Developing a Content Plan | The Fundamentals

The goal of developing a content plan is to create meaningful content.

Anything less creates confused and frustrated readers.

As a writer and publisher, you have the responsibility of making sure you have a content strategy in place. This strategy should be constructed around different departments of your company or brand. This is especially true if you want your readers on-board.

So in this article, we’ll dive into the fundamentals of creating a content strategy that has its applications throughout the entire company or brand.

Identifying the content objectives and KPIs

Content must support a key business objective or fulfill a need.

In many companies, content marketing is perceived as an opportunity for brand awareness, sales or engagement. Some larger, popular brands go beyond the standard content marketing metrics and aim to build one-to-one relationships with targeted users or stay ahead of any potential negatives. For the rest, content is used as a matter of awareness and engagement.

Therefore, it’s imperative to understand what content sets to achieve with each post. And we find it helps to work backwards. First, understanding the long term goals of the company. Second, determining the short term objectives. Afterwards, the key performance indicators or KPIs can be listed according to what needs to be measured. Here’s an example:

Goal: Customer Experience
Content Objectives: Customer Loyalty
KPI: Increase in return visitors, repeat orders, social followers and better ratings across platforms

Determine the audience and marketing channel

So for a successful content plan, you need to identify a specific person or group with specific needs, know where to find them and earn their attention by creating content that speaks directly to them across different channels, or touchpoints.

Traditionally, and now antiquated, a target audience would be identified by age group and/or geographic location. With the help of real-time online tools and in-depth market data, it’s possible to identify the propensity to actions, different beliefs and even sub-audiences to those audiences all with different behaviors, concerns and motivations. You can also easily map out which platforms your target audience is most likely to find and engage with your content and plan for those actions.

All this information can easily be collected and analyzed to develop content plans for your products and/or services.

Different content for different channels

This is where the hard work begins. The first step involves in-depth research; the identification of content opportunities; finding out what your competitors are saying and what your prospects are talking about. You’ll want to check into different content strategies that are employed currently and how you can not only emulate but improve upon them.

Following this research, you’ll want to build up the overall idea. For example, based upon the company or brand, service or product, how can you meet the needs and wants of your audience? What improvement or difference can you can bring to table? What’s more, how does your company, brand or service connect with topics that your audience might be interested in?

Evaluate the resources

Many companies look at the quantifiable resources available to make business plans and key decisions. For example, evaluating current technology to existing content, budgets and manpower. But for brands and companies with content strategies, its creative talents are at the core of the decision making and planning.

No doubt, marketing tools to track the performance will be required. Having access to these tools is an advantage. However, there are some very good free tracking tools, such as Google Analytics, Google Adwords, Google Webmaster Tools and MOZ, to design and manage content marketing plans.

So with a focus on these fundamental elements, developing a content plan is easy. The requirement is just to put it all together and give it an initial push. Once it’s in motion, with some time and management, it becomes self-sustaining.

Have fun with your content plan. And if you need help along the way, our digital marketing team at Savy is here to help.