Investing in a more organized approach to your business content has widespread benefits. It helps you set your priorities, stay on track, reach your target audience, and can also reduce a lot of stress. Planning your content will allow you to channel your energy with purpose, creating content that is not only relevant and on-brand, but also improves conversion and customer retention.
Content comes in many forms such as: website messaging, brochures, case studies, social media posts, blogs, email marketing, white papers and more. Many people within (and sometimes even outside of) your organization may participate in content creation for your brand.
Why is Planning Your Content Important?
If you have no content planning process in place, you have failed to prepare your business and your team for success. Your content quickly becomes inconsistent as your content creators lose sight of your brand character, values, and personality. With this it becomes impossible to accurately track important SEO keywords and phrases.
“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” ~Benjamin Franklin
How to Get Started
1. Declutter your branding, strategy, and design.
At Original Ginger, we can guide you through a comprehensive process to achieve this goal. See our recent article, Brand Clarity Will Transform Your Business, for more information on decluttering your brand. This will leave you feeling uplifted and motivated with a clearly defined purpose. You and your team will be ready to make more informed decisions, better choices and be more efficient. Optimized organizational systems and tools will make your content planning easier.
2. Identify your top 5 content marketing goals.
Typically, these are as follows:
- Drive Traffic to Your Website
- Generate Sales Leads
- Convert Leads into Customers
- Develop Brand Awareness
- Improve Customer Retention and Drive Upsells
3. Pinpoint your target market
Who are your current customers? What does your ideal customer look like? You’ll want to understand the personality, attitudes, values, interests, lifestyle, and behavior of your current customers. You can use this information and expand upon it to reach new customers.
4. Decide what content marketing activities will be most effective in reaching your target audience.
Where can you find your target audience? Are there specific social media channels where they spend their time? What is their social behaviour? Do they read specific publications? Be intentional about where you place your marketing efforts to ensure you’re reaching your target market.
5. Brainstorm content ideas
Ideate content that feeds into your top 5 goals. If everyone in your organization participates and “buys in”, it creates a positive energy about your brand culture from within. Your customers can sense this energy and culture too. So, by all means, get your team involved in this process but do so with a solid understanding of their skill set, strengths, and limitations.
6. Generate content
When generating new content, remember to keep it on-brand, engaging for your readers, search friendly, and relevant. Try to generate content that is evergreen and won’t stale-date. Triple-check for typos and grammar. Use visuals that break up text and solidify brand awareness.
7. Create a content calendar
For larger organizations, a content calendar can get quite complex and may include multiple content marketing activities running simultaneously. If you have the budget, there are tools out there that allow you to keep everything well organized in one central place. For smaller businesses with smaller budgets, Excel sheets may have to suffice for content planning and tracking purposes.
Working with an agency like ours means you have an expert resource on board who can guide your team from ideation to creation to implementation. We help you not only in planning your content, but also in creating and applying it.
We can provide fresh ideas, strategy expertise, creative content, beautiful visuals, tool set up, content calendar management, and reporting to measure success. We have the expertise. We understand the tools. We’re prepared to show you how these tools can work for you.
If you’re ready to dive into planning your content, give us a call. We’ll help you implement a higher degree of organization to your business, bringing it to a whole new level.
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