January is your blank canvas.
It’s an opportunity to kick off the new year with a clear idea of what you want your content to look like for the next 12 months. Setting aside time now to determine your strategy & plan makes it easier to align your content to your brand’s goals and create a streamlined process that saves you time and stress down the road.
Plus, putting in the work in January means you can confidently start each month or quarter knowing what content is on deck. No more, “We haven’t published a blog in months!” or “It’s ____ Day and we have nothing ready.”
Instead, it’s “we got this.”
Here are toth shop’s five go-to content planning tips:
ONE: know who you’re talking to
Tailor your content to who you’re trying to reach (re: your audience). Consider their pain points, problems, and interests. Understanding your audience allows you to give them exactly what they want - and at the same time, boost your brand’s credibility.
It also helps you determine where to focus your efforts. Are you speaking to an Instagram audience? Professional LinkedIn peeps? People addicted to checking email?
Once you know who you're talking to, it’s easier to work backwards and determine what you want to say.
PRO TIP:
Use the data available to get a better sense of your audience. Social media platforms offer free audience insights to paint a picture (age, location, etc.) of who’s already engaging with your content. You can use this information to create a buyer persona, which serves as your guiding light for the content you create.
TWO: define goals
Every piece of content should serve a purpose. If you are unsure of what your content goal should or could be, consider these “buckets” as a starting point:
Brand awareness
Lead generation/sales
Customer relationship nurturing
Thought leadership/education
As you start to plan, you should be able to point everything back to your goals.
PRO TIP:
Variety is the spice of life. Mix things up - sales post after sales post after sales post loses impact (and can be annoying). Sprinkle in some brand awareness with behind-the-scenes stories or share educational content geared towards your audience.
THREE: identify your themes
Give your plan shape with themes to drive your messaging - still keeping in mind what your audience wants/cares about.
This can look like monthly themes tied to what’s happening in the world, such as focusing on women in leadership for March (aka Women’s History Month). Or the theme might be internally-driven. For example, if you have a new product launching at the end of August, plan on hyping it up and positioning yourself as an industry leader in that month.
PRO TIP
This is also the perfect time to identify the days/events your brand wants to recognize.
To get you thinking:
FEBRUARY: Black History Month, Valentine’s Day, Galentine’s Day, Super Bowl
MARCH: Women’s History Month, International Women’s Day, World Down Syndrome Day, March Madness
APRIL: Earth Day, Good Friday/Easter Sunday, Stress Awareness Month, Passover
FOUR: maximize resources
Making a content plan forces you to see what you already have in the vault - pictures, videos, graphics, blogs. If the content is there, use it.
Repurposing content can take many different forms. Yes, it might be pulling something out that never got published. Or it can be taking a piece of content and turning it into something else. Have a cool series of captions that you shared on LinkedIn? Turn it into a blog. Have an evergreen blog that performed well? Turn it into social captions.
Repurposed content reinforces your message and helps avoid the create-new-content burnout.
PRO TIP
See what dated content you have that could use a refresh. Think of it as bringing old concepts to life with
FIVE: find your flow
The four tips above are all big-picture ideas - you can flex your creative muscles and get inspired.
But our last tip? Get tactical.
Put pencil to paper (or keys to keyboard) and find your flow:
Choose where your content plan will live.
Choose what tools your team will use - and who needs access to them.
Set deadlines for when content needs to be ready - and who needs to create it.
Determine your brand’s cadence (re: 1 blog a month & 2 social posts a week or 2 blog a month, 1 e-newsletter a month & 3 social posts a week).
Set up a quality check process (re: who creates, who proofs, who posts, who manages the post, etc.)
Set monthly, bi-monthly, or quarterly check-ins to see how content is performing and what adjustments (if any) need to be made to your plan
PRO TIP
There are a million & one tools out there to help with content planning and creation. These tools should streamline your processes so that you can spend more time focused on creating engaging, relevant content - not learning how to navigate 20+ different programs.
toth shop is all about human communication. But guess what? We use technology and AI, too. When we want to transcribe a video for a Q&A blog, we send it to Rev - then we use our human eyes & brains to read it for accuracy and write an engaging intro. It’s only a step in our process that saves us time; it is not our end-all-be-all.
Need a little extra help getting your 2025 content plan started?
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