To reach your content goals, you need a plan.
A content plan is not just a document with dates and roles. It's your content creation process from start to finish.
With a good plan, you can streamline your content creation efforts and achieve your goals.
In this article, I'll explain how to create and use a content plan to achieve your goals.
What you will learn:
- What a content plan is and its essential components
- Why a content plan is important for achieving your marketing goals
- The importance of defining and understanding your target audience
- How to create a content plan that aligns with your business objectives and marketing strategy
What is a content plan?
A content plan is a strategic outline that guides content creation, publication, and management across various channels and team members.
It serves as a roadmap for the content you intend to publish, detailing the topics, formats, and timelines involved.
It encompasses everything from topic ideation and research to setting up your publishing schedule, helping you stay organized and consistent in your content marketing efforts.
A well-structured content plan ensures that your content aligns with your business objectives, effectively reaches your target audience, and delivers value.
It also helps you stay on schedule and, when done correctly, creates an efficient system for producing high-quality content at scale.
Why is content planning important?
Content planning helps you stay organized and provides a clear direction for content creation.
With a content plan in place, you can deliver the best content to your target audience and reach your business goals.
There’s no wasted effort—the direction is clear from a content creation standpoint, and your team knows what to do and how to do it.
9-step content planning process
Now that you know what a content plan is and why it’s important, how do you create one?
Here are nine steps to help you create a content plan to deliver results.
1. Clarify who you are talking to
Before you start creating your content plan, identify your audience.
If you don’t know who you’re creating content for, you will struggle to find topics that resonate and solve their problems, and your messaging will not connect with the reader.
You may find it helpful to create audience personas. These are fictional representations of your ideal target customer.
Personas include information on:
- Demographics: Age, gender, income, occupation, location, etc.
- Interests: What do they like? What are their hobbies or passions related to your offering?
- Challenges and pain points: What problems are they facing that you can help solve?
- Goals and motivations: What are they trying to achieve, and how can you support them?
You can search online for "free user persona template," and you will find different options, such as this library by Canva. Sites like Hubspot, Figma, and Miro also have several templates.
The point is not only to fill the template. It is to actually do the groundwork of research and get to know your audience.
If possible, get on calls with your existing customers or people who represent the target you want to reach.
Knowing your audience helps you determine what topics to focus on, the type of content to create, and how best to reach this group. It also helps you decide on the tonality and language, whether formal, conversational, and so on.
You can do a similar exercise in your business by creating personas based on your target customers. 2-3 personas should be enough for most companies.
If you're talking to everyone, you're not really talking to anyone.
2. Set SMART goals
When creating a content plan, one of the first things you should do is set goals—what do you want to get out of content creation?
And while the easy answer is likely more leads, sales, and conversions, you should break it down into digestible chunks to help create a roadmap to get you there.
You can do this using the SMART goal-setting framework. The SMART acronym stands for:
- Specific—the goal should be clear and actionable
- Measurable—how are you going to track your goal?
- Attainable—the goal should be challenging but possible
- Realistic—take into account possible obstacles and be practical with your goal
- Timebound—set a realistic timeframe and stick to it
For example, let’s say posting articles on your website to increase organic traffic is your goal. Here’s how it would look if you used the SMART framework:
I want to increase organic traffic by 100% by posting 2 SEO articles weekly for the next 6 months. I will track my performance using Google Search Console and record my monthly progress using a bar chart created in Google Sheets.
3. Create a list of content topics
Once you create your personas, it’s time to find relevant ideas and topics for your content plan.
I suggest you start with a brainstorming session, noting down content ideas that address:
- the needs of your target audience at different stages of their buying journey
- their challenges
- and interests
You want to create content that answers your audience's questions and solves their problems.
Ensure these topics are relevant and showcase your product or service as a solution to their challenges—I'll call this business potential.
For example, Shopify creates blog posts that guide e-commerce startups at various stages, from setting up their first store to optimizing for sales, effectively supporting their audience through the buying cycle.
Shopify then provides their e-commerce store platform as the solution—the user wants to set up an online store, and now, they know how… by using Shopify.
Besides relying on your niche knowledge, you can also find relevant topics by doing some topic research and looking at your competitors' content.
For instance, you can use a free tool like Google Keyword Planner to find keyword ideas. It will give you a list of ideas based on a keyword or website URL you add.
However, it's not a content planning tool. You can't see how to group these keywords into topic clusters and how they relate to each other.
For that, you have to use a dedicated content research tool such as Surfer's Topical Map. With Topical Map, you can find hundreds of ideas properly organized into topic clusters.
Topical Map helps you prioritize which topics to focus on, visualize your content map, and make data-driven decisions.
Want to check it out for yourself? Feel free to play around with the demo 👇
4. Prioritize topics with business potential
When doing topic and keyword research, it’s easy to become overwhelmed by how much content you need to create.
Without a plan, this can lead to content creation paralysis—with so much to do, it’s easier to do nothing. Therefore, I suggest prioritizing content with high business potential.
High business potential content is any topic that moves the needle and can generate new business for you.
Business potential is closely related to your site's authority. Search engines like Google want you to create content that aligns with your area of expertise.
If you branch too far out into unrelated territory, your performance might suffer.
Additionally, if you create SEO content for organic search, such as blog posts, you want to focus on easy-to-rank content vs. hard-to-rank content. Easy-to-rank content is often defined by a low-mid keyword difficulty vs difficult-to-rank for keywords.
This helps you get more out of your content marketing efforts sooner.
You should pick topics closely related to your core competencies with decent search volume and moderate ranking difficulty.
Topical Map makes it easy for you to spot such topics:
👉The closer a topic is to the center of your map, the more relevant it's deemed to be
👉The darker the shade of purple, the harder it is to rank for
👉Orange spots are the recommended topics to focus on
You can note the topic list on a simple Excel file or Google sheet.
5. Select a format and channel where your audience is active
Where does your audience spend most of their time online? What types of content do they engage with? Are they more likely to watch YouTube and video tutorials, read blog posts, or scroll social media, for example?
Do your research and create content on the most popular platforms for your audience.
For example, WalletHub has an article for the search term, “best credit card for groceries.” They chose this content type because people often use search engines (and word of mouth) for queries like these.
They can also choose to reshare this content on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. However, LinkedIn wouldn't be the best choice of platform for this audience.
You can create content for multiple platforms and repurpose content for these, but focus on creating content for the main platforms where your audience is first.
6. Create a content calendar
A content calendar helps you plan and organize your content. If you have multiple team members, you can track task progress and assign tasks as needed to get your content from ideation to completion.
You can make your content calendar as simplistic or as advanced as you’d like.
Google Sheets is a great place to start. It’s free and easy to use, and you can share the document with your team to keep tabs on task progress. Use a project management tool like Trello, Notion, or Asana if you want a more specialized calendar.
Assign roles to each part of the content creation process, from topic ideation and research to writing, editing, publishing, and repurposing. You can also add task deadlines to keep everyone on track and ensure consistency.
7. Create interesting content
Once you know what format to prioritize and which topics to cover, you can dive into the nitty gritty… creating engaging content.
In a world of content overload, it's important your content stands out.
Here's an example of interesting content from Recess on Instagram. Take a look at their alcohol-free cosmopolitan alternative.
Their brand is fun, quirky, and unafraid to draw attention and call out how harmful alcohol can be.
Meanwhile, TechCrunch provides news and insights in the startup world. This year, they created a round-up of the best “copycats.” With more brands doing yearly reviews, it’s the perfect opportunity to lean into the wrapped concept by stirring the competition. It’s interesting, unique, and is an excellent read for tech fanatics.
Tailor your content strategy to the platform you’re using and follow the best practices for that platform.
If SEO articles are your focus, you should follow E-E-A-T guidelines and general best search engine optimization practices.
Content creation can be time-consuming. But with the right tools, it doesn't have to be.
With Surfer AI, you can create a fully optimized article draft in less than 20 minutes. It does the research and takes the heavy lifting of writing off your shoulders.
You can then edit and add that human touch to your article.
Focus on providing value through actionable insights and practical tips.
If you need help tweaking your writing, turn to Surfy, your AI writing assistant.Ask Surfy to edit or write something and it will follow your prompt.
Be specific with your prompts! The better your input, the better the output.
8. Repurpose your content into other channels and formats
Once you have created content, your job is not done yet! You can convert content into various formats for repurposing.
For example, I wrote a long-form article for Surfer on how to create an SEO roadmap.
Actionable, bite-sized tips were taken from this article to create a LinkedIn carousel.
To replicate this process for your content, identify long-form content that can be broken down into smaller parts.
If you need some help with repurposing your long-form content into social media posts, use Surfy. Here's a prompt for you:
Turn this into a [insert social media] post. Include an attention-grabbing hook, and end with a question or actionable prompt to encourage comments and shares.
You can adapt this prompt based on the channel and your requirements.
Gary Vee is a big advocate of this model for repurposing content. He first creates a video and then repurposes “the best moments” into many pieces of “micro-content,” optimizing for each platform. See the below image for a breakdown of Gary Vee’s repurposing process.
9. Measure your content’s performance
After you post content, measure content performance for valuable content insights.
For instance, you may find that videos under a certain length perform better than others. Or blog posts where you follow a writing formula for the introductions have a longer read time.You can use various tools and metrics to measure content performance.
Free tools like Google Search Console and Analytics can give you insights into:
- Page clicks
- Impressions
- Keyword rankings
- Social shares
- Bounce rates
Follow closely your most important metrics based on your SMART goals.
With Surfer Reports you can view your performance metrics at a glance.
You can also dig deeper into how your pages and keywords are performing.
For instance, if you find pages with declining impressions or that have dropped in rankings, it might be time for an update.
The beauty of Reports is that it gives you personalized and actionable tips you can follow based on your content performance.
And if you want to track the performance of specific keywords, head to Rank Tracker.Add your main keywords there and track their performance over time.
Once you have a library of content, you can compare and analyze data to create more of what performs best, and less of what does not perform quite so well. Consider using qualitative feedback, such as comments on posts or messages or user feedback.
Key takeaways
- A content plan helps you organize content creation efforts and achieve your content goals
- It creates a clear direction for publishing high-quality content at scale
- Identify your target audience to create content that resonates
- Set SMART goals to create actionable steps to achieve your content goals
- Pick relevant topics and ideas based on your audience’s pain points
- Prioritize topics with business potential and publish where your audience is most active
- Create a content calendar to track task progress from topic ideation to publishing
- Create interesting content that follows best practices
- Repurpose your content into other channels and formats for a wider reach
- Measure content performance and tweak as needed to improve your marketing efforts
