Content Planning Tips

Content Planning Tips

Want to create content that brings results? You need to carefully plan it beforehand.

That means understanding your goals and audience, keeping up to date on industry trends, and picking the right platform. Repurposing old content for new needs is also important.

The following content planning tips will help you create the value and variety your audience is looking for. For you, that means greater online visibility and more traffic.

Tips to Plan Your Content

Ready to create a content plan that excels? Follow these five content planning tips and get the results you’re aiming for.

1. Dive into Your Goals

Successful content planning begins with defining your goals. This will help set the direction of your content. Your goals should focus on boosting traffic, increasing brand awareness, generating leads, and converting online visitors into customers.

After setting your goals, you can start creating content that will help you achieve them, rather than churning out stuff and hoping it gets noticed.

Finally, make sure your content goals are SMART. That is, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and lastly, time-bound.

2. Identify Your Audience

The next step is to know your audience and create personas. That way, you will be able to create content that resonates with your readers.

To identify your audience, you need to understand what they’re looking for, how you can reach them, and how they will benefit from your content. You can do so in these easy steps.

• Get demographic data: The best place to start is by identifying your existing audience. Collect demographic information like their age, gender, stage of life, geographic location, language, income, and spending patterns.
• Ask for reviews and feedback: Reviews and feedback will help you understand what barriers and problems people face. Based on these, you can come up with ways to address them.
• Create avatars: After you have gathered all the necessary information about your audience, you can build their core personas or avatars. Refer to these while creating content, so you can focus on the interests and motivations of your audience.

3. Be Up to Date with Industry Trends

Knowing your audience is good, but not enough. You also need to know what’s hot in your industry. This will make your content relevant to your existing audience and also attract interest.

So, how to keep abreast of the latest trends and updates? Simply look around and see what your peers are doing. You can also gather information by joining online forums and groups.

Create trendy content but don’t get caught up in fads. In a few days it might be useless. Plan ahead and consider the impact of a trend a few years down the road.

4. Pick the Right Platforms

With so many platforms to choose from, how to know which ones are right for you? Well, follow these tips:

• Start with your audience: Research and see which platforms your target audience is most active on.
• Consider your brand: Is your brand highly visual? Consider social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. If not, you can blog about it or create podcasts.
• Check out your peers: Look at which platforms your competitors and peers are using. Analyze what’s working for them and what’s not.

That said, you can diversify your platforms, too. Make sure the one you pick is up and running successfully before moving on to the next.

5. Repurpose the Good Old Stuff

Your old content is not useless. You can still repurpose it to create fresh content. Add effective keywords to it, use outbound links, and tailor it for your new audience.

You can also tweak your old content for different platforms. For instance, you can turn a well-performing article into a podcast. Or publish parts of a blog as a social media carousel.

If your old content cannot be repurposed, it’s time to say goodbye to it. Irrelevant and meaningless content will only confuse your audience. What’s worse, it will tank your SEO ranking and affect your credibility.

Content Planning Tips – The Final Word

Planning your content can look daunting at first. But if you do it one step at a time, you’ll be there before you know it.

Start with a fixed goal and build your content around it. Keep in mind what your audience wants and what industry trends are currently hot. Refresh your old content and discard the useless stuff.

With these tips, you’ll be on your way to creating content that matters.

Additional Resources

• Google Trends – shows what the world is searching for. It analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across regions and languages, and presents graphs to compare a query’s search volume over time.