Answer 4 important questions

First you need to answer the following important questions:

What is your goal?

When a content plan has clear goals, it will help you easily orient and develop better content, without getting sidetracked from the beginning. Some common goals include:

1. Increase website traffic
2. Collect customer data
3. Sales goals
4. Increase registrations
5. Increase followers on social media channels

Who is the audience you are targeting?

After understanding the goal you need to achieve, the next thing you need to determine is, who are you trying to “reach”?

Identifying your target customers and understanding what they want will help you have a more appropriate direction with your content plan.

Do your current resources support you well enough?

Before building a content plan, you need to consider current resources, who will be responsible for implementing specific work items? To know what’s possible in your plan and adjust accordingly. Below are 6 popular content development channels:

1. Website
2. Email
3. Social Media
4. Blog
5. Per/Influencer
6. Advertising

Do you have the resources to take care of all those channels? Do you need ALL of them? Luckily NO . Take the time to consider your goals, customer needs, and resources before deciding which channels you want to invest your time, effort, and resources into.

Use goals to guide your plan

After determining the channels you need to build content on, review your goals again.

For example: You are a clothing company and your goal is to promote sales of your spring line and increase sales of your classic coat line.

Based on these goals you can start targeting your content so that it can exist on 3 main channels: website, social media and PR/Influencer.

Website : The home page has a banner promoting the spring collection, the vintage jacket product line is shown in the “spotlight” section below the banner (any advertising features will be remarketed to your online store)

Frequency : Maintain for 1-3 months, change image after a few weeks or complete refresh if needed.

Social Media : Let’s say you’re on Facebook, Instagram. Run an ad for spring products. You can upload 3 photos on Instagram with your spring line or classic coats.

Frequency : Facebook: 1 ad, Instagram: 3 days/content.

PR/Influencer : Work with industry influencers to get them to wear your spring collection and vintage jackets, then let them post on Instagram. Make follow-up posts around their “daily days” with all the products you want to promote.

Frequency : 1 post/day and many posts/week

Find out what you needNow review what you have for your content plan. After knowing:

1. Business purposes
2. Detail goal
3. Current resources
4. Specific goals will create more specific content packages
5. The frequency of content you will produce

Channel 1: Website

Think back to your goals and think about how you can use your website to help achieve them.

Here are some basic ideas for you to leverage your website and accomplish your goals:

1. Home features
2. Featured features (Displayed below the banner, spotlight position to recommend featured content).
3. New tabs on the page for content navigation (product categories)
4. Landingpage focuses on the new collection or specific product line you want to target
5. Now you have a few content suggestions to get you closer to your goals, but to accomplish all of this you need resources.

Going back to the clothing business example, let’s say we get started, you will probably need:

1. Copywriter to write headlines
2. Producer to produce images
3. Designer to design images
4. Developer to code and optimize the interface

Channel 2: Email

You need to determine the specific content, frequency and number of emails that will be sent in your plan.

For upcoming companies

If you are a startup, make sure you have all the necessary information such as: Introduction, incentives, support, customer service,…

For “premium” email campaigns

Some ideas to get you started:

1. Weekly information: Consistent, closely linked content to help you achieve your goals
2. Special offers: Discounts, free samples, contests,…
3. Feature introduction: Use content and focus on the featured product or feature to support the main goal.
4. Campaigns or programs: Send information to customers about program content with a specific time frame.
5. Link to blog posts: Use blog content to drive engagement, sales or signups, etc.

Many companies use Social Media as a main channel. But they don’t understand which platform actually brings in potential customers. To choose the right channel, you must really understand your customer habits and insights, but there are the following things you need to remember:

1. Link: Links to websites or other channels
2. Bio: Necessary information on your channel
3. Assets: Other related identifiers such as avatars, cover photos, etc.
4. Backlog: Fill full content before customers visit your channel
5. Content Calendar: Ensure content can be delivered on schedule
6. Ads: Use ads to increase communication for your website and other channels.

For Social Media channels, you need to pay attention to the following to maintain content on your channels:

1. Content calendar: Use Google Sheet to plan detailed content plans.
2. Photographer: Helps you create image concepts that match your target orientation.
3. Copywriter: Helps you come up with content ideas to support your goals, write a daily (monthly, etc.) content calendar
4. Community Manager: Responsible for posting content and interacting with customers.

Channel 4: Blog

Nowadays, most businesses have their own blogs, but mainly because it brings many benefits:

1. Optimization on search engines: Support for optimizing website SEO and SEM
2. Highly specialized: Helps brands express their opinions, expertise or branding to improve collaborative relationships.
3. Growth: Indirectly increase sales opportunities or collect customer information.

Channel 5: PR/ Influencer

Imagine if your brand was a person, who would he be friends with? This is a good question to help identify influencers or brands you want to collaborate with. These types of relationships are important because:

1. Reaching their audience, this helps your brand/product spread to more potential customers.
2. Content development: By working with other brands or influencers, you will get a fresh batch of content to follow to attract customers.

Some basic ideas that may help you:

1. Influencer campaigns: Try influencer Instagram posts, product/post exchanges or paid placements.
2. Blog posting: Exchange content, do a guest blog post or paid placement.
3. Contests/giveaways: Leverage your influencer network by holding contests or product giveaways, etc

Execute content plan

After you have prepared what you need, review it again and execute! Please write it all down in a Google sheet file for easy tracking.