Whether you have a new idea or have already established a name in the industry, content is essential in building a brand in today’s digital age. It can help increase brand awareness, establish authority, and drive organic website traffic.
Some crucial brand-building concepts you should know are content planning and content strategy. Unfortunately, some usually interchange these terms because both are crucial in creating compelling content. While content strategy is essential for brand awareness, you need a sustainable plan to execute it.
If you want to create and implement a successful marketing campaign, this article will differentiate content strategy and content planning. We’ll also discuss the crucial elements and how this process can help.
What Is Content Strategy?
A content strategy guides marketers in developing content to meet the organisation’s objectives. It includes research, goals, messaging, and themes and focuses on the buyer’s needs, motivations, and challenges.
What Is Content Planning?
On the other hand, content planning is the structure and processes marketers use to determine what content initiatives to execute and when to implement them. It can help ensure content is unique and relevant, optimise engagement for each piece, and support teams in accomplishing their tasks on time. Effective content planning includes a content strategy, a content plan, and an understanding of the available team and resources.
What Are the Things Involved in Content Planning?
When content planning, you must consider how topics align with your strategy and determine if it’s helpful. You should also ask yourself if the type of content will be relevant to your target audience. Moreover, know if your industry has seasonal or promotional periods, identify content opportunities from competitive research, and ask if you have a content repurposing plan.
What Are the Elements of Content Planning?
This process involves documenting production and content workflows, creating a content calendar, onboarding, and training team members, and promoting and distributing content. It also means fostering transparency and communication.
7 Ways Content Planning Can Help
After differentiating content planning from content strategy and identifying the crucial elements, this section will explain how this process can help address content marketing issues.
1. Identify Buyer Pain Points
Buyers constantly search the internet to find solutions to their problems. You can be their answered prayer by having a content plan. It means that after researching and creating different personas, you should know how to use this knowledge effectively.
2. Create and Adhere to a Schedule
You can ensure everyone on the team is on the same page by having an accessible editorial calendar. It will also help minimise conflicts that usually arise when managing content.
3. Keep Content Powerful and Unique
Collaborating helps to utilise everyone’s ideas and develop the best solutions. Referencing your data allows you to see what has the most impact on your target audience.
4. Maximise Resources
A clearly outlined and reusable process can help marketers save resources and make things more organised and easier to prioritise.
5. Distance from Your Competition
You set yourself apart from your competition when you become more organised and productive than others. While content planning has its fair share of difficulties, having a good focus and the right resources can help you conquer your competitors.
6. Measure Effectiveness
Tracking the results of a content marketing strategy, interpreting data, and making changes based on the findings are crucial in planning content.
7. Maintain Engagement
Teams usually finish and forget their content, leading to poor reach and engagement. On the other hand, improved content planning can ensure every published item gets the needed attention.
Conclusion
All brands deserve increased awareness and visibility because they’re crucial for success. You can create and implement a successful marketing campaign by understanding the differences between content planning and content strategy and using the right tools.
If your marketing team struggles with content planning, check out ContentCory! We help businesses organise their content by letting them make a simple but beautiful content calendar. Create yours now!