Mastering Content Planning: Six Steps to Boost Marketing Success
Understanding Content Planning
In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital marketing, mastering content planning is crucial for success. As we move into 2024, top-performing content marketers have credited their achievements to producing high-quality content, aligning goals with organizational objectives, effectively measuring content performance, and having a well-documented strategy. These elements are all integral to the content planning process, making it an essential step toward achieving marketing success. In this article, we will explore what content planning entails and outline six steps to build a robust content marketing plan for your business.
Table of Contents
- Understanding Content Planning
- Content Planning vs. Content Strategy
- How to Create a Content Plan
- Conclusion
Content Planning vs. Content Strategy
Content planning is the process of transforming your content strategy into an actionable schedule. It involves generating specific content ideas, determining where and when to publish content, outlining the content creation process and timelines, setting distribution strategies, and identifying the metrics to track success. A well-structured content plan ensures that your content provides value to your target audiences, builds authority within your industry, increases brand trust, and keeps you top of mind with customers.
How to Create a Content Plan
1. Start with a Content Strategy
A content strategy is the foundation of any successful content plan. It involves planning marketing content—such as blog posts, emails, social media posts, videos, and podcasts—that speaks to your audience and aligns with your business goals. Key elements to consider include:
- Goals: Ensure that content marketing goals support larger business and marketing objectives. For example, if your business goal is to boost brand awareness, you might aim to increase blog traffic by 20% in the next year.
- Budget: Determine whether you need to write in-house, pay for ads, hire contractors for creative work, or account for other expenses.
- Target Audience Research: Collect data about preferred content channels, consumption patterns, buying processes, and interests.
- Content Topics: Use persona research and business goals to outline topics that your target audience cares about, which can be grouped into content pillars.
- Content Types: Examples include how-to guides, explainer videos, blogs, customer profiles, and infographics.
- Distribution Channels: Specify where content will be distributed, such as Facebook, Instagram, or email.
- Publication Cadence: Define the frequency of publication by channel.
For instance, Hotel Lobby Candle focuses its content strategy on TikTok and Instagram, while also considering its blog and email newsletter. They maximize the value of each content piece by repurposing it across channels.
2. Determine Your Planning Window
Define how far ahead you plan content, which depends on industry dynamics. For rapidly evolving industries, like artificial intelligence, a monthly content plan might be necessary. For more stable industries, a quarterly plan may suffice. The key is to have a plan while leaving room for flexibility.
3. Set Your Tentpoles
Start with content topics based on your business’s calendar of tentpole marketing events, such as sales, product launches, and in-store events. Include community events or holidays relevant to your customers. For example, a plant store might use Earth Day as a tentpole event for a content campaign.
4. Brainstorm Content Ideas
Generate a list of specific evergreen content topics using your content pillars and tentpoles to maintain strategic focus. Broaden the lens to include relevant trends. Pay attention to trending topics and use social listening tools, monitor trending keywords, and read industry publications to stay current.
5. Build Your Content Calendar
Content calendars, or editorial calendars, are digital tools that plot when and where content will go live. They allow you to visualize your publication schedule, identify gaps, and plan ahead. You can build a basic content calendar using a content management system, calendaring application, or spreadsheet. Many project management systems offer editorial calendar templates with built-in content planning functions.
6. Execute Your Workflows
Once you’ve planned your content, build out your content creation and publication workflows with enough time for each step before the target publish dates. Specify who is responsible for designing, writing, reviewing, and approving content for publication. Include performance monitoring in your workflows and schedule regular content planning sessions to prevent gaps in your publication cadence.
Conclusion
Mastering content planning is essential for boosting marketing success. By developing a comprehensive content plan, businesses can ensure that their content aligns with strategic goals, resonates with target audiences, and maximizes impact across various channels. By following these six steps—starting with a content strategy, determining your planning window, setting tentpoles, brainstorming content ideas, building a content calendar, and executing workflows—businesses can create a robust content marketing plan that drives results.
2025 Tendency LTD. All rights reserved.
