Updated July 1, 2021
Unless today is your first day as a content marketer, you know a written strategy is essential to content marketing success.
But let's face it: Not all of us play a direct role in building or controlling the strategic, high-level content view of our company. For some of us, the job is to fulfill the promise of those strategic ideals.
And to do that, you must develop a content plan that positions your content marketing program for long-term success. Whether you're building a tactical editorial content plan for your organization or refining the one you have, read on for a helpful guide and some of our best resources to guide you. .
By the way, if that to be On your first day on the job, you'll want to catch up quickly. I recommend starting with The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing Strategy ours and start from there.
What is a content plan?
The content plan documents the policies, procedures, team resources, and task-related decisions for implementing the content. Your marketing strategy .
Similar to formulating your content marketing strategy, editorial planning can seem intimidating at first. You need to consider multiple moving parts and design each to align with your strategic goals yours .
Your plans need permission too flexibility as your content may need to adapt to changing business priorities, emerging technology trends, audience preferences, and other changes over time.
Fortunately, if you break down your plan into three focus areas, the tasks will come into focus more clearly, making the process much more manageable. The three areas include:
- Principles and governance
- Process and tools
- Resources of the group
An editorial content plan for #ContentMarketing documents your principles, processes, and resources so you can create better #content faster, @joderama said via @CMIContent. Click to Tweet
Goes off: Limited time but want a plan? Grab some helpful tips, tricks, and patterns from these Time Saving Tips, Checklists, and Templates for Conquering Content Marketing Goals in 2021 .
Set your governance principles and policies
Administration is at the heart of every editorial program. The decisions you make – and the principles you set – define and differentiate your brand content experience.
Governance is at the heart of every editorial program, said @joderama via @CMIContent. #ContentMarketing Click to Tweet
Developing a single set of communication standards makes tactic, going/about making decisions easier. Focuses on editorial quality standards, preferred methods, and guiding principles, including:
Set the tone, voice and style of your content
Outline the qualities and characteristics that make your brand content recognizable and different from others. Define your preferred tone, voice and style standards all your content should follow.
Set standards for editorial quality and value
Your content editorial team should be compliant with the standards of content quality Make your content worthy of your audience. Poor quality content can hinder results and reflect poorly on your brand value and reputation.
All content should be judged on its ability to deliver the value your audience expects. Ahava Liebtag is creating valuable content, step by step -Step Checklist gives you a great starting point for quality assurance. If your content doesn't meet these standards, consider sending it back to the drawing board.
Click to enlarge
Goes off: For a deeper dive into how to take control of your digital content, consider creating an editorial board, as CMI Strategy Advisor Robert Rose Suggestions in this post .
Grow your processes and choose content tools
Planning editorial content includes:
- Define tasks to be completed and detail how each piece of content is moved through a workflow
- Determine how team members will collaborate and communicate effectively
- Identify the tools and technologies they will use to get the job done
Define your workflow
Good Workflow is called Secret sauce for content marketing success for a good cause. If you do not identify the steps, signing process and stakeholders involved in converting the idea into an asset, you run the risk of bankruptcy and bottleneck . Tasks that slip through the cracks, equipment-necessary approvals skipped, missed deadlines, even small errors and failures can easily turn into a productivity nightmare.
Try the tips and tools in these articles to define or improve your workflow:
Level up communication and collaboration
Once you've defined the workflow, help your team members understand their role in content creation process – and how it impacts and overlaps the responsibilities of others involved with your content program. This makes it easy to come up with tools and techniques to foster better communication and collaboration as your team members do their jobs.
Detail calendar editor is a great tool for collaborative management. It helps each team member know where each piece of content is in production, what tasks still need to be done, and who they need to work with to get it done.
Try these tips and tools to create and maintain your editorial content calendar:
Prioritize projects
As your team becomes more efficient, you may find that it is generating more content ideas than it could be expected to execute. To keep the stream of killer ideas from falling into total creative paralysis, you need a system to evaluate ideas to prioritize projects that most strongly align with your goals and reject those that might impede productivity, tax revenue, or are out of your reach Main purpose of content .
Try these resources to help you focus on what's important:
Content Request Rating
Once word of your content team's success spreads throughout your organization, you may receive requests from other teams, departments, and business units that want your help to produce similar results. themselves to them. It helps if you have policies and documentation in place for handling content requests to keep your team's resources in place for projects that are best positioned for success.
Once news of your #ContentMarketing success spreads, you will be flooded with requests from other groups. The #content plan helps you stay focused – here's how to create one via @joderama and @CMIContent. Click to post a Tweet
Built-in Quality Assurance
While your team may be flexible in how it manages its editorial processes, procedures, and collaborate , let's be rigid about one thing: maintain the highest standards for content quality. Even a small factual mistake in your content can erode your brand's credibility in just a minute on social media. Implement a quality assurance (QA) process to remove spelling mistakes, grammar errors, and factual inaccuracies from your published content and keep your brand reputation unscathed blame.
Try these ideas to keep your content high:
Technology
In addition to the basic tools of a content marketing commerce — like calendars, workflow maps, and process checklists — make sure you have the necessary technology infrastructure in place. Depending on your goals, team resources, and budget, technology systems can range from simple spreadsheets and desktop publishing programs to full-scale content management system (CMS), multi-function Marketing automation solutions and more. You should assess your technology needs early in the planning process to ensure you can afford to build and execute your strategic content marketing vision.
Resources of the group
Without the right human resources, even the most expensive content program is unlikely to deliver the ROI you expect. Your content planning process needs to take into account each role, skills and expertise Team members need to play to their full potential and support helps everyone reach their full potential.
Without the right people, even the most expensive #ContentMarketing program can't deliver the expected ROI, @joderama via @CMIContent said. Click to Tweet
Culture and mindset
Because of the nature of the work they do, content teams often work best in one environment promote creativity , minimize distractions, and enable easy sharing and discussion of constructive feedback across multiple functional groups and silos across the organization. Paying attention to the little details makes it more supportive Content marketing mindset and a collaborative culture can lead to greater teamwork, lower churn, and greater efficiency and performance.
Try these resources to get the most out of your team:
Group structure and roles
The success potential of your content marketing program rests entirely in the hands of your team members, which is why putting the right employees, functional roles, and total team structure in place. position is an important component of any editorial plan.
Here are a few points to start:
Skill set
While today's content teams may have to learn to do more with less, they can only multitask if they have the necessary skills. And while certain skill sets – like writing, editing and design – essential to all content marketing, others can be useful additions as you’re ready to develop your content programs further.
Depending on the size of your organization, the resources available and the extent content marketing maturity determine which skill sets need to be acquired immediately and which you can outsource, share, or do without until your needs grow.
Goes off: Having trouble getting your employees to realize their potential? Follow these tips to Diagnosis and treatment of the common source of the problem .
You are now 'ready to create'
Now that you have your plan and the resources gathered, you can start the business of content creation. It's a completely different story, which you can read in Discover the secret to successful content creation .
But before we get started, let me know in the comments how you approached content planning.
Cover photo by Joseph Kalinowski / Content Marketing Institute
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