Content Planning

Content marketing is one of the central dis­ci­plines of suc­cess­ful online com­mu­ni­ca­tion. If you want to be suc­cess­ful in content marketing and impress ever-more demanding customers, you should plan your content properly right from the start. Pre­vi­ous­ly in our content marketing guide, we discussed the 8 most important steps to achieving a suc­cess­ful content marketing strategy. Today, we’re taking a closer look at the cor­ner­stone of content marketing: proper content planning.

If you’re at the beginning of your strategic planning and are yet to determine the main aim of your content marketing, or you’re still carrying out target group analysis, then content planning can help to hold all of this together in a struc­tured plan. Going forward, you will need to focus on co­or­di­nat­ing topics, ap­point­ments, channels, and of course on sourcing reliable employees. The planning process usually begins with a search for valuable topics and finishes with a concrete editorial plan. In this article, we’ll take you through the most important steps in the process of content planning.

An important component of content planning is finding topics. In order to con­tin­u­al­ly provide fans and followers with new and in­ter­est­ing topics, you have to continue to find fresh, relevant, and exciting ideas regularly. Finding topics and re­search­ing is a continual process that should become part of the weekly routine for employees working in content marketing. The central focus should always be the interests and needs of the target group. 

You shouldn’t make the common mistake of focusing on your own interests and picking topics according to personal taste when planning content. There’s good reason for this too: if your target group isn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly in­ter­est­ed in a topic you post about, you’ll miss out on huge potential – above all directly through in­ter­ac­tions and en­gage­ment as well as in­di­rect­ly through reach. Likes, shares, and other general forms of rec­om­men­da­tion are valuable. And you’ll only get these if you’ve paid attention to your target market and tried to un­der­stand their problems, questions, and wishes – and then tailored your content to these. So how does this work?

If you want to discover more about the thoughts and wishes of your target audience, there are a few options to help you get closer to them. The first question that you should consider is what your target audience is looking for. Just as in classic keyword research for search engine op­ti­miza­tion (SEO), the focus for finding ideas for content creation should be on questions that the user typically enters into search engines online. To find out what your target group is searching for, there are some other useful tools besides the Google Keyword Planner.

Analysis of trends

An important mark of quality for content is current relevance. Content marketers have to record relevant and – above all – current topics and con­tribute to dis­cus­sions with ap­pro­pri­ate content. So paying regular attention to current trends and hotly debated topics is a crucial aspect in content planning. There are various tools and platforms available to help with this, including:

• Google Trends

• Trending topics and hashtags on Twitter or Facebook

• BuzzSumo

Pay attention

If you’ve iden­ti­fied some trends and in doing so have found some good ideas for topics, then there are methods to avoid commonly discussed topics, and focus on the specific pref­er­ences of your target groups. These are useful for finding out more about your audience by listening to them, reading user comments, and observing their behavior. There are several ways to go about this.

Customer service

If you want to get to know your existing customers, you must open your ears to them. This is where your col­leagues in customer-re­la­tion­ship man­age­ment and customer service come into play. These are the employees with the most direct contact to customers, and they spend the majority of their day-to-day em­ploy­ment handling queries and com­plaints from your users via telephone or e-mail. This in­for­ma­tion is valuable input – even when it comes to finding content topics. If you take the time to answer the questions and concerns of your customers in the form of tutorials, blog entries, or videos, you’ll be offering them an added value. Another option can be to actively ask for sug­ges­tions and areas of im­prove­ment. Surveys, in­ter­views, and reviews, which could be generated by an e-mail marketing campaign, are also good op­por­tu­ni­ties to receive opinions and feedback directly from customers.

Social Media

But it’s not just the opinion of your existing customers that’s important – you should pay close attention to potential new customers too. The best source of opinion from your target market is of course: social media. There are numerous spe­cial­ized tools to help you identify dis­cus­sions and popular topics on the social web. You should take advantage of these mon­i­tor­ing options to observe dis­cus­sion, using the knowledge you gain to influence your content planning.

In­flu­encers

Another option is iden­ti­fy­ing in­flu­encers and opinion leaders in the field. In­flu­encer marketing is concerned with the suc­cess­ful part­ner­ships of celebri­ties, bloggers, or jour­nal­ists, together with companies – you can read more about it in our digital guide to in­flu­encer marketing. Before you integrate in­flu­encers into your company com­mu­ni­ca­tion actively and make them brand am­bas­sadors, it’s worth doing your research: has a blogger or a YouTuber already published reviews or other in­for­ma­tion about your product in the past? If so, can the results be trans­ferred into mean­ing­ful content for your users/fans and followers? How did the community react to the in­flu­encer’s post, and how can you use this reaction?

Content op­ti­miza­tion and content recycling

When searching for new topics for your content planning, don’t forget to think about content op­ti­miza­tion and what’s known as ‘content recycling’. Existing content can also be updated and extended with new aspects and a little effort. Content that doesn’t have to be current, or remains current for a while, can be con­sid­ered ‘re­cy­clable’ – you can simply create new formats of the same content.

While you can post blog entries on your company website, you can use an in­fo­graph­ic, whitepa­per, or videos to post on other platforms.

Results: a wider topic selection

All points of contact between consumers and brands or products listed above are in­cen­tives for good content marketing planning.

Other than through the methods mentioned above, you can find new topic ideas:

• through reading industry magazines

• by keeping track of event calendars with trade fairs and other events within the industry

• by analyzing your com­pe­ti­tion

• by looking at your own company, your history, and your company culture

Even though there are a wealth of great topics to choose from that will be relevant to your company, you shouldn’t forget the initial aims you set and your brand’s po­si­tion­ing. If you’ve done things right, you’ll end up with a large pool of topics and ideas that you can draw upon later – but the research and ideas phase has to lead to a strategic planning of resources and the drafting of an editorial plan.

Im­ple­ment­ing an editorial plan requires good resource man­age­ment in advance. Here are some of the most important things to consider:

• Clearly define re­spon­si­bil­i­ties: who’s in charge of which topics and content?

• Stick to the schedule: how often will you post and on which channels? The reg­u­lar­i­ty of your pub­lish­ing on your various platforms will depend on the aims of your com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

• Clarify avail­abil­i­ty: who’s in charge of creating content at the last minute? Who’s re­spon­si­ble for spon­ta­neous blog posts? In the modern digital world, it’s more important than ever to react to news and changes in real time and comment on daily updates as quickly as possible.

• Always be ready for sudden changes: fast and spon­ta­neous reactions when un­ex­pect­ed news breaks or viral internet sen­sa­tions appear are essential when writing content. But community man­age­ment also plays an important role in everyday content marketing. When it comes to answering comments and queries, the quicker your reaction, the better. To make sure you can pull this off suc­cess­ful­ly, it makes sense to clearly define your com­mu­ni­ca­tion strategy. That way, if something sudden and un­ex­pect­ed comes up, you can refer to your strategy to plan your reaction.

For many companies, resource planning holds the key to mastering content strategy. For this reason, you shouldn’t just draft an editorial plan: you should make sure you stick to it, creating good content and sharing it over your many des­ig­nat­ed channels. If there aren’t enough resources available in-house, it can be worth­while looking for external service providers. But the decision to put your content pro­duc­tion in the hands of others is a big one. Your in-house staff normally know exactly what type of content you need and how to produce it. This means that you should weigh-out whether an external agency or another service provider will deliver the content you need in the quality you want.

Once you’ve decided upon your topics and carried out your resource planning, it’s time to build an editorial plan. A well-struc­tured plan has many re­spon­si­bil­i­ties – it helps with or­ga­ni­za­tion and time­keep­ing as well as creating trans­paren­cy and com­mit­ment. To form an editorial plan, you’ll need to take your col­lec­tion of ideas and structure them into cat­e­gories and sub-cat­e­gories. The most important questions to answer in this process of content planning are:

• Is the topic relevant to my aims and strategic planning?
• Which of my aims does this topic focus on?
• Which of my buyer personas will I be speaking with on this topic?
• Which point of contact during the customer journey is the topic suited towards?

Customer journey maps can be used as a basis, par­tic­u­lar­ly to answer the last question. This involves looking more closely at the in­di­vid­ual phases involved in the pur­chas­ing decision process, and iden­ti­fy­ing the central touch points between the customer and the brand – you can later build your content marketing strategy around these touch points. To learn more about touch points and how to use them, please refer to our digital guide article about customer journey mapping.

Your editorial plan should now contain all of your content planning and the topics you intend to write about at a later stage, and you should refer to it before making any strategic decisions.

What goes in the editorial plan?

Your editorial plan is designed to provide clear in­struc­tions for all actions, create roles and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties, and contain deadlines and pub­li­ca­tion dates. It makes sense to create your editorial plan in a calendar format. This will make the plan clearer and more binding than a list of dates.

The content calendar usually covers a fixed time, which can vary between four weeks and three months. You should also include any other important ap­point­ments and events, to be sure you factor them into your time­keep­ing. A detailed overview about tasks and re­spon­si­bil­i­ties will usually contain:

• Scheduled pub­li­ca­tion times
• Focus areas including a headline, keywords, target group, and CTA if necessary
• Re­spon­si­bil­i­ties of editors, including required releases, deadlines, and statuses, if necessary
• Content for­mat­ting (guide, news, how-to, surveys, video tutorials, galleries, etc.)
• Dis­tri­b­u­tion channels: where will the content be published?

Depending on your com­mu­ni­ca­tions strategy, it could be worth­while to write down notes about your re­spec­tive target group. Which personas is the planned content designed to reach? As mentioned above, you should also include the targeted touch points within the customer journey in the editorial plan.

Free templates for your editorial plan

The question that most marketers ask them­selves is: what’s the best way to implement this plan? How will I manage to collect all relevant in­for­ma­tion in one place and create a calendar that all re­spon­si­ble col­leagues can access? Many companies use classic Excel files, or Sheets on Google Drive. The latter can also be edited by multiple col­leagues in real time.

But combining all the in­for­ma­tion you need into a concise, struc­tured document with the cor­re­spond­ing functions and ref­er­ences is certainly a challenge. And you can quickly lose sight of the overview for the plan. For­tu­nate­ly, there are many free templates online that you can use to create a clear and concise structure. We’ll introduce the best ones below:

Editorial calendar template from Curata

Curata is a simple editorial tool designed in Excel format. It comes with a feature to organize employees around your content plan and structure, and lets you track tasks to help stream­line per­for­mance. Curata’s tool offers an­a­lyt­i­cal features too, including meta tags, notes, and labels, that allow you to analyze per­for­mance.

Webpage FX – built in Google Sheets

Webpage FX’s intuitive tool is perfect for Google Sheets users. It’s a template created within the program that you can edit without down­load­ing. Packed full of clever ideas and options, Webpage FX offers every­thing that you need to create a solid format for your editorial plan.

Convince & Convert – the eye-catching Excel template and guide

Convince & Convert offer more than just a down­load­able guide. The content experts here offer a content marketer’s guidebook for building your own editorial plan as well as their free, down­load­able template that you can use. Their editorial plan template is based on Excel, but their tips and guidance can be applied to any software you want to use.

Of course, there are a number of pro­fes­sion­al tools that can help you in content planning and generally in im­ple­ment­ing a content marketing strategy. For an overview of these, check out our digital guide to the best content marketing tools.

The next important aspect in content planning is the choice of ap­pro­pri­ate dis­tri­b­u­tion channels.

When it comes to choosing the right dis­tri­b­u­tion strategy, many companies still have a lot of catching up to do. Typically, most companies choose to just use their own channels – known as ‘owned media’. Ap­proach­ing customers who are already connected to a brand or a company is sensible, of course. This strength­ens your business re­la­tion­ship to your existing customers, but it doesn’t do enough to address potential new customers who are outside of your current sphere of influence. Paid media, like social media (e.g. sponsored posts on Facebook) or display ad­ver­tis­ing on search engines (e.g. Google AdWords), is important for gen­er­at­ing ad­di­tion­al reach. The strategic co­or­di­na­tion of different dis­tri­b­u­tion channels is almost always a recipe for success, but many companies still rely too heavily on their own media. To read more about content dis­tri­b­u­tion and promotion, check out our digital guide to promoting your own content.

The sooner you decide on the different channels you want to focus on for your content marketing strategy, the better you can optimize your editorial content – the channel will usually determine the type of content you need to produce. For blogs and publisher pages, your content should of course be text-based, while channels like YouTube or Instagram carry a more visual focus.