Defining your Content Strategy, Content Plan, & Content Calendar

If you remember when we talked about Content Batching, you’ll remember when I said that your content strategy, content plan, and content calendar all significantly shape how your brand unfolds online and what results you bring back. Well, here’s why.

Content Strategy — Done annually, the Content Strategy defines the objectives of your content; i.e. what your business is using digital content to achieve and what it’s not. This document should be created once you’ve done a thorough digital audit and will link directly to your content plan and content calendar.

The digital audit is key to creating a solid foundation for your content strategy and everything else from here on out. Here you can uncover interesting audience behaviours, personas, content wins, re-purpose options, and opportunities for engagement. Going into a strategy development phase with this information is not to be underestimated. Extra points if you include a competitor analysis.

The content strategy defines your target audience, what problems your content solves for them, what separates your business apart from the marketplace, what channels you’ll be posting on, and the objective of each — all of which will tie into your tone of voice.

Content Plan — Your Content Plan defines the assets your business will produce to fulfil the proposed Content Strategy. This includes the types of content, the formatting for each, keywords and search terms, hashtags, relevant holidays, and seasonal audience behaviours. Last, but not least, it defines your goals, benchmarks, and any possible trend forecasts.

Content Calendar — Your Content Calendar is a day-to-day and month-to-month schedule of all digital platforms. This can often be organised in a third-party app such as Buffer, Sprout, or Later. Sprout is my personal favourite for data reasons and tagging options, however, Later seems to be the mainstream provider right now.

The main bits you should have covered are your campaigns, collaborations, key dates, and posting times; but the Content Calendar can be as granular as you have the time for, in fact, the more details you have the better. Any assets, links, hashtags, or creative copy you have ready can go directly in. The more concise your calendar is, the more efficient your team can be during the scheduling phase.

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These three documents are vital to your content marketing efforts and should be completed before you enter the content production phase, and after your marketing budget and digital marketing strategy are in place.

Need help with your digital marketing? Get in touch or email styledbygracieclemens@gmail.com.