How to write a content plan

A content plan is one of the many tools marketers use to plan and manage content creation. If content success comes down to the right content, for the right audience, at the right time, your content plan details what the 'right content' is.

Your content plan can look like anything that works for your team: a Google doc, a spreadsheet, a wiki in Notion, or a Trello board.

What all content plans have in common, though, is how they relate to your content marketing strategy and calendar. They sit squarely between your high-level content strategy and your granular content calendar (more on this distinction in a minute!)

It’s a place where busy marketing and communications teams gather ideas about the types of content and the topics and/or keywords they need to cover to fulfil their content strategy. It often details things like the marketing channels you’ll use, the leading content metrics you’ll measure, topic clusters you’ll cover, and more.

Modern content marketing and creation involves a lot of steps, from building your overall strategy to tactical planning, ideation, scheduling, and reporting on content. There are several layers to keep track of, and that’s where your content strategy, plan, and calendar come into play.

While they may sound similar, each of these has their own place in the content process. Adding to the confusion, many people use these terms interchangeably. That can make it hard to conceptualise the difference between the three and what you should include in each.

So before we dive into how to write a content plan, let’s get super clear on what it is in relation to a content strategy and a content calendar.

A content strategy outlines how you’ll use content to achieve overall business objectives. It’s high-level and ties content back to broader business goals like product launches, education, retention, and acquisition (among others). Your content strategy answers questions like, 'Why are we creating content? And who is it for?' and outlines lagging metrics you want to work toward.

A content plan is where you gather ideas about what types of content and what topics or keywords you need to cover in order to fulfil the marketing goals set forth in your content strategy. It lays out tactics, channels, content themes, and leading content metrics. Your plan should answer, 'What content are we going to create?', 'Where will we publish and promote it?', and 'How will we measure content success?'

A content calendar (or editorial calendar) helps to visualise and keep track of future content, your publishing schedule, and the actual workflow for content production. This is where content creation gets into the nitty gritty details of content management: when you’ll publish new pieces of content (or update existing content) and who will create it (internal team members, freelancers, influencers, users, etc.).

To help put those distinctions in practice, let’s look at an example.

“Our content needs to drive MQLs for the sales team that will help grow our travel vertical.”

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“We’ll create a number of gated content pieces to generate leads and gather their contact information. We’ll publish them on our blog and promote them via paid search ads on Google, as well as our own social media platforms.”

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“On 15 August, we’ll publish a long-form whitepaper on how our customers in the travel industry can recover after COVID-19.
Writer: Kylie. Designer: Simon. Final proof: Samara.”

From a practical perspective, your content plan includes the topics and types of content you plan to create, how you’ll distribute and promote them, and the metrics you’ll use to measure their success.

A great content plan takes your overarching strategy and translates it into actionable tactics. That often means detailing:

• The content channels you’ll use for publishing, distribution, and promotion (e.g. your blog, Instagram, a specific email list).
• The content types and formats you’ll produce (e.g. paid LinkedIn ads, written blog posts, YouTube videos, an email newsletter).
• The plan for distributing and promoting your content.
• The plan for content optimisation and how you’ll repurpose content across different channels and formats.
• The content metrics and KPIs you’ll use to gauge success (e.g. organic search traffic, trial signups, conversions, social shares, donations, etc.), including leading and lagging indicators (more on this later!)

A lot goes into a solid content plan — but there are also plenty of details that don’t belong there. Among them are:

• a strategy statement
• buyer personas
• high-level business goals around things like revenue and CAC
• plans for individual pieces of content, and
• a calendar with publication dates and other production details.

Now that we’re on the same page about what a content plan is, what it isn’t, and how it differs from your content strategy and calendar, let’s talk about how to build your own.

Your content plan isn’t a strategy, but it does require you to have one in place. A successful content strategy lays out high-level goals for your content marketing (like acquisition or brand awareness, for example), details your audience and personas, and explains why you’re creating content in the first place.

All of these details are a crucial foundation on which to build your content plan. After all, ad hoc content tactics won’t drive tangible results — the tactical details in your plan have to be informed by your overarching strategy and goals.

Before you dive into the how, it’s important to get clear on what you’re really trying to do with your content. That’s where metrics come into play. There’s no right answer as to which content metrics you should focus on — it only matters that you understand what they are before moving into tactics and editorial planning.

We also recommend including a mix of leading and lagging indicators of success. Here’s an example from Databox:

If [fictional company] Predictably, Inc. publishes a new blog post, sessions from social traffic to their website may spike immediately after they share the content with their followers — a leading outcome.

However, sessions from organic traffic will most likely take a little while to grow. For Predictably, Inc., the majority of their traffic comes from Google search, making the likely success of any individual blog post hard to detect immediately — a lagging outcome.

Details on who your content is for — including buyer personas — should be established in your content strategy. That said, if your business targets multiple personas, you may create different content for each audience.

It’s important to know this information and keep your audience in mind while developing your content plan — because who you’re creating for will impact things like content format and distribution channels.

With foundational details like your strategy, audience, and metrics in place, it’s time to start brainstorming. There are a number of ways to approach content ideation. For example, if your strategy centres around search engine optimisation (SEO), you may brainstorm content topics and clusters based on existing keyword research.

You may also look into qualitative data from your customers or audience members to find topics that interest them, look into topics your competitors cover, perform a content audit to find optimisation and update opportunities, and more.

Once you’ve brainstormed what you’ll cover, you’re ready to think about how you’ll approach those topics. Different media types (a visual story, for example, or an infographic) may work better for different content topics. It’s also important to outline the type of content, be it blog content, social media content, case studies, etc.

You may also want to repurpose content across a few media types — turning a podcast episode into a written blog post, for example — to get more mileage out of your content marketing efforts.

While we’ve been clear that your content plan should not include a calendar, it can be helpful to include a higher-level expectation for how frequently you’ll create and publish new content. This can be as basic as saying, “We’ll publish a new blog post once per week” or “We’ll promote our new blog content in a fortnightly email digest.”

If you’ve completed the first six steps, this last part is easy peasy. Simply pull all the existing details into a content marketing plan that’s accessible and actionable for you and the rest of your team. As we mentioned before, this can look in practice like anything that works for you: a Notion doc, a Google spreadsheet, or a robust project management tool setup.

A successful content plan keeps your entire marketing team on the same page and ensures you can create the results the business needs.

It also makes the next step — building your content calendar — super straightforward. To that end, you can check out this detailed how-to (including more than 10 content calendar templates!)