Time spent on drawing up a sensible content plan will make the work on content production much simpler, more productive and doubtless more fun. In this blog post you will get good and practical tips on how to create a content plan that triggers your target group to convert as you wish.
Why do you need a table of contents?
A plan makes everyday life easier. When you already have a plan for what to do, it will help you to work more effectively. So you save a lot of time and frustration that you might encounter if you work blindly. Below you will be presented with three essential advantages that you will receive from a content plan.
- Marketing set by system If you succeed in drawing up a content plan, the benefits are many. One of them is that you get a clear overview of everything that's important to you in the business. A content plan will force you to understand the whole of your role. You will have to challenge yourself by setting your role as a content producer in systems with other objectives the company has. If this is achieved, it will be achievable to achieve seamless interconnection between all marketing activities. So you can simplify the system of all marketing across channels.
- Predictable and more effective workdays A table of contents always means that you know what you have ahead of you of work. So you don't have to start every day with research and creative processes. It's not every day that this is equally tempting. If you complete the steps presented in this article, you will be left with a clear plan for your entire content production, for example one year ahead in time. When it comes to marketing is better to be the lead every time, and a content plan helps you with this very thing.
- Increased flexibility It might sound strange that a set plane makes you more flexible. A content plan will help you to get a better understanding of what to prioritize and when. When you have a clear overview of the company’s objectives, opportunities, target groups and future activities, you will also be more flexible in the administration of content production and other marketing activities. So once you already have a plan, it's easier to make small adjustments.
If these are the benefits you want for your company, I recommend you to go further through the article.
Important steps towards a successful and long-term content plan
In order for your content plan to really meet its great potential, there are some important factors you need to map on the way. These steps are described below and include:
- Set SMART and overall marketing objectives
- Define the target groups of the enterprise
- Understand the target group’s customer travel
- Brainstorming and identification of possibilities
- Content organisation for context (target group, customer travel and other channels)
- You are ready to create a table of contents!
Set SMART and overall marketing objectives
Knowing what goals to achieve with your work is absolutely pretti. Without goal, you cannot know where to start. “But I’m producing a lot of content!” you might say. Not having a goal doesn't mean you're necessarily guaranteed to write-only -- and that's just this thing that makes it a little scary.
It's no problem to think about things about. You might have many ideas about what you want to write about, and what you think will be accepted with the greatest gratitude of the target audience on the other side. The problem is you don't know. You're quickly ending up spending a lot of time producing content that doesn't match defined goals, the challenges of the target group or the steps they're in their customer journey.
SINGLE objectives
When you create a content plan, you depend entirely on clearly defined goals. These objectives should preferably be SMART. That a goal is SMART means that it is:
- Specific (specific)
- Measurable
- Available (Attainable)
- Relevant (relevant)
- Timed (time based)
A SMART measure may be formulated as follows: ”Through content production, we will increase the average daily traffic to our website by 10% over the quarter. We have 1,000 visitors per day, which means that within three months we have 1100 visitors per day.“
Objectives that are overall and relevant to the whole enterprise
In planning content, it is appropriate to avoid limiting itself to its own role. You might be in a market department, thinking for natural reasons, first of all, about creating results for your own team. It should be made aware that content production can help the whole enterprise to achieve its objectives. There is nothing to prevent you as a content producer from creating content that strengthens the relationship between the company's target group and customer service. Ask the question: “How can I make content that helps the sales department achieve its goals, and preferably exceed these?”
This is how you can let your mind wander through all the departments of your business. In this way you move in a direction that will help make your role as content producer absolutely indispensable.
When you create a content plan with goals that match the company's overall objectives, you will have a clear advantage: you can be absolutely sure that you have the right focus in your work, and that what you do contributes to the positive effect where it is most critical for the company.
Long-term and short-term objectives
Setting targets for the content plan is an advantage to focus on both long-term objectives, but also on objectives that are intended to be achieved in the shorter term. The objective of the above example can describe a longer-term target for the whole of content production. In addition, you should consider the objectives that each content production should achieve. Is the goal, for example, to make the target group perform a specific conversion (may be to sign up for a newsletter or contact the sales department)?
If you can have a conscious relationship with how you want the target group to convert, you also have a better starting point to adapt to this.
It is important to be aware that the target group is to be guided through a customer journey. Different people are at different stages in their customer journey at all times. You understand this, and you can meet everyone's needs from where they are, you're on an important key for success!
We come back to this a little later in the article, where we will consider how to work with content to satisfy the target group through the different steps of the customer journey.
Marketing Fertiliser
In addition to thinking about customer travel, it is also worth thinking about how to get your target group to convert as you like. Here the concept of marketing comes in, which you can also refer to as its sales area. A falsify has four steps, all of which require different types of content. Each measure you set should reflect one of the steps in the finder. The four steps are as follows:
- Attractor attention of the target population (Contents appropriate to social media and advertising)
- Engaging gear and create trust (Customer, relevant and informative content. e.g. blog posts and videos)
- Convert (Call-to-actions: e-books, newsletters, etc.)
- Building relation and care for this. (Very pointed communication, e.g. by e-mail or telephone)
Define the target groups of the enterprise
To achieve your goals, you need to know who you have to deal with. Who are the customers of the company, and how much do you know about them? It is about being able to define what is characteristic of the target group and its segments.
An important concept of this work is ‘buyer personas’ or ‘marketing personas’. These concepts represent fictional and generalized descriptions of the ideal customers of the enterprise. Such descriptions help us to know more clearly what types of people we are trying to reach out to. In this way, it is also more sensible to understand the challenges that the company can face, so that its content becomes more humane, relevant and helpful. Understanding who you are addressing is absolutely necessary if you are to succeed in your goals.
For example, if you do not know exactly how to solve this problem, you will find practical “persona templates” hereSo let's say that this is the same thing as that.
Understand the target group’s customer travel
What's so great about a long-term content plan is that you get the opportunity to be the perfect guide for your target group through their customer journey! It's about understanding the customer journey, and where you reach the point. When you do this, you will be able to create relevant and actual content to answer the questions your target group has at the time.
A customer journey can be divided into three steps:
- Interest (Awareness Stage)
- Review Stage
- Decision (Decision Stage)
It's pretty important to keep your mouth heavy when you make a table of contents. You should consider making content tailored to each of these three steps in your customer journey. It is not appropriate to send the offer of a free sample to an early in the awareness stage. It will be experienced quickly as contrary to the needs of this person at that time and may help to destroy the customer relationship of the person. This offer should rather be offered to those who have perhaps been in the intervention stage for a long time.
Brainstorming and identification of possibilities
When you know what goals you have and who you're going to reach, it's time to figure out what you want to communicate. Setting aside time for effective brainstorming, either alone or with colleagues, is rarely a bad idea. Here you start a creative and often efficient process, based on the facts you have already developed.
Some specific questions you can ask to get the creative machinery going:
- What questions are we often asked by our customers? (A good opportunity to include customer service department if it is provided)
- What challenges do our target group have that we are able to solve?
- What would we want our target group to know about the company?
- What is discussed in social media that may be relevant to what we offer?
- What are our competitors talking about?
When you're in brainstorming bubble, you have a golden opportunity to identify content holes and the ability to seal them up.
When you are in this process, it is also good to identify what the company is already on with content resources. Do you have colleagues who are already sitting on unfinished content, or can you build interesting stories and cases you can go on? By taking a deep look at what already exists among the employees in the company from now on, you can save many hours of unnecessary work.
Successcase from Car Care King
You can also take it a little longer, like the Car Care King did, by asking through a giveaway what they would like to know a little bit more about. In this way they got Car care King over 200 ideas to blog posts of less than one hour! We must call this an effective and highly productive brainstorming. Being so familiar with what your target group misses is an invaluable starting point for further drawing up a content plan.
Content organisation for context
At some point, the time is right to leave the creative brainstorming activity. Now it's about putting everything in a sensible and structured system, and working towards filling the steps in the customer journey based on your defined target groups. Now, make sure that the content you plan to perform attracts the right person, and guide him through all the steps towards a purchase decision and on the way to becoming a loyal customer.
A tip is to use the knowledge you have about what's happening in your company to create content. When you are in good shape, content may jump out from, for example, upcoming projects you know the company has ahead of it. Here there is room for creativity to flourish, and certainly avail ourselves of the opportunities to co-operate marketing across all marketing channels (and in addition to different target groups and different customer travel steps of course)!
You are ready to create a table of contents!
Time has come to keep the contents of the pen! We recommend using a spreadsheet program like Google Sheets. Benefits from such a programme:
- Real-time/changes update plan immediately
- The table of contents is equal to all accessees
- Allow multiple users
- Easy to cooperate
Example of a good content plan
One of the main issues in drawing up a table of contents is to ensure that all columns of categories are relevant to each other. This gives you a good overview of both the subjects you cover with your content, but also how you use the content to meet the right target group with the right messages and wrapping.
The categories you should include in your content plan are:
- Content/Work Title Title
- Subject/Keywords
- Steps in the customer journey
- Steps in the Finn
- Format of the contents
- Target Group (persona)
- Publishing Time
- Other Notes That Can Be Useful
Here is an example of how the starting point of a content plan might look:
Example of a content scheme
With this article, I hope you have a good understanding of what a table of contents is, why it is so important to have a long-term plan and how you can make this yourself.
Please contact me when you have any questions or comments.
Blog post inspiration: “Inbound Marketing” certification – HubSpot AcademySo let's say that this is the same thing as that.