Focus on building a continual planning process instead. Here's one to try.
Instead of creating a content plan, decide on a menu. That way, everyone's clear about what your content team will serve up – and what they won't.
By Robert Rose
Believe it or not, the most valuable outcome from planning is not a plan.
The valuable outcome is a set of clear decisions about what you'll need – and what you won't need – to accomplish your goals.
There couldn’t be a more important lesson for planning content creation.
You may be suffering from what I call a plan with no planning. How do you know if you have this
condition? Watch for these telltale signs:
Instead of planning how to combine meals as efficiently as possible, it’s time to plan a menu – what will be served and, more importantly, what won't.
To be clear, I’m not talking about the company’s overall approach to content – that’s the content strategy. I’m talking about planning for the workflow of content so you can scale and manage it better.
Where should marketing content planning fit into your content strategy? Can you reuse the planning process you develop for product or loyalty content? Robert Rose explains in this segment of Marketing Makers, a video series that explores everything you've ever wanted to know about content and marketing (but were afraid to ask).
The purpose of planning is to make the best decisions about what content you need for your strategy.
To do that, you need to focus on five areas: idea development, creation and production, merchandising, activation, and measurement.
Using your value propositions or messaging architecture, figure out the right content or stories for your brand to tell.
Don’t think about containers or channels at first. Think of ideas – and I mean big ones.
For example, let's say you're planning content for a financial services business that wants to be a thought leader for an audience of people who own small- to medium-size businesses.
Someone suggests developing content for a blog post about why SMBs should partner with other SMBs to offer easy-to-understand information on financial and other sophisticated concepts.
That’s not simply a blog post, that’s a big idea.
Right away, you probably can imagine topics to cover and the voice to convey them. You might develop a “helper” spokesperson, get influencers to chime in, develop a game, or create a university-type class.
Once you've worked on this big idea around thought leadership for SMB owners and decided it fits into your overall strategy, you're ready for the next step.
Now you can hash this idea out with your agency, your content council, editorial board, or content team. Once you determine the story you want to tell, you can decide what form it should take.
Maybe you launch it as a 10-step explainer video series on the basics of finance for SMB owners that's hosted by industry professionals.
Plan to turn the transcripts into blog content and use visuals and snippets from it for social posts. Plan to interview the industry professionals and share the content with them for their blogs, social channels, and so on.
Now is the time to decide what your team can, should, and shouldn't do – and when.
If your content calendar is just a list of assets your team was asked to create, you're suffering from a plan with no planning.
You'll need a shared calendar of all projects for some agreed-on period (say the next 90 days).
Most of the projects should be the strategic ones you decided on in the previous step. But list any reactive content requests and needs that arise, too.
Using the calendar, assign resources (including the team) to create the content and produce all the related designs and outputs.
You’ve already planned multiple outputs from the central content, so you should know what core and secondary content you need. In this stage, you’re planning specifics around that content creation, such as:
Don’t start planning by thinking about containers or channels. Instead, focus on the big ideas and stories you want to tell.
The idea is to decide to create fewer, bigger ideas that translate into smaller content expressions that can fill as many containers as you need.
Map these things out and make content planning the basis of your asset planning. A simple spreadsheet-based content calendar can help. Or you might turn to a robust technology solution to outline the process.
Think of the merchandising step as the internal distribution of the content produced.
If you use the kind of planning process I'm describing, your team likely will complete assets that may not be published for weeks or even months.
That's why you need to detail how the content will be shelved and communicated internally to the rest of the business. This is content merchandising.
Smart merchandising recognizes new content products and existing content worth reusing.
That means someone (or some team) must decide what, where, and how, those categories should be promoted internally.
Similarly, someone must decide how it will be distributed so it can be used, activated, and published accordingly.
You could simply designate a team member to go back to old blog posts and schedule them to be reused as part of the social publishing strategy.
Another option is to conduct once-a-week reviews of content with sales, web, and other teams so they know what’s available.
Planning for content activation ensures that you not only publish your core pieces but also update any relevant content related to them.
You can schedule organic promotion of that content with other promotional content. You can align with other groups that may be doing the same thing. Put simply: You need to make decisions about what, where, and why things will be promoted.
For example, you might plan to:
As you work through a few cycles, you’ll develop patterns and workflows for different content categories.
Decide to create fewer, bigger ideas that translate into smaller content expressions that can fill as many containers as you need.
In this content planning process, you'll determine the decision-making process for how you'll measure your content.
In other words, you'll decide who is responsible for tracking the metrics, who is accountable for getting the numbers, who will be consulted, and who needs to be informed.
You'll also determine what will be tracked – from consumption metrics (visits, SEO score, downloads, form fills, shares, likes, etc.) to cost metrics (cost of production of the asset, time to produce, and so on.)
Ultimately, this feeds back into your planning to help you understand what content topics to reuse, which are not performing, and which you should double down on by promoting and activating again.
Decide what to measure, then feed the results into your planning process to help you decide which topics to double down on and which to avoid.
With all five steps complete, you’ve built and stabilized the bridge between content and your overall business strategy. Planning this way helps you reserve most of your resources for proactive content while spending much less time reacting to necessary updates or responding to requests.
Every stakeholder should understand that your goal is to create a few big ideas that lead to many content pieces.
You (and other stakeholders) can see which content will be produced, which projects should be prioritized for production, and when those assets have been merchandised, published, and measured.
It’s a process. It’s a workflow. The foundation of successful content planning helps you get out of reactionary mode and into a truly strategic process – where nobody has to juggle anymore. CCO
Robert Rose is the founder and chief strategy officer of The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for the Content Marketing Institute. He’s provided content marketing and strategy advice for global brands such as Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Follow Robert on Twitter @Robert_Rose.
He may be the Content Marketing Institute's strategy advisor, but he's generous with his advice. Here are some ways you can tap into his know-how to build or advance your content program.
