What is Content Planning

What is Content Planning?

Content planning refers to a set of activities that increases the overall productivity of an organization and ensures the timely delivery of quality content to the target audience.

Lack of a proper content plan can result in poor workflow management, delivery delays, quality issues as well as poor content performance. This is why a detailed content plan is considered as the most fundamental and the most important part of a content strategy.  Let’s take a look at What is Content Planning!

Content Strategy vs Content Planning

There is a common misconception that Content Strategy and Content Planning are the same things. The truth is however that they are vastly different!

What is Content Planning – The Importance

What is Content Planning – Content planning is a crucial aspect of any successful marketing strategy, whether it’s for social media, a website, a blog, or any other digital platform. Here are some reasons highlighting the importance of content planning:

• Consistency: Content planning allows you to maintain a consistent and regular posting schedule. Consistency is key in building an audience and keeping them engaged.
• Strategic Alignment: Content planning helps align your content with your overall marketing and business goals. It ensures that each piece of content contributes to the larger strategy and supports the brand message.
• Audience Engagement: Planning enables you to create content that resonates with your target audience. By understanding your audience’s interests and preferences, you can tailor content to engage and connect with them more effectively.
• Efficiency: Planning in advance allows for efficient use of resources. You can batch-create content, schedule posts, and automate certain processes, saving time and effort in the long run.
• Adaptability: While planning provides structure, it also allows for flexibility. You can adjust your content strategy based on real-time data, current trends, and unforeseen events, ensuring your content remains relevant.
• Quality Control: Planning allows you to maintain the quality of your content. You can review and edit content before it’s published, ensuring that it aligns with your brand standards and provides value to your audience.
• SEO Optimization: For digital platforms like websites and blogs, planning content with SEO in mind helps improve search engine rankings. You can strategically incorporate relevant keywords, optimize meta tags, and structure content for better visibility.
• Resource Allocation: Content planning helps allocate resources effectively. Whether it’s time, budget, or personnel, knowing what content needs to be created and when allows for better resource management.
• Storytelling and Narrative Flow: Planning enables you to tell a cohesive and compelling story over time. This is especially important for brand storytelling, where each piece of content contributes to building a narrative that resonates with your audience.
• Measurement and Analysis: With a planned content strategy, you can establish key performance indicators (KPIs) and track the success of your content over time. This data-driven approach allows for continuous improvement and optimization.

What is Content Planning – The Elements

Content planning is used in a broad sense. It can be broken down into several basic elements, each of which performs a specific function. The major elements of content planning are –

• Documenting the workflow – to ensure everyone knows their responsibilities.
• Preparing a content calendar – so that work can be planned accordingly.
• Workload management, so that work is equally distributed among all members.
• Hiring and training professionals – to improve content quality.
• Maintaining absolute transparency – within the team and effective communication among the members.
• Streamlining the creation and review process – to enforce strict QA measures.
• Promoting, and distributing content in the appropriate channels – so that it drives website traffic and increases user engagement.
• Monitoring content performance and updating it, if it needs further optimization.

What is Content Planning – Benefits

• Efficient Allocation – Having a content plan will help in equally distributing the workload among the members of the content team. This ensures that no one is overburdened and thus improves the overall productivity of the content team.
• Simpler workflow – Content planning helps in better delegation of tasks and responsibilities related to a project between team members, making the creation, review, and publishing processes much simpler and faster.
• Improved Quality and Better Performance – Efficient processes result in improved content quality and better performance statistics.
• On-Time Completion – As the deadlines are known to everyone well in advance, the team can gauge the efforts needed to complete the projects on-time. This improves the work-life balance of the team and also ensures that the project is completed on-time.

What is Content Planning – Summary

Most organizations have a well-settled content strategy. They know their domain, their target audience, and what needs to be done to increase user engagement. However, the majority of these organizations face major hiccups when they try to put their content strategy into practice. This is where content planning comes into the picture.

The right content plan can drastically increase your organization’s efficiency and timeliness, and also increase your content’s overall performance. If you want to take the DIY route, it is vital to have the necessary resources that can create the content in the first place. So, build a great team or liaise with one for a successfully handled and delivered content plan.