The Importance of a Marketing Content Planner Content planners are accountable for defining a vision for content creation publication, distribution and publication. They also are accountable for evaluating and tracking the effectiveness of their strategy. This kind of content teaches the audience about the company's products and services. It also aids users to solve issues and meet their requirements. A marketing content planner is a spreadsheet or it could be a third-party program. The difference lies in how you use it. 1. Set Your Goals Benjamin Franklin's famous phrase If you don't plan, you plan for failure is true. Efficiency, structure and clear communication are essential to transform a visionary strategy into an efficient content marketing engine. Setting goals is among the most crucial steps to take in this process. You can start with high-level business goals or the SMART framework to make them more specific and achievable. This is also a great time to look over your existing content goals and ensure they are in line with the current strategy. Understanding your goals will allow you track the performance of every piece of content. This will allow you to determine what is working and what can be improved, allowing you to make the necessary adjustments and improve your overall performance. This will ultimately ensure that you're achieving your goals overall and delivering quality content to your viewers. 2. Identify Your Audience It is essential to know who your audience is in order to create content that is relevant, informative and effective. The best method to accomplish this is through conducting research and identifying the traits of your ideal customer personas. This can be done by using surveys, data analyses and other methods to gather details about your customers. You can then apply the results of your research to identify the content types that will be most efficient for you and your company. This can include anything from blog posts, podcasts, social media posts and webinars. Once you've determined the most effective formats then you can begin creating your content strategy. A tool for content planning can aid you in keeping track of your marketing goals and ensure that the most qualified people are working on the right projects. It can also boost productivity by allowing teams to remain focused on what's important and avoiding distractions. content marketing tools offers a free Content Analysis Report that you can download right now. 3. Find Your Ideal Platforms When creating digital content, it's crucial to adapt it to your preferred platform. Instagram users are looking for visually appealing visuals, while TikTok users love trendy short-form videos. Conducting some market research will aid in identifying your ideal users and their preferred platforms. A content planner for marketing can assist you in planning all the steps necessary to convert your ideas and concepts into a completed product. It will give you a structure to help you achieve your goals and ensure that everyone in your team is on the same level. Content planning tools such as Monday and Kapost aid you in this. They let you create tasks, assign them, collaborate, and track their progress through a single dashboard. There are more sophisticated tools, such as Wrike, which offer drop-down menus, a table with actionable items such as a message board and a project-wide timeline. Both come with a free version and more comprehensive subscriptions for teams that need more advanced capabilities. 4. Find Your Content Types If you're a single influencer or an enterprise marketing team, a planner for content can help you keep track of your ideas and ensures everyone is on the same page. It's also a great tool to manage content for long lead-time projects like quarterly or annual campaigns. A good content plan can assist you in determining the kinds of content that should be produced and how they should be executed. This includes determining the format your content should be in such as blog posts, infographics, case studies, podcasts, or social media press releases. It must also include a timeline for when these pieces must be published and produced. You should also keep track of metrics related to your objectives for content marketing like traffic and engagement. This will help you evaluate your results and make the needed adjustments. Using a program like Ahrefs will help you understand what's working and what's not. It also gives you insight into the performance of your competitors. 5. Identify Your Content Objectives If you have clear objectives for your content, it can help your team remain on track to reach their goals. If it's increasing traffic to SEO by rewriting blog posts or enhancing customer retention through hosting webinars, having clear goals will help you reach your content marketing goals. A good content planner can help you define your goals through laying out a workflow that is organized 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 can assist you in identifying your performance metrics, key performance indicators (KPIs) as well as other important elements. This will allow you to assess the effectiveness of your content and react accordingly to improve your marketing campaign. Some examples of quantifiable 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 time of your content's existence, including production, publication, and distribution. 6. Identify Your Resources A great content strategy is useless when you don't have the resources to execute it. When planning, ensure that you have enough funds to complete the tasks you've laid out. This may include salary or team payments, production costs for web space and materials, and paid marketing tactics. Once you have a budget in place, you can start assigning the responsibility for each task. For instance, you could decide to assign tasks such as keyword research and copywriting, editing and design to various members of your team. Alternatively, Sprout can be used to automate the process of scheduling your content across multiple platforms. You can connect your social media accounts with the Sprout tool and schedule posts for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn company pages and Google Business Profiles all from one dashboard. Sprout's tools for scheduling include an image library that streamlines managing assets and reduces time during the creation process. 7. Determine your Key Performance Indicators It's crucial to ensure that your marketing efforts are worth it if you're spending lots of time writing content. Identifying and tracking the right key performance indicators can help you measure the effectiveness of your content and boost your results over time. For instance the number of repeat customers is a popular KPI employed by content marketers. This metric can be used to determine if your content is converting customers to you and to determine areas for improvement in future campaigns. In addition, it is important to identify the types of content you'd like develop based on your goals and the audience. This could be posts on social media, blog articles or infographics, as well as videos. Once you have identified the various formats for your content and formats, you must make a plan for each that includes frequency and distribution. This will ensure that the right people are viewing your content at the right time. 8. Identify Your tracking methods A marketing content plan can be a valuable tool for any company looking to improve its marketing strategies. It helps you keep in mind your marketing goals as well as your audience and your resources, while also allowing you the ability to assess your strategy's effectiveness over time. A social media content calendar can help you determine the time when your posts are scheduled to go live, which helps ensure that your content is posted regularly. It also lets you plan ahead for any holidays or other events that could affect the engagement of your followers. A keyword content plan is a great method of optimizing your SEO strategies. It can help you identify the right keywords for your content, which can improve your search engine ranking and visibility. It can also help you evaluate the effectiveness of your content strategy based on keywords over time. 9. Identify Your Measurements Your marketing plan should allow you to 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 understand the extent to which your content has been so that you can continuously improve it. A cloud-based marketing planer, like Optimizely CMP can also make it easier for team members to collaborate and produce reports that can be used for making future content planning decisions.
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