Please Tell Me You’re Content Planning

Content planning is the process of organising, scheduling, and creating content for a specific purpose or audience. It involves identifying the target audience, setting goals and objectives, researching and brainstorming ideas, creating a content calendar, and measuring the success of the content. It is an important part of any content marketing strategy, as it helps ensure that the content created is relevant, useful, and aligned with overall business goals. Why do small businesses need content planning? Small businesses need content planning for several reasons: Honestly, content planning is a critical aspect of any small business’ marketing strategy, helping to increase visibility, reach new customers, and establish the business as an authority in its field. Why do larger organisations need content planning? Larger organisations need content planning for similar reasons as small businesses but on a larger scale. Here are a few key reasons: Content planning is crucial for larger organisations to ensure the alignment of their content efforts to their overall business goals, efficiently manage the production process and optimise the use of resources, measure the success of their content marketing efforts and to stay competitive. ‘78% of those who believe their content marketing was very successful in 2021 had a documented content marketing strategy,’ states SEMrush’s content marketing report. With most marketers finding that their content planning tactics that provided the most success were improving the quality of their content and improving the SEO.   How content planning can enhance your branding Content planning can enhance branding in several ways: It’s really an important aspect of branding, as it helps companies to effectively communicate their message, build trust and credibility with their audience, and establish themselves as leaders in their industry. I always encourage my clients to undertake rigorous content planning, particularly at the start of the year.  How can content planning be more cost-effective for your business? Content planning can be more cost effective for a business in several ways: How does content planning advance SEO? Content planning can improve SEO in several ways: Overall, a well-executed content plan can help a business to create high-quality, relevant, and keyword-optimised content that can improve its website’s visibility and search engine rankings. How can you start content planning? Starting content planning involves several steps: It’s important to note that content planning is an ongoing process, and it needs to be reviewed and adjusted regularly to ensure that it’s aligned with the business goals and audience needs.  Here’s what I do: I base all my marketing around my blog content (with the objective of selling my marketing and copywriting services, blogging course and books – so everything needs to point back to them). I choose to blog because that’s my love, I know it’s effective for me (especially in terms of SEO), and it plays to my strengths.  Then, I base all my other marketing around that. My social media, email marketing and paid ads generally feed back to my blog posts (or my website, depending on what I’m promoting).  My blog content is primarily based on SEO keywords (I do a mixture of blogging, copywriting, digital marketing keywords and occasionally words related to my books). But I also focus my content on answering questions that my community or potential clients may have. Or that will help them achieve their marketing, blogging or writing goals.  I actually do my content plan every quarter, as well as an annual strategy. Do I always stick to it? No! Because client work always takes priority, so I plan as if I am able to dedicate consistent time to my content marketing and then just end up doing what I can.  Even though my SEO is pretty consistent for me at the moment, I figure that I can never have enough blog content, so I will often focus my efforts on building more and more. I encourage others to do the same, especially if you are interested in building on your SEO.