In today's world, an online presence is crucial for the success of your company. You need to publish content regularly via social media, your website, a blog or formats such as a podcast. This could be articles, explanatory videos or infographics, for example. A content plan, also known as an editorial plan, helps you to plan and create all your content.
Read on to find out how you can easily create your content plan using a free template and what you need to bear in mind when doing so.
What are the advantages of a content plan
The use of a comprehensive content plan has several advantages for your marketing:
The content appears as planned
You can always keep an eye on deadlines for drafts and important publication dates with a content plan. It is clear who has to complete which tasks by when. Personnel bottlenecks when creating the content plan or missed deadlines are therefore a thing of the past.
Responsibilities are clearly distributed
You should assign a responsible person to each planned article. This way, everyone in the team can filter the editorial plan according to their to-dos and see at a glance what needs to be done. Coordination across several people or departments is easier if it is clear who is involved in which project and who still has capacity.
Use a content plan to coordinate the planning and creation of articles. Image rights: © DisobeyArt / Adobe Stock
No content is lost
Furthermore, good content planning means that no content is lost. Every idea can be recorded directly and given a place in the queue. The content plan offers you a central location for collecting ideas for future articles, social media posts, etc.
Keeping an overview with a content plan
The content plan also helps you to maintain an overview in the stressful day-to-day editorial work. It is a support for the successful planning and implementation of projects in all areas of content marketing.
Pursue a content strategy
After all, good content planning allows you to focus on your goals. These can be, for example, greater reach, more followers or more leads. In the content plan, a common thread can be established between the posts and followed consistently.
Checklist for your content planning
The next step is to choose the right framework for your content plan. The following checklist will help you to create a good editorial plan template that you then only need to fill with ideas and content:
- How many channels do you want to manage?
- How often would you like to publish?
- Do you want to manage complex campaigns or just post organic content?
- Do you pursue an SEO strategy for the content?
- Which subtasks are part of content planning and which processes do you want to map with the content plan?
- How many parties should cooperate via the editorial plan?
- Do you need a calendar and automatic reminders?
- What data and statistics would you like to use to analyze performance?
Content planning requires a well thought-out concept. Image rights: © Andrey Popov / Adobe Stock
The answers to the questions in the checklist determine the structure and scope of the required content plan template.
Create a content plan in 5 steps
You can get your content planning ready for use in five steps. We start with the "why". Why do you want to do content marketing?
1. determine goals
Define the goals you want to achieve with the editorial plan. The following options are possible, for example:
- Awareness: More people should know your brand or your company.
- Reach: Your marketing messages should reach more people.
- Traffic: More people should visit your website.
- Sales: You want to gain more leads, subscribers or customers.
- Customer loyalty: You want to strengthen the relationship with your customers and encourage them to recommend you to others.
- Unique position: You want to stand out from the competition with your content.
- Expert status: You want to make a name for yourself in the industry and become a sought-after expert on a specific topic.
Once the objectives have been defined, the next step is to decide on the appropriate media, content types and formats.
2. select medium, content type and format
Important media for content marketing are usually your website, blogs, search engines, video and social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook. What type of content do you want to publish? Choose between text, image, audio, video or a mix of several content types. The possible content formats depend on which medium you choose. Content formats include blog articles, YouTube videos, podcast episodes, social media posts, presentations, webinars, white papers, infographics, newsletters and more.
As a general rule, focus on two to three formats in which you are particularly good or would like to become particularly good. These should be tailored to the usage habits and expectations of your target group.
3. determine content mix and frequency
Then go into detail with your content plan. The content mix determines which content you will post. Various categories can be considered thematically:
- Viral: Content that corresponds to current trends or could trigger a new one.
- News: Content on topics that are hotly debated in your industry or generally in the news.
- Entertainment: Content that attracts attention and entertains your target group.
- Guide: Useful content that helps your target group.
- SEO: Content that your target group wants to find via a search engine.
For content planning, also specify when and how often content should be published. For example, twice a week, every Tuesday and Thursday at 8 am.
4. create an editorial plan
Now it's time to actually create the editorial plan. With the right tool, this is child's play. For example, select an existing template for your content plan, adapt the tables to your own requirements and insert your data.
As a minimum, your content plan should contain columns for a working title or the content idea and the planned publication date. Columns for documents and images, the editing status, the person responsible, the format, the medium or other information are also useful.
5. define general guidelines for your content
Once you have planned the content, you should develop and document content guidelines with your team in a workshop. In this way, you can ensure that the content achieves consistent quality even over a longer period of time with several participants.
These include, for example, how to address readers, the tonality of texts, the use of emojis and hashtags, the resolution and size of images, links, formatting and more. The guidelines round off the editorial plan and make it ready for use. If you are working with freelancers or an agency, guidelines help you to create content exactly as you want it.
Create content plan with SeaTable
With SeaTable's free content plan template, the marketing team, content creators, agencies and other stakeholders can work together in one tool. In your editorial plan, you can organize all content clearly and maintain it easily. Responsibilities are defined and tasks distributed.
1. meaningful structuring with categories
You can create any number of categories with the single selection columns. The advantage of this is that you can later group, filter or carry out statistical evaluations. For example, you can display all unpublished blog articles or just your social media content plan.
2. save images and documents in the content plan
SeaTable has a decisive advantage over well-known programs such as Excel: With file and image columns, you can store documents and images for your posts directly in your content plan. You no longer need to manually link images to drives, send them by e-mail or via file-sharing services such as Dropbox. No more lost files!
3. deadlines always in view
In order to keep track of time, you can switch from the table to the calendar view with one click. The deadlines for drafts and publication dates are entered here in a monthly, weekly or daily overview.
4. easy communication in the editorial plan
The communication for planning contributions sometimes extends across various e-mails, internal chats or documents. This can quickly become confusing. With SeaTable, all messages are bundled in one place: Communicate your feedback directly in the editorial plan. This works very efficiently via the comment function in the individual rows. You can track all changes in the log - so it is always clear who has made which changes in the editorial plan.
Simple and direct communication in the editorial plan
5 Create clarity with statistics
Would you like to experiment with different data and analyze your content according to your wishes? Then create meaningful statistics with SeaTable. For example, analyze in which months you have published a particularly large number of posts, which employee has written the most posts or on which channel the content was most successful. This provides many valuable insights into where things are going well - and where there may still be room for improvement.
Tips on how to use your editorial plan efficiently
All in all, you should make sure that ...
- ... your goals are measurable so that you can check the success of your content marketing measures later. Clicks, likes, comments - which key figures would you like to collect and analyze?
- ... you should not plan too much, but also not too little time for content creation. Quality comes before quantity, but you should achieve your marketing goals with a reasonable amount of effort.
- ... all participants have access to the editorial plan and can work on it simultaneously.
Conclusion on the content plan
When you create a marketing plan, you need a clear content plan to keep track of the planned content, deadlines, tasks and their status. This allows you to successfully plan and implement contributions as a team.
If we have piqued your interest in SeaTable, register for free in our cloud and start working directly with the content plan template.
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