Content planning is where you know what content you’ll be posting to your social media, your website, and publishing in your business months or maybe even years in advance.
I can talk about the nuances to content planning for each individual business for hours. If you want to work on developing a strategy for your business to make content feel smoother, easier, and more fruitful, schedule a call with me or reach out via my contact form.
But this article will give you a strong foundation that you can go to an AI with (like Gemini or ChatGPT) or to work with consultants currently on your business on.
As a business owner or someone who’s working on a WordPress site for a client, you have a level of flexibility of mind and ability to think about and learn thing you haven’t always known.
WordPress is changing all the time and so are all the tech tools and platforms it integrates with.
While we do often think about how the tools we work with change, we don’t as often think about how the content we create changes.
Year over year, different kinds of content emerge like short form 1 minute videos on TikTok or Instagram (you might have seen, they’re called reels)
There are serious tutorial videos, funny dance videos, rant videos, and all kinds of other types of content that serious businesses are making to drive traffic, leads, and attention.
So figuring out exactly what kinds of content will be most effective for your business, we need some foundational steps in place.
We need to know what your business bottom line is.
I’ll use my business as an example, but you’ll want to swap in your own business to this template:
- Best kind of customer:
- What products does that customer have from us:
- How much money do we make from those best customers:
If we can’t answer those 3 questions, then the rest of the questions we’ll look at won’t matter. Make sure those bases are covered for you.
For WPCourseGuide:
- Best kind of customer: WordPress business owners and consultants who partially work on backend and partially on overall business
- What products does that customer have from us: they’ve watched the free videos, bought a course, and have purchased the ongoing membership to monthly live calls. And might be considering hiring out a full project with us from the $1k – $5k range
- How much money do we make from those best customers: $120/month or so and a possible project of maybe $3k
While I do also have projects ranging well above the $10k and $20k range, most of my ideal customers will fall within that description and those larger projects are specialized custom outliers for the business.
With those 3 questions answered, we can move into some more specific questions that indicate what type of content would be useful for me to plan and make:
- What kinds of questions do my customers ask and what channels do they ask them in?
- How often do I reflect on what content I create and how well it’s performing?
- What are my next steps for anyone watching my content at any point? (Where should they go next)
My answers:
- What kinds of questions do my customers ask and what channels do they ask them in? They ask in Facebook, Google, and YouTube about WordPress LMS plugins and general advice
- How often do I reflect on what content I create and how well it’s performing? I do a weekly spreadsheet in Google Drive to evaluate week over week which content is the most popular and how much content I’m creating (business scorecard)
- What are my next steps for anyone watching my content at any point? (Where should they go next)
- Live streams send people to the short videos
- Short form sends people to lead magnets
- Lead magnets take people to long form
- Long form takes people to the courses
- Courses take people to the recurring membership
With all of that laid out, I know a lot about what content I’d like to create, how much editing and work I’d like to put into each and I can evaluate the performance of each step in that process against who I serve and how I help them and what the average financial value of each customer is.
Those 6 questions from this post will get you a long way towards strong content planning if you don’t already have those answers top of mind:
- Best kind of customer:
- What products does that customer have from us:
- How much money do we make from those best customers:
- What kinds of questions do my customers ask and what channels do they ask them in?
- How often do I reflect on what content I create and how well it’s performing?
- What are my next steps for anyone watching my content at any point? (Where should they go next)
If you’ve reached that step where you have all of those questions answered and implemented into your business, you’re at the point where you’d benefit from consultants (like me and others in the industry) to look at what you have set up and how it can be improved.
You can even use those questions as a framework for your team or hired help to get all that set up for you.
But we want to get to the point where when marketers are hired or consultants are hired, we can actually measure the results based on advice they give.
With all that answered above, we have a very very strong basis to work with.
I don’t think you should do content planning until those 6 questions are answered.