So many marketing teams create content on the fly. It’s hard to put together a content plan when competing demands eat up your time.
We advocate for bumping content planning up to the top of your priorities. This includes multi-media leadership content, online experience content, and engagement content. The benefits of building a content strategy make it essential to long-term marketing success.
Why is strategic content planning so important? And what can you do to create a meaningful content plan for your organization? Let’s explore.
Benefits of Strategic Content Planning
It Aligns Goals and Marketing Strategy
Most marketers feel pressure to churn out content to remain relevant, or juice SEO authority. But content that is not tied to a broader purpose is just noise.
A strategic content plan maps each piece of content back to goals and broader business objectives.
Let’s imagine a KPI next quarter is to drive an increase in product demos. How are your blogs, videos, podcasts, social posts, and email content working in service of this KPI? Answer that question, tweak content, create the tactical roadmap and calls-to-action that drive to the KPI..
Seeing everything laid out all in a project plan provides clarity and helps you refine your overall content marketing approach.
It Maintains a Rhythm
The internet never stops. To keep up, you need to get into a content-creating groove. The appropriate pace depends on your industry, business size, and customer base, but the most crucial part of setting your tempo is sticking to it.
It’s harder to fall off the content wagon when your strategy and plan projects what you need to produce well in advance. Use downtime on a slow week for you or your team to produce several weeks ahead. When upcoming weeks are hectic, your content is already created, approved and scheduled.
When you do get knocked off-kilter, your plan helps you get back on beat seamlessly. Eliminates that hectic, nervous rush to generate new ideas by mapping out for future content–and get back on track with execution.
It Invites Collaboration + Engagement
Strategic content planning affords you the luxury of a coordinated content approach. There’s more space to consult internal experts and stakeholders to pull in viewpoints that make content compelling for your decision-maker audiences.
When you’re not scrambling to create content last-minute within your marketing bubble, you can touch base with relevant parties and invite them into the content creation process.
Let’s say you want to draft a blog post on a recent law impacting your clients’ industry. You consult your sales and internal teams to learn how they think the legislation will change your clients’ product usage.
Armed with those insights, you can address how your product solves new issues in your blog post. You might even invite the sales team to create a brief video on the topic for your digital distribution channels..
The possibilities for relevant, clever, compelling content are endless when you have time on your side!
It Boosts Your Search Results Presence
For many websites, well-executed content can significantly boost your reputation in the eyes of search engines.
It’s no longer the case that frequently posting low-quality content will lead to more website traffic. Now, search engines like Google prefer to show high-quality, detailed content that speaks to a specific audience.
Properly planning your content strategy will ideally give your team the time to execute strong content that your customers will find useful. The result? More organic traffic to your website—and potentially new customers and leads.
5 Tips for Strategic Content Planning
If you’re ready to start with content planning, or tweak your current approach, here are five tips:
1. Start with strategy. Audiences > Needs > Content strategy that addresses those needs.
2. Create a master document that houses all of your content/links. Social, video, email, blogs, and more must work together. A shared calendar allows you to coordinate and orchestrate.
3. Plan quarter by quarter. You want to be ahead, but not too far ahead. There is no sense in developing twitter content, for example, five months ahead unless it’s evergreen or timeless.
4. Leave room to pivot. Market conditions will evolve and surprises occur–internal, external, global. Be flexible and nimble in your plan to respond appropriately to significant events.
5. Your content plan as a living document. Objectives will change, social media platforms may come and go. Nothing you plan should be set in stone.
Need some help getting your strategic content plan off the ground? Bongo Consulting can guide and support you in developing this crucial marketing strategy component.