It’s no secret that planning ahead makes content easier to manage. Keeping ahead of the competition usually takes more than scrambling for ideas the week something needs to be published. It comes from creating a content plan that makes maintaining your website, blog, and marketing channels feel a lot less like guesswork.
However, even the most prolific publishers have trouble creating a steady stream of fresh, relevant content year-round. Learning how to plan content that matches your business goals, audience, and buyer journey will help you turn momentary ideas into a long-range editorial calendar.
Your step-by-step guide to content planning
Here’s a step-by-step guide to building a content plan that gives your audience a year’s worth of timely, useful content without forcing your team to start from scratch every week.
Set a clear mission and goals
All good business plans start with a mission statement. This allows them to tailor business and marketing activities that line up with their values and goals. It’s the same with a content plan.
Why are you in business, and who does your business serve? What are your core values, and how will your content plan line up with your mission and values to help you reach your goals?
Missions and goals give your content boundaries. Anything you put in your content plan should, in some way, support the business you’re building, the audience you serve, and the outcomes you’re trying to create. Without those boundaries, your content calendar can fill up fast and still fail to move anything important forward.
Turn strategic goals into content priorities
Your content plan should be deliberately aligned with your business and marketing goals. It’s about choosing the right content types, distribution channels, and success metrics.
Think about your strategy and what you’re trying to achieve. If your goal is to build authority and build brand ambassadors, educational articles are often a good way to do that. If your goal is to increase conversions, your strategy may include sales enablement pages. Engaging posts, webinars, social media, and storytelling should all work together to strategically drive your message home.
Understand your market position
Now that the goals are clear, look at where the business sits in the market. You can’t know where you’re going until you know where you stand. This principle is foundational in navigating the complex terrain of your industry, niche, and competitive landscape.
What type of competition is your business up against? Is your business a budding startup, an established industry leader, or are you navigating the challenging waters somewhere in between a multitude of similar enterprises? Understanding your competitive level is the first step towards strategic content planning.
What are you trying to accomplish in your market? Are you trying to explain something unfamiliar? Differentiate from lookalike competitors? Support a premium offer? Build trust? Enter a new category? Your market position changes what kind of content you need.
Know your audience and buyer journey
Before drafting your content plan, define your audience, buyer journey, pain points, questions, objections, and decision stages. Getting this right is, perhaps, one of the most difficult yet important parts of successful marketing.
If your audience consists of seniors or new parents, they’re less likely to respond to a super-trendy presentation on a lifestyle blog for young professionals. In order for your content to resonate with your audience, it should be:
- built around topics that matter to them
- matched to where they are in the buyer journey
- created in a format they’re likely to use
- promoted on platforms they actually frequent
Moreover, planning your content requires an understanding of your audience’s needs, preferences, and behavior. You’re trying to create content that not only speaks to them on a personal level but also provides value, whether it’s through education, entertainment, or solutions to their problems.
Find the gaps before you fill the calendar
A content plan shouldn’t start with “what should we post this month?” It should start from what the site already has, what’s missing, what’s outdated, and what needs to be connected.
Content inventories, audits, and gap analyses stop the guesswork. A content inventory will help you find out what you already have on your site. The content audit outlines performance for individual pages and topic clusters. Finally, the content gap analysis identifies missing content tied to the buyer journey and user intent.
These three steps in content planning provide the answers to:
- What content already exists?
- What questions are still unanswered?
- Which pages need support?
- Which topics are overbuilt or competing?
- Which content should be updated before something new is created?
The answers give you the information you need to build a robust, active, and strategic calendar.
Give every planned piece a job
I talked about your audience, their intents, and the buyer journey, but how does that relate to the content? Each planned article, video, sales piece… each one should have a clear purpose. That purpose should make a difference in the type of content and the way the information is imparted.
Every piece should have a reason to exist: attract, educate, compare, support a service, answer an objection, strengthen a cluster, move someone toward a decision, or help retain/serve current customers. When you review your content plan, consider whether an article fits its purpose.
Use the right content for the right channel
Once you know who you’re trying to reach and what each planned piece is supposed to do, you can decide which channels and formats make the most sense. A visual topic may work well as a short video, infographic, carousel, or image-led social post. A complex topic may need a full article, guide, webinar, or downloadable resource. A trust-building topic may belong on your website first, then be broken into smaller pieces for LinkedIn, email, or social media.
The point isn’t to publish everywhere. The point is to match the content, channel, and audience behavior so the piece has a better chance of doing the job you created it to do. That is, drive engagement, build trust, and guide people toward the right next step.
Plan where each piece belongs
Once you know what each piece is supposed to do, decide where it belongs in your larger content marketing system. Some pieces support a pillar page. Others fill a cluster. Some pieces should become updates to existing articles instead of brand-new pages. Others may work better as social posts, newsletter topics, videos, or sales enablement assets.
This is also the point where internal links should be planned. Don’t wait until after publishing to ask how a piece connects to the rest of the site. If the topic supports a larger service, guide, or cluster, decide which pages it should link to and which existing pages should link back to it.
Create a calendar for content
Next, you want to sit down and decide how often you’ll post. The easiest way to do this is to create a content calendar that determines which days you’ll post and which topics will work best within that schedule. For example, a blog post created with teachers in mind might focus on classroom resources and learning aids, child psychology, holidays, and possibly important legislation or seminars.
Planning in advance not only helps with timely content releases, but it also provides your audience with consistent, relevant content they can look forward to reading on a set schedule.
Distribute, measure, retool
Content creation and scheduling are only as good as the results. If you want a solid, consistent ROI for your efforts, it’s important to assess your metrics, see what’s working, and what’s just too much work for little reward.
One good way to assess your articles’ engagement and reach is to study your analytics dashboards. Many publishers use GA4, Google Search Console (GSC), and CRM/form/conversion analytics. Analytics can even tell you which days your audience is tuning in or reading. Once you know where your efforts are paying off, you can structure future content so it does the most good.
Final Thoughts
Maintaining a website is a full-time job. By planning your content for the year ahead now, you’ll have more time for connecting with and growing your audience.
Having trouble turning your ideas into a working content plan? Talk to Level343 about building a content system that supports your goals, audience, and long-term visibility. Contact us today.
