When it comes to publishing content for your company or organization, you know that you need to be strategic with it. Delivering the best content to your customers in the most effective way can be a difficult task though. There is no perfect method, but at Breezy, we’ve developed a content plan that works very well for a few different reasons and will make your content planning efforts a lot easier in the process.
The Method
Content planning isn’t a perfect science, but developing a method, timeline and process can be extremely beneficial in making the most of your content marketing. Our simple method and recommendation for content planning: PLAN 1 month out, then CREATE 1 week out. Using this method will help you create a content plan and stick to it while also giving you a lot of benefits too.
Plan
Content planning, per month, is a great way to see a birds-eye view of everything that goes into your plan and being strategic with it. Another benefit? A month is an easy metric to follow. For example, “Here’s how we’ll tackle our content for June!” is a straightforward way to break down your broad content strategy into a smaller, more doable group of tasks.
We also recommend operating off of a focus that lasts for about a month. This focus should be in about 80% of your content, while the other 20% might be general brand content or an ask, like scheduling a free consultation or alerting your audience about a promotion. Using this method allows you to balance out the kinds of content (videos, graphics, images, text-only) and reasons behind the content (brand awareness, thought-leadership, education, CTAs).
In a nutshell, planning your content one month in advance allows you to be more strategic about:
- The content you’re delivering to your audience.
- How you’re talking to your audience.
- And what you’re asking them to do.
Create
So, why do we create your content one week out? This is partly because even the best-laid plans might have to change. For instance, a global pandemic might completely disrupt the world. This could make the content that you’ve put valuable hours into creating look tone-deaf, which will reflect poorly on your business. You don’t want to waste your time or your energy creating something far in advance that could turn out to be useless! Creating one week out allows you to adapt to the current situation, whatever it might be.
Also, pivoting happens often in the content space. You don’t know what’s going to happen in your market or with your competitors, so you have to be prepared to pivot. Again, you don’t want to end up not using content that you’ve spent hours creating. The framework of one month is good for balance. You’re still being strategic, but you’re also able to align with what’s going on in the world at the time.
Easy Content Planning
Following this content planning strategy of plan one month out, then create one week out, will make you more efficient and strategic. And ultimately, it makes the content better. It will give you peace of mind to know that your strategy adapts to the market situation while still addressing your content goals.
Looking for a full content marketing team to help you with creating on-going, original content? We can help with that! Schedule a free consultation.
