A set of valuable, relevant, and consistent digital material that you publish to your digital space to attract, delight, and engage your readers is known as content.
Articles, blogs, social media posts, case studies, diagrams, ebooks, free offers, games/quizzes, infographics, knowledge articles, lists, music, news and opinion pieces, podcasts, reviews, slide shows, toolkits, user-generated comments, videos, widgets, XML feeds, and cartoons are examples of digital content or material.
Creating the right content is a good way of attracting people to your digital space. Good content answers the pressing questions or provides the right information to questions being searched by your target audience. So it is important to put effort into your content planning so that you can attract, delight, and engage your target audience.
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴?
Content planning identifies the type of content you want to produce and establishes expectations for how it should be produced, who will be responsible for it, what the content's goal will be, where it will be published, and how it will affect your overall content strategy.
Imagine the last post you made to your blog or your Instagram page, that post is an example of digital content.
𝗦𝘁𝗲𝗽𝘀 𝗶𝗻 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁:
1. Buyer Persona
The first thing you need to do is to identify the audience you intend to speak to. These are the set of people that would be willing to digest your content.
So you need to know your buyer persona or who you will be creating the content. This will give you a better insight into the kind of content they want to see, the problems they have, and how your content can provide them with a solution.
2. Research
During this stage, you will find out what your personas/audience are searching for e.g on google, etc.
Think of search terms that these people use. Interview some of your current clients to find out the type of content they are digesting. You can also look at the type of content that your competitors put out to get an idea of the type of content that your followers may want to see. You should also keep track of the previous content you’ve created to see which of them your followers engaged with the most and put out more of those kinds of content.
3. Create a Content Calendar
A content calendar will help you break your content into days/weeks/months. It will also help you schedule the content according to the time that your followers will engage with it the most. Things like who is responsible for developing the content, who will edit the content, who will create the graphics, when the content will be published etc will all go into your team’s content calendar. You can use a collaborative tool like google worksheet to create the content calendar and share it amongst all the people that will be working on it.
You can create a content calendar for your blog, your podcast channel, YouTube channel, etc
You can also create a social media content calendar for your Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts.
You can format your content calendar the best way that it suits you and your team.
𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲𝗻𝗱𝗮𝗿?
- Creating a content guide/calendar helps you remain consistent.
- It helps to ensure that you are putting out content that your followers want to see.
- It makes it easy for you to publish content on your blogs/social media pages.
- It also puts you across as an authority in your niche.
- It helps you grow your audience.
A content plan is a guide that helps you to organize your increasing workload and to create fresh, relevant, and engaging content for your target audience.
The plan can be made for the long-term or it can be adjusted according to the requirements of the consumer. But you aren't just making this for yourself, but for your audience as well.
If you want them to remember what you will write, when you will release it, and where it will be released, then it is important that you have a content plan to give your audience what they want and help them find what they need from your vast sea of information. Good luck!