Oh how exciting a new year is…if you consider excitement to be a brain overload of all of the things you want to change or do starting RIGHT NOW! Setting business and marketing goals for a new year can be quite overwhelming (in my opinion), because there are so many endless possibilities for improvements. Even the most full and robust of marketing plans can be even better than it already is. The first key is picking and choosing your battles. The second is organization.
Planning out your content for the year can be as simple as organizing your thoughts in a handy worksheet before getting started on the actual creation of the content. Our pals at HubSpot have kept us on track with content marketing organization by creating a Concepting Worksheet that I’m obsessed with because of how easy it is to use!
Below is a screenshot of a completed Concepting Worksheet, for a hypothetical case study that GRM would like to write. As you can see, not only does it help you organize what the title of the piece should be and the format of the content, but it also includes important information such as persona, buyer’s journey stage and the topic/keyword. It may seem very simple, but these are all things that you will need to consider when planning new content. It’s so convenient and clear to have all of it mapped out on one quick sheet.
Now that you have your Concepting Worksheet, here are some tips on how to plan your content in 2015:
- Before starting, make sure you have marketing or buyer personas set up.
- Decide how frequently you would like to publish content. It’s important to remain realistic with what you can accomplish – it’s a really nice idea to think you will publish a blog every week, but is it feasible? Make sure that you are publishing content as much as possible, but don’t set yourself up for failure from the beginning.
- Create three Concepting Worksheets for each of your buyer personas – one for the awareness stage, one for the consideration stage and one for the decision stage.
- Once you have all of your concepts laid out, choose the most important ones for your business. Perhaps you know that most of your customers are a certain persona. Therefore, content for that persona is more important. Or, maybe you’ve already written a ton of content for the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey. It may be time to focus on the consideration and decision stages.
- By now, you should have several ideas for content pieces laid out in the order that they are most important from your business. Create a schedule for yourself to stick to the frequency that you chose in step #2. Time to get creating!
- The final thing to keep in mind when planning content is promotion. Be sure to factor in time to promote your new content piece. This may include social media posts, blog entries, email blasts, press releases, guest blogging or article writing and more. Promotion is often an overlooked piece of content marketing…don’t let your new content go unnoticed!
Read more: Major Content Marketing Trends