What are the steps involved in content planning?
In order to plan effective content you need a handle on the elements of content strategy and how they relate to each other.
At a minimum, a documented content strategy should:
The next 4 chapters will explore each of these areas in detail. The introduction to this guide referred to these four key elements of an effective content strategy as the four C’s of content marketing strategy.
There are at least three ways you will see benefit from your documented content strategy:
Being deliberate about your content strategy provides the benefits we just mentioned because it enables you to plan content in a fundamentally better way than most marketers do today. In fact 87% of marketers are managing content in a manual or ad hoc way.
Source: 2019 Content Management & Strategy Survey, CMI
We call the way most content gets planned today the Common Content Planning process. It involves steps like:
START: Internal request or setting a goal for creating a certain volume of content
FINISH: Store plan docs on shared drive, NEVER to be heard from again
In contrast, a documented content strategy sets you up to adopt a SMART Content Planning process:
START: Commit content to a specific business objective
FINISH: Integrate plans with the rest of your MarTech stack
Smart content planning means:
The result of a smart content planning process is a content calendar that is more relevant to what people are searching for and struggling with and is differentiated from the competition. At the same time, the calendar will be quicker to create and easier to maintain.
Now you know the four C’s of content strategy (Company, Customer, Content, and Communication). You’ve also compared the Common Content Planning Process with the Smart Content Planning Process. Which of these paths looks more like your process today? Never fear! This guide gives you the background you need to feel confident in transitioning your organization to a Smart Content Planning Process. Let’s take a closer look in the next chapter (Defining Your Business Objective) at the relationship between your content and your business objective by exploring the first C in Content Strategy: Company.