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In a rapidly changing Smart digital marketing landscape, business growth comes from staying relevant and visible. Content planning can help you achieve all three of these goals build brand awareness, giant engagement, and effectively convert leads. However, before we go into effective content planning, we first need to consider the bigger picture of why online branding matters.
Having a well defined branding strategy developed will portray your identity, credibility, and differentiates you from the competition. Branding establishes a continual experience and understanding for your audience across your websites, social media channels, and other marketing platforms.
Whether you are a small start-up or a growing organization, having a solid online branding strategy creates a basis for everything you do in your marketing, including your content planning.
Why Content Planning Matters in Digital Marketing?
Digital content surrounds us-born blogs, blog emails and newsletters, videos, and social media updates. Without a plan in place, your “content” can lack direction, consistency, and impact. Good content planning ensures that the content you develop meets a professional purpose, assists you with branding goals, and is equally in tune with your audience.
Good content planning includes discovering your target group of people, mapping their journey, developing the right formats, channels, and measurements, and reviewing results for continuous improvement. Planning your content not only regularly structures your marketing campaigns, but it decreases wasted time and allows you to stay in the game as the digital landscape continues to evolve.
1. Set Clear Goals and Objectives
Before you begin to create content, it is essential to figure out what you’re trying to accomplish. Are you trying to create brand awareness, generate leads, create traffic to a website, or build customer loyalty? Defining clear goals will help create a content strategy and better measure success.
Consider the examples below:
- If you want to create brand awareness, write informative blog articles and share on social media.
- If you want to generate leads, Offer downloadables such as ebooks/checklists that offer value.
- If you want to create traffic, Use SEO optimized blog posts targeting keywords that your audience looks for.
2. Understand Your Target Audience
Effective content comes from knowing your audience very well. Think about what they might be interested in, what they need or are challenged with, and the digital behavior they exhibit. Knowing your audience helps you create audience targeted content, and helps ensure that your messages are getting in front of the right people.
You can use Google Analytics, social media insights or feedback solicited from customers to create detailed “buyer personas” to define your audience. Your buyer personas will help you determine what tone to take, what to write about and what formats, like video, visual or text, to present your content in.
For example, a technology startup may target existing young entrepreneurs with content about innovation features or productivity hacks, while a wellness brand would be targeting women over thirty who are striving for holistic health.
3. Create a Content Calendar Strategy
A good content calendar can help you stay organized and consistent. A content calendar includes many possibilities of content development; a calendar will provide you with a roadmap detailing what content will be published, when, on what platforms, and you won’t ever be worried about the last-minute development of a post. Additionally, a content calendar is a great way to map out your content in coordination with product launches or seasonal promotions.
What should you include in a content calendar? Here are some ideas:
- Content titles and types
- Publication dates
- Distribution channels or platforms
- Team members responsible for content
- Keywords and calls to action
Outlining your content calendar ahead of time will help you stay organized and consistent, and it will help you maximize performance across all your platforms.
4. Focus on Quality Over Quantity
Although frequent posting can assist with visibility, quality is far more important. Your content must be informative, engaging, and valuable to your audience. Don’t create filler posts – content that provides little value just to reach your target number of posts.
The best use of your time is spent on research, writing, editing, and design. If you create content that is high quality, then it is more likely that you will receive backlinks, build trust, and have conversions.
Some examples of high quality content are as follows:
- Comprehensive how to guides
- Data backed case studies
- Expert interviews
- Customer success stories
- Thought leadership blog posts
5. Use a Variety of Content Formats
Different people enjoy different types of content. Mixing formats is a great way to reach a wider audience and shake things up. Examples of useful formats include:
- Blog posts for SEO and education;
- Infographics for storytelling;
- Videos for demonstrations and testimonials;
- Podcasts for depth
- Webinars for interaction
Also, by diversifying your content, you can take one piece of content and turn into several others. A blog post, for example, could be turned into a video script, an infographic and multiple social media posts.
6. Optimize for SEO
Search engine optimization is required to get organic traffic to your content. SEO helps ensure that your blog posts, landing pages, and videos appear in search results when people are looking for anything relevant to your business.
- To optimize your content:
- Use relevant keywords in a natural manner
- Include internal and external links
- Add meta titles and descriptions
- Use headings and bullet points for readability
- Optimize images with alt text
Search engine optimization is key to good content planning. When you have it both combined, your visibility online will greatly increase, as well as credibility.
7. Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice
Your content should reflect your brand’s personality and tone. Whether you are casual and fun or professional and formal, consistency is key. This strengthens your digital brand identity development and helps build familiarity with your audience.
Create brand guidelines that cover tone of voice, vocabulary, preferred phrases, and visual styles. Share these with your content creators and marketing team to ensure uniform messaging across all platforms.
8. Align Content with Customer Journey
There are various types of content for different stages of the customer journey. By identifying the stage of the funnel your audience is in, you can deliver the right content at the right time.
For the example of content types:
- Awareness stage: Blog articles, infographics, social media posts
- Consideration stage: Product comparisons, webinars, case studies
- Decision stage: Free trials, customer reviews, pricing pages
By mapping content to the stages, you ensure that you’re nurturing prospects through each step of their journey.
9. Leverage Social Media Distribution
Having awesome content is only half of the battle; you must also have it seen by your target audience. Social media provides a natural distribution channel for your content while fostering community development and branding.
- Use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to:
- Promote new content
- Create conversations with your followers
- Get involved in discussions relevant to your field
- Encourage user generated content
Post consistently, use relevant hashtags, and interact with comments to ensure maximum content distribution and visibility.
10. Analyze and Adjust Your Strategy
A good manager is always measuring performance. Content analytics tell managers who is working but also what needs adjusting. This is when marketers should consider content performance metrics.
- Measurable items to track include:
- Page views and traffic sources
- Bounce rates and time on page
- Social media sharing and engagement
- Conversions and lead generation
- Email open and click-through rates
Use anything that will help you collect and measure your data (like Google Analytics, HubSpot or a social media insights tool). Then you can adjust your marketing strategy based on the things mentioned to improve the next iteration.
11. Encourage User Engagement and Feedback
When you engage your audience, you will grow your relationships and reach with your content. James Clear encourages us to endorse comments and shares and discussions. You can encourage engagement by asking questions in the end of your blog posts, asking opinions on social media posts, and rapidly responding when someone acts on a prompt in the form of feedback.
When you receive feedback from users, it is a treasure trove for developing your content. It tells you what your audience finds value in, things the audience struggles with and what they would like to see more of.
12. Repurpose Top Performing Content
Don’t let valuable content go unused! Repurposing refers to the process of taking existing content and converting it to a new format. This benefits you by extending the shelf life and reach of your content.
Examples:
- Convert a webinar into multiple blog posts
- Convert a blog post to video
- Convert a series of related articles into an ebook
- Convert customer testimonials to social media quotes
Repurposing saves time, promotes efficiency and makes sure your best ideas keep getting results.
FAQs
Q1. What is the most important step in content planning?
It’s important to know your target audience because all content will be generated according to the audience’s needs and wants.
Q2. How often should I update my content calendar?
You should review your content calendar at least on a weekly or monthly basis to stay ahead of trends and make changes to priority as needed.
Q3. Why is repurposing content important?
Repurposing content allows you to extract more value from content you have already generated, while also saving time to address the entire audience.
Q4. How does content planning impact branding?
Planned content helps keep messaging consistent, tone accurate, and visual identity consistent and maintained across all digital platforms.
Q5. What metrics should I use to evaluate the performance of content?
Commonly used metrics include page views, engagement rates, conversion rates, social shares, and time spent on page.
Conclusion
As much as any other elements to success in today’s business environment, planning digital marketing content effectively is critical. However, planning is initiated within a bigger picture strategy; once you recognize/see the potential importance of an online branding strategy, you will realize that your content tone, messaging, and outreach are competencies that contribute to your branding and strategy.
In a world with a shrinking attention span and an ever-increasing depth of competition, it is the businesses that planned out their content marketing execution that will earn their competitive advantage, and build loyalty with their value proposition, and create more sustainable growth.
