Content Planning

Now that you have your strategy mapped out and have identified the right team to make it happen, it’s time to put together your calendarized plan.

While some things in life are ripe for spontaneity (sure, going bungee jumping sounds like a great idea!), executing your content strategy is not one of them. Planning your content over time, whether that be three, six, or twelve months out, is an important step to reaching your goals. While you may be able to execute willy-nilly and keep progressing to your objectives, you’re a lot less likely to hit them if you’re not constantly aware of how far you have left to go.

Say you’re leading an SEO team, and your CMO expects you to deliver a 20% YoY increase in organic traffic. You could take a weekly approach to plan content and hold brainstorms to find content opportunities, then execute each one at a time. While this flexible approach may be tempting, there’s a risk to only focusing on 1–2 weeks at a time — you may get sucked into the day-to-day and not step back to review performance. After six months, you may go back to measure the success of your work and realize that you’re only on pace to hit a 7% traffic increase. By planning your content ahead of time, you can create quarterly benchmarks to determine if you’re tracking to hit your goals or not, and check in accordingly.

Planning your content out over time can also lessen the stress and pressure of having to come up with topics on the fly. You will inevitably have a tough week when the best idea you can come up with is less than ideal, and you have to either choose to execute a poor idea or skip a week and seem inconsistent to your customers.

Resourcing is another reason why planning content ahead of time is important. Plotting out what you’ll be executing and when can allow you and your team to evaluate if you’ll need to get more of your creative team’s time, to hire a new writer, etc.

Keep in mind, planning out your content doesn’t mean that you’re locked into what you’ve decided. A content plan should be a living document — if a new product gets fast-tracked and you want to build up topical authority with a few new resources, go right ahead and add those in. Take a look at what’s already on your schedule and push back whatever else isn’t time-sensitive accordingly.

Let your content audit and competitive gap analysis from earlier chapters guide your content plan. That research should be used to determine what content opportunities to prioritize, what format they should be in, when they should be published, etc. Just because your company has always written 500-word blog posts doesn’t mean that a longer 1,400-word resource is off-limits if that’s the type of content that Google is ranking and users like.

While research should underpin your strategy, experimentation can uncover innovative ideas that you wouldn’t have known about if you didn’t test them. Experiments don’t have to be completely out of the box, especially for a more regulated organization, but simply ideas that you haven’t tried before. It could be as straightforward as changing up content that you would typically put into long paragraphs into scannable bullet points. It's perfectly okay to fail, so long as you were trying something you thought might work really well. Here’s more about the concept of creating a strong content mix from Ian Lurie:

• 70% of our content should be solid, standard stuff: basic how-tos and advice that's very safe and is easily justified as supporting SEO and other efforts.

• 20% of our content should riff on the 70%, but take some chances. This is the content that expands on 70% content, but may flirt with controversy, or try appealing to a new audience, or otherwise be moderately risky. It may take a bit more effort. It also offers a higher potential payoff.

• 10% of our content should be completely innovative: Things we've never done that, if they work, could become part of the 20% or 70%. 10% content often requires a lot of work or audience interaction. Or, it's just risky. Most of the 10% will fail. You still have to do it. It's really important, because without it, the entire strategy stagnates.

You may not be able to follow this formula completely, but take it as inspiration to push yourself to think out of the box.

Let’s dig into how you can create your plan.

Start with your goals

This isn’t the first — nor the last — time you’ll hear us talk about the need to begin with your brand’s objectives as the guiding force behind the content you create and share. As you start planning, think back to the goals you outlined within your content strategy. Consider those as you plan out and calendarize your content, so you’re putting your company on track to hit your objectives.

Calendarize your content ideas

Getting into the nitty-gritty, let’s talk about actually putting together your content plan. After thinking about goals, the next step you’ll want to take is to get together all the ideas you want to pursue (content ideation will be covered a little later) and schedule them out accordingly.

Start by reviewing opportunities found from the content audit and competitive gap analysis. These are key from an SEO perspective to get on the calendar first. From there, you can explore other sources of ideation (data-driven content gap analyses, creative brainstorms, etc.) and experiments you want to test to have a solid content mix. If there are ideas you’re on the fence about, set them aside and revisit after you go through your first pass of scheduling content.

Once you’ve laid out the ideas you want to pursue, note which content opportunities are high priority. Determining priorities will be subjective based on the company, but some considerations to think through are capitalizing on SEO opportunities, filling a content gap in a user’s journey, and alignment with brand objectives.

Account for seasonality

One very important element when calendarizing your plan is to understand and account for the seasonality of your business, as well as your planned company initiatives (product launches, events, etc).

If you don’t already have an understanding of your business’s seasonality in terms of search, utilize Google Adwords Keyword Planner to understand how interest in your target topics changes over the course of the year. Posting content about Thanksgiving in December is an obvious lapse in terms of seasonality, but you may be surprised with what industry terms have almost as stark timing preferences. For example, at the start of every calendar year, “business tax software” peaks, signalling that business owners are starting to prepare for their spring filing deadline.

Also correlate your content plan to what’s going on in your business. This is not only important to properly introduce a new product you’ll be launching, but to demonstrate your authority on a given subject in advance of a new product release. For example, if you’re launching a product or service, you’ll want to start writing about topics related to it three to six months before that launch to gain authority within your industry, as well as to build up Google’s understanding of its relationship with your brand.

Be realistic with timing

Another important consideration is to be honest with yourself and your team regarding the timing and cadence of content. If you’re a lean, mean content machine, you may feel tempted to add all the things into your content plan and plan on executing four pieces a week. Now, that may be possible, but the ideas and the quality of content might suffer if you don’t have enough resources to make it happen.

Think realistically about how long you’ll need to create the best version of the content idea that you have, and strive to give yourself that leeway when you’re planning. Neither your audience nor Google will reward you for rushing through content just to have it — prioritizing one well-written piece that solves your customers' needs over three poorly written, hurried pieces is always a better choice.

Make time to revisit

Like we said at the start of the guide, a content plan or calendar shouldn’t be something you’re locked into, but it should be updated and refreshed from time to time. These updates may be needed to take into account shifted company priorities, past performance of content, or simply act as a mechanism to keep planning for the next three, six, twelve months or beyond. Set calendar reminders for you and anyone else who has a stake in planning to revisit your content plan quarterly.

Editorial calendars

There’s no wrong way to set up your editorial calendar, as long as it’s meeting your needs. Remember that an editorial calendar is a living document, and it will need to change as new SEO opportunities are uncovered or an author drops out.

There are a lot of different types of documents that pass for editorial calendars. You get to pick the one that’s right for your team. The simplest version is a straight-up calendar with post titles written out on each day. You could even use a wall calendar and a Sharpie.

Quick editorial calendar

Teams who are balancing content for different brands or other more complex content environments will want to add categories, author information, content type, social promo, and more to their calendars.

Full editorial calendar

Complex calendars can encompass everything from ideation through writing, legal review, and publishing. You might even add content localization if your empire spans more than one continent to make sure you have the currency, date formatting, and even slang right.

While we’ve focused on the content execution in this chapter, don’t forget about pre-planning your promotion efforts. Some teams may be tempted to not think about promotion until after the content is completed, but it’s important to be strategizing and planning for this when kicking off the content process.

Maybe you’re a travel brand creating a guide to finding the best souvenirs in LA, and one of your goals is to get it picked up and shared by LA lifestyle bloggers. If you wait to reach out to them until the content is launched, you’re basically just hoping they find a guide that they have nothing to do with interesting. On the other hand, if you work with them as the content is being created and ask for their expert opinions to include in the guide, they have a stake in the game, so to speak, and will be more likely to share it with their followers.

Additionally, as you’re scheduling larger content initiatives, think about what each will require in promotion, so you don’t stretch yourself too thin with a few major promotion initiatives going on at once.

In this chapter, we’ve detailed the importance of looking ahead to plan out your content initiatives by considering which types of content to pursue and the team you have access to, and how to put your plan to paper via an editorial calendar. Next we're diving into Chapter 6: Content Ideation.

Written by the Moz staff and our good friends at Seer Interactive.