Here’s a question to ask yourself today: Does your B2B company do content marketing? In today’s hyper-competitive market, you should. 60% of people actually attribute their purchasing decisions to content.
But here’s something you might find hard to believe: Only 46% of B2B content marketers effectively track their performance. If you want a clear picture of your content marketing efforts, you need a concrete strategy complemented by a tactical content plan.
More questions: Do you find yourself questioning the value of having a content planning process? Then this is for you.
In this article, we’ll talk about the ins and outs of content plans. Let’s discuss its meaning and also the steps when making one.
What is a content plan?
A content plan is a document that specifies the specific content pieces that your company will develop and deliver as part of your content strategy. It’s like your roadmap for content creation—to ensure implementing your strategy will not be chaotic doing content marketing.
A short clarification: Many confuse strategy and plan as one concept, but they’re actually just two closely related terms under the content marketing umbrella. While strategy is the overarching guide to the overall creation of content, planning includes the tactics of the content to be created and published.
In short, a content plan is intentional. Usually, it’s created for shorter time frames (monthly or quarterly) and answers questions such as:
- Who is responsible for creating the content?
- When will the content be created? (editorial calendar and publishing schedule)
- How will the content be created?
- What are the content topics, formats, and keywords?
- Where will you promote and distribute the content?
Why should B2B companies have a content marketing plan?
A content marketing plan is an integral part of a company’s content strategy. Since strategy is the “why,” the content plan is the “what” and “how.” Having a solid content marketing plan helps B2B companies achieve their business goals by:
- Organizing content marketing workflows
- Nurturing leads
- Mitigating risks
- Building brand awareness
- Positioning you as a thought leader
Organizing content marketing workflows
A content plan is a tool for your content marketing journey. It brings order to your content marketing workflows in a systematic way. With it, your team can actually follow a schedule on when to start creating content so that the articles or social media posts are ready for scheduling. You avoid last-minute scrambles. Instead, you can focus your energy on producing high-quality content.
Fact in check: organized marketers are 397% likelier to succeed.
Nurturing leads
As a general rule, leads don’t convert into customers right after a single contact. That’s why B2B marketers know the concept of the buyer journey. And because only 5% of the buyer’s journey involves salespeople and 75% want no salespeople at all, you can only nurture leads through content—emails, blogs, newsletters. Effective lead nurturing is made simpler and more streamlined when there’s a plan that targets different buyer stages.
Mitigating risks
Without a B2B content marketing plan in place, content creation can become fragmented and all over the place.
Your content might fail to interconnect with content pillars, or topics may become random or have unclear ownership. Worse, you’re publishing duplicate or new content that’s no longer relevant to your audience. That’s not a hunch, though—in a study, 29% of websites have duplicate content problems which can cause cannibalism.
Think of your content plan as a guiding light—something that always brings you back to your goal.
Building brand awareness
According to Inbox Insight, 57% of B2B companies allocate over 50% of their budget towards brand awareness.
But how can a well-crafted content marketing plan help here? Simple. A plan empowers you to always show up. Delivering valuable and relevant content consistently establishes your strong presence in your industry.
Positioning you as a thought leader
Want to be recognized as an industry thought leader? Of course, strive to! According to the Edelman-LinkedIn study, 54% of decision-makers and 48% of C-suite executives read thought leadership content each week.
What does this mean? It’s important to craft content that showcases your expertise, insights, and unique perspective. Through a content strategy geared toward market insights and trends, B2B firms can become trusted advisors.
6 steps in the content planning process
Step 1. Establish micro-goals
Begin by defining your content plan’s goals—the stage of the buyer’s journey you wish to target. Common goals include lead generation, brand awareness, nurturing prospects, or driving conversions. Clearly defined objectives will guide the rest of your content planning process.
Step 2. Audit your existing content
Identify gaps, redundancies, and opportunities for improvement in your existing content assets. Conducting a content audit will help you understand what content resonates with your audience. Some of the insights are the types of content that drive traffic, engagement, and conversions. Weed out the weaklings—those outdated, irrelevant pieces that are doing more harm than good.
Step 3. Ideate content topics
Get those thinking caps on. Brainstorm new content topic ideas that fit your audience and your goals. Tap into your audience’s interests, pain points, and burning questions. What keeps them up at night? What challenges are they facing in their industry?
Use customer survey tools, social listening tools, and keyword research to uncover hot topics and trending conversations.
Step 4. Decide on the format
First things first. Take a step back and think about your target audience’s preferences and habits. Are they frequent readers of blog posts? Or do they prefer podcasts they can consume during their commute or multitasking? Being familiar with how your audience likes to interact with content will guide your format decisions.
Step 5. Assign tasks to team members
Firstly, gather your content team. Sit down together (virtually or in person) and decide who’s going to tackle what. Play to each team member’s strengths and match tasks to their skills. Just make sure everyone’s on the same page about how to create content, when the deadlines are, what the expectations are, and if there are any roadblocks they might encounter along the way—keep those lines of communication open.
Step 6. Set the content calendar
This is the time to map out your content journey for the weeks and months ahead. Populate your content strategy and create a content plan template or editorial calendar based on key milestones, events, and themes that you want to cover. But here’s the trick: be realistic about your bandwidth and resources.
5 content planning tools you can leverage
If you want more systemized end-to-end content production operations from ideation to publication, check out these five content planning tools that B2B companies should consider:
CoSchedule
An all-in-one marketing tool from social media to content creation to analytics. It’s a calendar and content scheduling platform that has features like social media scheduling, content management system analytics, and team collaboration.
Asana
A popular project management software, Asana keeps you on track with given to-do tasks. You can use it to plan, manage, track, and communicate about your content team’s assignments. With its customizable fields and statuses, it’s easy to see the stage of your content plan.
Airtable
The user-friendly AirTable is an asset management tool for easy content reuse. It combines the flexibility of a spreadsheet with the functionality of a database. The tool is a powerful solution for content planning. Use Airtable to organize content ideas, track deadlines, and manage content workflows.
Google Workspace
Google Workspace doesn’t need much introduction. With its built-in tools that can facilitate effective content planning, creating and collaborating is a breeze. Through easy sharing and permissions, the full Google Workspace stack acts as a cloud access point for organization-wide visibility into planned content strategies.
Notion
Notion is a flexible workspace that can be leveraged across the content planning process. You can map content frameworks, build editorial calendars, assign workflows, produce content, and analyze performance. This is all within the Notion system.
How can you measure the success of your content plan?
As mentioned earlier, content marketing plans are created for shorter time frames. So, it makes perfect sense that you measure and optimize it on a regular basis. Here are the various analytics and metrics you can track to measure the success of your content marketing campaign plan:
Website traffic
This (vanity) metric tells you just how many people check out your site. But how does it measure the success of your content plan? Higher overall website traffic shows your content efforts are reaching more people. Of course, you’ll have to diver deeper to assess whether the organic traffic that you’re getting is quality and adheres to your ideal customer profile (ICP).
Search ranking improvements
When your content starts climbing up those search engine results pages (SERPs), it means your content is hitting the mark. Improved search rankings can also be an indicator of a broader win for your entire content strategy. To put it another way, you’re creating valuable and trustworthy content in the eyes of search engines and your audience alike.
Google Analytics goals
Let’s talk about setting goals in Google Analytics. These are the specific actions you want your audience to take in response to your content. Once set up, it’s time to start tracking those goals. Keep a close eye on key metrics like conversion rate, goal completions, and goal value to see how your content is performing.
Engagement metrics
Look at metrics like average time on page, bounce rate, pages per session, and scroll depth to determine your audience’s attention span. Higher engagement typically indicates a positive response to your content.
Social shares and comments
Monitor social shares, likes, comments, and mentions across various social media platforms to gauge audience reception and sharing. They’re like applause from your audience, indicating that your content sparked engagement.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is a direct measure of how many people click on your call-to-action (CTA) within your content. When someone sees your content—whether it’s a social media post, email, or ad—and decides to click on it, they are basically saying, “Hey, this looks interesting! I want to know more.” A high CTR indicates that your content is compelling and effectively driving user engagement.
Lead generation metrics
Lead generation metrics correlate to the volume of gated premium content resources included in the content plan (like eBooks, guidebooks, and email nurturing courses). Monitor metrics related to lead generation, for example, form submissions, email sign-ups, and gated content downloads, to assess the effectiveness of your content in capturing and nurturing leads.
Bonus resource: Tim’s own strategy for content planning
TaskDrive’s CEO, Tim, considers having a content plan as very crucial for organizing his writing process. He utilizes a Notion database to categorize his content ideas by their current status: Idea, In Progress, To Review, Ready to Post, and Published. This approach helps Tim track the progress of each piece of content, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.
Tim’s inspiration for content often stems from his daily experiences, observations from the digital world, and conversations with others. Whether it’s an unexpected situation, like conducting a sales call from his broken-down car, or responding to a provocative online post, these real-life scenarios provide a rich source of material for Tim.
When a new idea strikes, he starts by creating a rough draft into the ‘Ideas’ section of his Notion. From there, he utilizes Content Crafter GPT to refine his initial thoughts into polished, engaging posts ready for his audience.
One of Tim’s key strategies is to captivate his readers from the beginning. He employs a Hook Generator within his AIPRM to craft compelling introductions. Keeping abreast of current events also allows him to create content that is not only engaging, but also timely and relevant—such as his video on ChatGPT’s memory feature on the day it was released.
In essence, Tim’s approach to content planning is a blend of meticulous organization, drawing inspiration from everyday life, and leveraging cutting-edge tools to ensure his content resonates with his audience and stays at the forefront of discussions.
Convert your content strategy into action—create your content plan today
If your content marketing plan is just full of strategies, sorry, but it won’t work.
Without an intentional, tactical content plan to guide your content efforts, it’ll be all in vain—and won’t move the needle. It’s time to start building your own content marketing strategy plan and see higher revenues directly attributed to your content efforts.
For your content plan goals to become more achievable, partnering with a skilled virtual assistant team can make all the difference. Let our team at TaskDrive provide you with VA experts who can understand your unique business needs. Schedule a free consultation with us now!
