

1. Identify Your Goals

Benjamin Franklin's famous phrase "If you don't plan, you plan for failure" is true. Structure, workflow efficiency and clear communication are essential to transform a visionary strategy into a successful content marketing engine.

One of the most important actions in this process is identifying your goals. Start with the high-level business goals or employ the SMART framework to make them more specific and attainable. It's also a good time to look over your current content goals to ensure they are still in line with your current strategy.

Understanding your goals will help you monitor the performance of every piece of content. This will help you determine what works and what can be improved, allowing you make the necessary adjustments and improve your overall performance. This will ensure that you meet your overall goals, content marketers and deliver quality content to your audiences.

2. Identify Your Audience

Knowing your audience can enable you to create content that is relevant, effective and engaging. The best way to do this is by conducting research and identifying the traits of your ideal customer personas. This can be done by using surveys, data analysis, and other methods to gather details about your customers.

Using the findings of this research and the results of this research, you can determine the types of content that are most effective for your company. This could include everything from blog posts to social media posts, podcasts, and webinars. Once you've determined which formats are most efficient, you can begin creating your content strategy.

A tool for content planning can assist you in tracking your marketing goals and ensure that the most qualified people are working on the appropriate projects. It can also improve productivity by allowing teams to focus on the most important things and staying clear of distractions. CopyPress provides a free Content Analysis Report that you can utilize today.

3. Identify Your Ideal Platforms

When creating digital content, it's important to make it a perfect fit for the ideal platform. Instagram users are searching for visually appealing content, while TikTok viewers enjoy short and trendy videos. You can discover the preferred platforms of your target audience through conducting market research.

A content planner for marketing will help you plan all the steps necessary to turn your ideas and concepts into a finished 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 content marketers Kapost help you with this. They allow you to create tasks and assign them to others, collaborate, and track their progress on a single dashboard. Alternatively, there are more in-depth tools like Wrike that allow for drop-down menu functionality and provide a general timeline of the project, tables of actionsable items and a message board. Both come with a no-cost version, and more extensive subscriptions for teams that require more advanced capabilities.

4. Identify Your Content Types

A content planner is a great tool for anyone, no matter if 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 page. It's a great tool for managing content for projects with more time to lead, such as annual or quarterly campaigns.

A well-designed content plan will assist you in determining the kinds of content that need to be created and the best way to get them executed. This includes determining what format your content should be presented in such as blog posts, infographics, case studies, podcasts or social media press releases. It should also include a timetable for when these pieces must be produced and published.

You should also be keeping track of the metrics that relate to your content marketing goals such as traffic and engagement. This will help you analyze your results and make needed adjustments. Utilizing a tool such as Ahrefs can help you see what's working and what's not. It can also provide you with insights into the performance of your competitors.

5. Find Your Content's Objectives

If you establish clear objectives for your content that will assist your team to remain on track to reach their goals. Whether that's increasing SEO traffic by updating blog articles or increasing customer retention by hosting webinars, having clear goals will help you reach your goals for content marketing.

A good content planner can help you define your objectives by laying out a well-organized workflow and allowing for collaboration. It can also incorporate tools such as image-generating software, text-to-image instructions or social management software, to streamline the process.

Apart from setting goals and establishing an expected workflow, a content planner can also assist you in identifying your metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). This will enable you to evaluate the effectiveness of your content and make adjustments to improve your campaign. Some examples of measurable metrics include bounce rate web traffic, website traffic as well as social media shares and newsletter signups. All of these metrics should be tracked throughout the entire lifecycle of your content, including production, publication and distribution.

6. Identify Your Resources

A successful content strategy won't be effective without the resources to make it happen. When planning, ensure you have enough budget to accomplish the tasks you have outlined. This may include team or salary payments, production costs for materials and web space, and paid marketing strategies.

Once you have a budget in place, you can begin assigning the responsibility for each task. You could assign different employees to do keyword research, copywriting, editing or design. Alternatively, Sprout can be used to automate the process of scheduling your content across various platforms.

Sprout lets you connect your social media accounts and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn company pages and Google Business Profiles, all from a single dashboard. Sprout's scheduling tools also include an image library to simplify managing assets and reduce time in the process of creating.

7. Find your Key Performance Indicators

It is crucial to ensure that your marketing efforts are worth it if you're spending lots of time writing content. You can boost your performance by analyzing and tracking the most important performance indicators.

For instance for a return customers is a typical KPI used by content marketers. This is a metric used to determine if your content can convert customers into customers and to determine areas to improve your future campaigns.

Additionally, it's crucial to determine the type of content marketing trends you'd like to create based on your objectives and your target audience. This could be blog posts videos, infographics, or posts on social media. Once you've identified the various types of content, it's crucial to create a plan that includes the frequency and distribution methods for each. This will ensure that the correct people are seeing your content at the appropriate time.

8. Find Your Tracking Methods

A marketing content planner is a useful tool for any company looking to improve their marketing efforts. It lets you keep track of your marketing goals 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 scheduled to go live, which helps ensure that your content is posted consistently. You can also plan ahead for holidays or events that could impact your followers.

A keyword content strategy is a great tool to optimize your SEO strategies. It can help you determine the most effective keywords for your content and improve your visibility and search engine rankings. It also helps to measure the effectiveness of keyword strategy for content over time.

9. Determine Your Measurements

Your marketing plan should help you identify which metrics are most important for each piece of content, regardless of whether you organize your content based on theme or keyword. This will help you determine how effective your content has been so that you can continuously improve it. A cloud-based marketing content planner, like Optimizely CMP can make it easier to manage collaboration among team members and generate reports that are useful for making future content planning decisions.