Are you a lazy content planner?

Bad news, you’re making life harder for yourself.

You’ve had your team planning sessions and agreed the content titles for the next 6-12 months. You’ve even married them against your personas and content funnel stages. Excellent, you’re ahead of the game.

But I’ve seen many who think the work ends there, the job’s done, tick it off the list as complete and pat themselves on the back. This is lazy and ineffective. Do you only look at your plan when it’s time to create the next item? Have you ever said, “We’ll have to plan the next batch of content soon”? I guarantee you are wasting all your initial hard work and effort.

Case Study: The Replace Base

An online retailer of mobile device repairs and replacement parts

The content plan should be an evolving document, always within easy reach, i.e. not buried in a maze of folders. It’s your birds-eye-view of what you’ve already created and shared, and what’s still to do. Keeping on top of it will help you squeeze every drop of potential from your efforts. How?

The benefits of using your content plan properly:

New content. In response to some breaking industry news, a new blog has been written, posted up on the site and shared on social. That’s not the end. Where does it sit in the plan? Where should you be driving the reader to next? Does the copy refer to other content items and would links to these be helpful?

Tracking what your audience wants. You’ll have some killer content in your plan that your audience will lap up, but how will you know? You need to track the KPIs right there, in the plan. Equally, there'll be some items that aren’t so well received, so what’s the point of directing people to it? You could just be showing them the door.

Generate new ideas, reduce duplication & save time. Looking back over past topics could suggest a follow-up piece or a new angle. You might find that a lot of the groundwork for that new idea is already in place. Or perhaps it’s already been written.

Re purposing. Chances are, your content can be re purposed into different formats. Blogs into infographics, whitepapers into a video series, the latest guide into a quiz. These are your quick wins. The content already exists so why not test other formats and learn how your audience wants to receive it.

Revisit and update. Add a column to your content plan for a suggested review date. When are the award winners announced? When are new regulations due to come into force? If it's a seasonal piece, it may need a little tweaking this time next year.

Covering the whole funnel. Seeing all your content titles, formats and funnel stages in one place will help you spot any gaps that are appearing.

The more you refer to and update your plan, the more evolved it’ll become. So, stop being lazy, pay it the attention it deserves and trust me, it’ll start working for you. But, more importantly, your customers will get the content they want.

We can help you develop personas, identify key messages and create and populate your own content plan. Get in touch to find out how.