If you’re one of those “I’m not sure what I’m doing later today, let alone six months from now” types of people, I hear you. For many, creating any long-term plan is a daunting task with seemingly too many ways to approach it, so it’s easier to just not start.
But like so many things in business, having a documented content plan comes with many benefits–holding the team accountable, staying consistent, and understanding how you can improve–just to name a few.
Whether you’re planning blogs, videos, infographics, social ads, or any other type of content, here are four easy ways to at least start building that year-long content plan.
Look at the Calendar
We don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. Piggyback off of major holidays and seasonal events like Christmas, Black Friday, summer, winter, back to school, graduations, and the list goes on. Go beyond just themed sales events celebrating those holidays. From a content marketing perspective, think about the weeks or even months leading up to those events. How are your products or services useful during those times? What are the questions or problems that your customers encounter during those specific times of year?
For example, if you own a dog grooming business, think about the summer months; what common concerns are on pet owners’ minds during that month? Perhaps they’re wondering what the best summer haircuts for their long-haired pups are. Or maybe they’re worried about ticks and want to know the best methods for inspecting their pets, identifying what ticks look like, and how to safely remove them. These are the types of topics that, as an authority, you can blog about and share across your social networks.
In addition to official holidays, join the crowd on platforms like Twitter and Instagram with social media holidays. With holidays like #InternationalCoffeeDay, #NationalBookLoversDay, #NationalDogDay, #SmallBusinessSaturday, #WorldEnvironmentDay, and tons more, there are plenty of ways to connect your business to what your audience is already talking about.
Work With What You’ve Got
Conduct some research with the data you already own. If you have some existing content on your site, set your time frame in Google Analytics back as far as you can go. Do you notice any particular pages, services, or blogs spike during certain months? As an auto repair center, maybe it’s a page about tire maintenance that sees the most traffic in January. Look for trends and determine what other angles you can take to tackle the topic in a new way.
Utilize Google Trends
You already know holidays happen the same time every year, but that doesn’t mean you wait until May to start thinking about spring. Google Trends is a handy tool that will show which months are most popular for certain searches. You can also drill down to your state or region to show even more accurate data.
Let’s say you own a hair salon and you’re looking to expand your clientele for special occasions like proms and weddings. We can see that searches peak the end of June for wedding hairstyles. With that, start planning your “Wedding Hairstyle Trends for 2019” content as early as possible–preferably just in time for the new year–so that the content has enough time to be indexed and shared.
Another benefit of Google Trends is finding related keywords to the topics you’re researching, which could then trigger new ideas for future blog topics, video content, or even possible hashtags to use on Instagram. For instance, sticking with the hair salon example, “prom hair” shows a number of related queries specifically for certain hair lengths and types. Use these to guide your content planning so that you can create content that’s as targeted as possible.
Identify Themes
Experiment with having a dedicated monthly theme that you can model all of your content after. This not only keeps all of your various efforts cohesive, but makes planning a given month a bit more focused and (hopefully) easier to come up with topics to cover.
Here at PCG, we planned out an entire year of themes that will drive all of the content we create during the month. These don’t need to be extremely specific; for example, some of our themes include “consistency,” “strategy,” “educate,” and “evaluate.” They are broad enough that you are not pigeon-holed, but serve as your content marketing North Star throughout the month.
With this month’s theme of accountability, now is the ideal time to start building your content calendar! Be ready to kick off 2019 with a plan that will guide your year and hold your team responsible for effective, consistent content.
About the Author
Laura is the Content Director at PCG. She likes to sew, read fiction, go on day trips, and doodle on her iPad. She is also a "Diamond Girl" (aka more than your average Neil Diamond fan).