Content Planning Tips

How to connect your business to your audience using these content planning tips

Would you like to effectively attract customers AND reach your business goals?

The content you produce connects your business to your audience. It also requires careful planning in order to effectively attract customers and reach your business goals.

The following content planning tips will help you create a streamlined process to develop a successful content marketing plan.

Research, Research, Research:
Conduct research on the themes and topics outlined in your content strategy to identify opportunities. Take a look at what your competitors are offering and be sure to account for industry trends and seasonal pattern.

Prioritise Content Ideas:
Tackle the low-hanging fruit first! List, evaluate, and score topic ideas (see the content decision-making matrix template below), then identify your high-value, low-cost topics for quick wins.

Focus on Your Audience:
Plan your content around your intended reader. Consider the problem you are solving or the question that you are answering for the viewer. Determine who is seeking out and consuming your content, and create your content accordingly.

Know Your Goal
Determine what you are trying to achieve before you execute to avoid losing time and wasting resources on efforts that don’t align with goals. Are you trying to raise awareness about your brand? Are you educating a group of people on a particular topic? By understanding what you’re trying to achieve, you can decide on a direction and determine the type of content to produce (e.g. video, infographic, blog content).

Hold Brainstorming Sessions:
Create an environment (on or off site) to get creative juices flowing and to encourage others to share fresh ideas. Learn effective ways to brainstorm to find ways to produce better, more valuable content than what’s currently available. This includes looking at your content inventory to find ways to repurpose and improve upon existing assets, which leads us to the next tip.

Check Your Content Inventory:
Don’t waste time reinventing the wheel when you have current pieces available that you can modify to satisfy current search trends and business goals. Use a content inventory audit worksheet to organise and list published assets (on and off line). Then pinpoint which pieces are high performers and which ones you can update to better align with present-day marketing and business objectives.

Prepare for Plan Execution: Decide if you will create content in-house or outsource it. Prepare a creative brief to provide a clear action plan to writers and designers. The brief also helps ensure the content “voice” and style are consistent with the brand.

I hope from this explanation your content production will become easier, however if you would like to go over anything to do with your marketing, I’m always here to help you.