What is a Content Plan and How to Create It

In the world of digital marketing, having a well-planned and strategic content plan can be the key to success for any business. A content plan acts as a roadmap that guides you through the creation and distribution of your content to reach your target audience effectively.

Why Do You Need a Content Plan?

A content plan helps you align your business goals with your content goals. It ensures that your content strategy is targeted, organized, and cohesive. Without a clear plan in place, you risk wasting time and resources on creating random or inconsistent content that may not resonate with your audience.

The Benefits of Having a Content Plan

A well-developed content plan offers several benefits:

1. Consistency: With a plan in hand, you can maintain consistency in producing relevant and engaging content across various channels.
2. Effective Resource Allocation: A plan allows you to allocate resources efficiently by identifying the right channels and tools for distributing your content.
3. Focused Strategy: By setting clear objectives for each piece of content, you can craft a focused strategy that addresses the needs and interests of your target audience.
4. Improved SEO: Incorporating an SEO strategy into your content plan helps optimize your website’s visibility on search engines. Effective keyword research ensures that you create relevant, high-ranking articles.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Creating a Content Plan

Now that you understand the importance of having a solid content plan, here’s a step-by-step guide to creating one:

1. Set Your Goals: Clearly define what you want to achieve with your content strategy. Whether it’s driving website traffic, generating leads, or increasing brand awareness, setting specific and measurable goals is key.
2. Know Your Audience: Conduct thorough research to identify your target audience. Understand their needs, pain points, and preferences to tailor your content plans accordingly.
3. Create a Content Calendar: Develop a calendar that outlines when and where each piece of content will be published. This ensures consistency and helps you stay organized.
4. Keyword Research: Conduct keyword research using tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMrush. Identifying relevant keywords will help optimize your content for search engines and increase organic traffic.
5. Create Engaging Content: Use expert copywriters who have relevant industry knowledge to craft high-quality articles and create visual assets such as infographics or videos to enhance engagement.
6. Distribute & Promote Strategically: Develop a comprehensive plan to distribute your content across various channels, including social media platforms, email campaigns, and partnerships. Tailor the promotion strategy to suit each channel.
7. Measure & Analyze Performance: Keep track of how well your content is performing by analyzing metrics such as website traffic, time on page, bounce rate, and conversions. Make adjustments to your strategy based on the data.

Having a well-structured content plan is crucial for achieving your marketing objectives. It provides both guidance and consistency to ensure you’re delivering valuable content that resonates with your target audience. Remember to regularly review and update your plan as per market trends and changes in audience behavior so you can stay ahead of the competition.

The maximum effectiveness of the campaign depends on the content. What is better, the traditional approach with the preparation of all the content for the month ahead or experiments during the week?

 One of the directions of the work of our agency is the creation of a content plan, and our specialists are ready to carry out even the most difficult task.

Why do you need a content plan for social networks?

You can not just take and give something a masterpiece! To come up with quality posts with enviable consistency, you have to spend time and explore the topic from all sides.

A clear plan will give you time and give you fresh ideas: you will see which topics can be divided into component parts, and which ones can be viewed from a different angle.

Also, you do not overdo it with advertising posts and do not forget to congratulate subscribers on the holiday. And the content plan is useful if you have contractors: copywriters, designers, etc. You can optimize their work and do not sit in the pool if the artist Vitaly suddenly goes on vacation

Difficulties in creating a content plan

Articles are in the interests of users – this is the task that is considered to be the most difficult in the work of the content manager, namely to generate the topics of articles that will interest the reader and collect traffic: likes, reposts, comments. Also, these topics should be a lot to alternate headings and release posts every day, every two days.

If you have ever had to collect a content plan, for sure you have felt all the delights of standard recommendations in this matter. The most popular are:

• read topics on thematic forums, pick up questions from there
• view topics in thematic social networks;
• view competitor sites and pick up topics of popular articles;
• read the comments under the thematic articles and extract from there the problems of the readers;
• enter keywords into a search engine and copy search tips from there;
• ask friends who work in this area what they would like to read about;
• watch questions at the sites on the principle of “question-answer”;
• follow Google Alerts alerts and trends in Google Trends;
• create questionnaires in social networks to collect topics.

At first glance, these paths are enough to create a content plan for a long time, and there should be no problem. But on the other side, the realities of content managers are different: they kill a lot of time for routine actions, gathering topics in Excel into bits, occasionally diluting with trends, interviews, popular digests. They create a portrait of the audience, try to understand its tastes, interests … A terrible cycle.

You can break the vicious circle with the help of a special service that pulls out all the thematic questions that people have ever asked from search engines. What is it and how to work with it, we analyze further.

What is a content plan?

Everything is very simple here. A content plan is a list of possible topics for a blog for a certain period of time. It can be from a couple of weeks to half a year or more.

Why do you need a content plan?

At first, when you start blogging, it’s extremely easy to find topics for writing articles. But when you blog for more than half a year, problems start to arise with it.

The content plan is suitable for a new blog, and for a blog with experience.

The work begins with a study: we analyze the specifics and audience of the brand, how close this or that topic is to it, whether the entertainment content is suitable, how much product content can be published, so as not to overload users with it.

Content plan for the month

Most brands operate according to the classic monthly content plan. At the first stage is created the rubricator and on its basis, a plan is developed with themes and products.

You can add situational content to planned publications and adjust it if an unforeseen event occurred or the audience did not like some topics. Such a strategy does not require frequent updating of information, rather its constant addition.

Having in front of you a plan of publications for the month ahead, you can very effectively manage both your own time and the work of the team, distributing tasks among the performers. Planning in advance allows you to involve the whole team at once, and not just a few SMM-managers.

Work on the plan will affect the consistency of the content.

Your audience will know what to expect from the brand, how often new content is published and what topics it is dedicated to. The publication schedule will give maximum engagement without downtime. This principle is followed by our client Ararat.

This is a large international company, so the main product and information content are prepared for 3 months. Agreed at all levels of the company themes are sent further to other markets. Ararat’s global strategy is designed for all countries of the brand’s presence, therefore it is difficult to use situational content, and relevant topics will be different for all countries.

Then individual teams from other countries translate general content into their own language and create local content that is relevant specifically for their markets, publish memes.

Plan your future events and activities: the launch of a new product on the market, annual conferences, cultural events. And dilute with company news, promotions, reactions to resonant events.

Experts advise while making a plan for the month to consider the questions:

1.    What events and launches are scheduled for this month?

2.    What are the content targets for this month?

3.    What publications can you plan in advance and for which you need to leave a place?

4.    What kind of experiments with topics you want to spend?

Content plan for the week

The newsjacking method – linking your ideas to the most discussed news, will be effective as long as people are in context.

This is the best method if the audience of the brand is ready for experiments. You can plan content for the week ahead and vary it greatly, always managing to respond to current topics and deliver the same products through trends and the latest news.