You receive or finalize your organization’s latest content marketing strategy. That means you’re ready to jump right into creating great content, right?
Not so fast, friend. Sorry to tell you, but that strategy is a virtually useless piece of (digital) paper unless you have a plan, too.
Why? Because knowing your goals isn’t the same as knowing how to achieve them.
A detailed content plan gives you the keys to unlock that knowledge. It outlines all the operational, technical, and tactical details that will guide and support your content efforts.
One-size-fits-all content plan templates don’t exist — every brand has a unique set of goals, assets, and considerations to account for. But here’s the next best thing: a detailed tutorial with expert-recommended resources to make crafting a winning plan easier.
At the end of this article, you’ll also find a handy checklist to refer to as you build your plan. But before you roll up your sleeves and get to work, let’s answer a few fundamental questions:
A content plan documents all the specific policies, practices, resources, and task-related decisions required to execute your content strategy. It serves as a guide for orchestrating your content resources and systems.
It also governs your techniques and collaborative workflows and establishes parameters around your story creation and production processes. This plan helps ensure your team has the right tools and resources to produce marketing content efficiently and deliver a valuable, high-quality experience to your audience.
Though these fundamental content marketing elements are closely intertwined, they’re not interchangeable. To understand the difference, think of how you might create a mood board for a personal goal.
Your content strategy sits at the top of your board, representing what success looks like to you. It sets the stage by documenting the goals you want to achieve, who else might be involved in (or benefit from) your achievement, and what will make it a distinctly satisfying experience. It also establishes an overarching theme around the unique ideas and insights that characterize your vision.
Your content plan, on the other hand, outlines all the specific steps you’ll take as you activate your vision. It’s where you characterize what needs to happen (and how) and what the resulting efforts should look like.
Building your plan can seem intimidating. You’ll need to orchestrate many parts, and each must align with your marketing goals and team dynamics.
Fortunately, if you break down your plan into four focal areas, all the tasks should come into sharper focus, making the process much more manageable.
Here’s the good news: If your team has worked out its content operations framework, the first three are done already.
The four areas are:
- Governance and guidelines —the editorial quality standards, preferred practices, and guiding principles that define and distinguish the value of your brand’s content
- Processes and systems —your production tasks, workflows, routing practices, and the techniques and technologies you’ll use to make communication and collaboration as friction-free as possible
- Team resources — the roles that need to be in place, skills those tasks require, and details on how you’ll fill gaps that might emerge
- Content creation and delivery — the topics your creative team will focus on, how they’ll generate and prioritize ideas for those topics, and what content types, formats, and platforms you’ll leverage.
But don’t forget: The conditions you operate under today won’t stay the same forever. So, your plan should also account for how you’ll adapt to shifting business priorities, emerging tech trends, audience preferences, and other changes over time.