The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner

Content planners create a vision for publishing, creation and distribution. They are also responsible for tracking and assessing the effectiveness of strategies.

This type of content informs the audience about the company's products and services. It also helps users to solve issues and meet their requirements.

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

1. Identify Your Goals

The famous quote, often believed to be the work of Benjamin Franklin although perhaps never spoken by him, holds true: "If you fail to plan, you will fail." Efficiency, structure and clear communication are essential to transform a strategic plan into a successful content marketing engine.

The process of identifying your goals is one of the most crucial steps in this process. You can begin with a high-level goal for your business, or you can use the SMART Framework to make them more specific. This is also a great time to review the goals for content and ensure they in line with the current strategy content marketing.

Understanding your goals will help you track the performance of every piece of content. This will help you determine which elements are working and which isn't working, allowing you to make the necessary adjustments and improve your overall performance. This will ensure that you're meeting your overall goals and delivering quality content to your viewers.

2. Identify Your Audience

It's important to know who your target audience is to develop content that is relevant, informative and efficient. This can be accomplished through conducting research to discover the traits of your ideal customers personas. This can be accomplished through surveys, data analysis and other methods of collecting details about your customers.

You can then use 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 anything from blog posts and social media posts to podcasts and webinars. Once you've identified which formats will be most efficient, you can start drafting your content plan.

A tool for planning content will assist you in keeping on top of marketing goals and make sure that the appropriate people are working on the right projects. It can also increase productivity by allowing teams to stay focused on what's important and avoiding distractions. CopyPress offers a free Content Analysis Report that you can utilize right now.

3. Choose 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 enjoy stylish short-form videos. You can determine the preferred platforms of your target audience through conducting market research.

An effective marketing content planner will take into account every step needed to turn your ideas into a completed asset. It will outline a plan to help you meet your goals and ensure that everyone on your team is on the same page.

Content planning tools like Monday and Kapost aid you in this. They allow you to create tasks and assign them, work together and monitor their progress in a single dashboard. There are other more advanced tools, like Wrike, that offer drop-down menus that include tables with actionable items, a message board, and a general project timeline. Both of them offer a free version, as well as more extensive subscriptions if your team requires more advanced features.

4. Identify Your b2b content marketing Types

A content planner is a great tool for any person, whether you're an individual influencer or a team of marketers within a large corporation. It helps you stay organized and ensures that everyone is on the same level. It's a great tool for managing content for projects that have a longer lead time for projects like annual or quarterly campaigns.

A solid content strategy can help you identify the kinds of content that must be created and how they should be executed. This includes determining what format your content should be in, such as blog posts, infographics, case studies, podcasts or social media press releases. This should include a timeline of the date these pieces will be created and published.

It is also important to monitor the results of your content marketing goals like engagement and traffic. This will allow you to review your results and make necessary adjustments. Ahrefs is a great tool to help you determine what is working and what is content in marketing isn't. It can also provide you with insight into the performance of your competitors.

5. Identify Your Content Goals

If you have clear goals for your content, it can help your team 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 assist you in achieving your content marketing goals.

A good content planner can help you define your objectives by laying out an organized workflow and allowing collaboration. It could also include tools like image-generation software and text-to-image instructions or social management software to simplify the process.

A marketing content planner will aid you in identifying your metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) and other crucial factors. This will allow you to monitor your content's effectiveness and make changes to improve your campaign. Bounce rate, website traffic, and social media shares are examples of metrics that can be measured. These metrics should be tracked throughout the time of your content's existence 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 enough money to complete all of the tasks you've laid out. This can include salary or team payments, production costs including web space, marketing strategies.

Once you have a budget, you can assign responsibilities for each task. For instance, you may decide to assign tasks such as keyword research, copywriting, editing, and design to various members of your team. Alternatively, you can also use a tool like Sprout to ease the process of scheduling content across various channels and platforms.

Sprout allows you to connect your social media content marketing media accounts and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn company pages and Google Business Profiles, all from one dashboard. The scheduling tools of Sprout also have an image library to simplify managing assets and reduce time during the creation process.

7. Determine your Key Performance Indicators

It is crucial to make your marketing efforts worthwhile if you're going spend many hours creating content. The right way to identify and track the key performance indicators can help you measure the effectiveness of your content and boost your performance over time.

For instance for a return customers is a popular KPI employed 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 is also important to identify the types of content you'd like to create based on your goals and your target audience. This may include blogs, social media posts, articles, infographics, or videos. After you've identified these various formats of content, you need to devise a plan that includes frequency and distribution methods for each. This will help you ensure that your content is being read by the most relevant people at the appropriate times.

8. Find Your Methods of Tracking

A marketing content planner is a valuable tool for any company looking to enhance their marketing strategies. It can help you keep the track of your goals, audience, and resources, while allowing you to assess how effective your strategy has been over time.

A social media calendar will help you plan your content and ensure that it is regularly released. It also allows you to prepare for occasions or holidays that could impact your audience's engagement.

A keyword content strategy is a powerful tool to optimize your SEO strategies. It will help you identify the best keywords for your content and increase your search engine ranking and visibility. It will also help you determine the effectiveness of your keyword content strategy over time.

9. Determine Your Measurements

Regardless of whether you choose to organize your content according to keyword or theme the marketing plan you create should assist you in identifying the most important metrics for each piece. This will allow you to assess the effectiveness of your content to keep improving it. A cloud-based marketing content marketing funnel planner, like Optimizely CMP, can also make it easier to manage collaboration among team members and produce reports that can be useful in making future content planning decisions.