Content planning and calendars
Content done right delivers inarguable value to digital marketing efforts, providing your new and existing customers with the information they need at each stage. But doing content well is challenging, and demands a systematic approach to goal setting (what do we want to achieve?), measurement (how do we know we’ve succeeded?) and campaign planning (how do we get there?).
With targets, KPIs and plans in place, the content opportunity can be analysed, refined and improved, building a sustainable platform which will be central to reaching customers across a range of online platforms.
Our approach to content planning is performance focused – we will insist on agreeing strategic and tactical goals, supported by ‘baked in’ KPIs to inform and evolve content marketing efforts. Although conversions and sales may not be a primary focus for content planning, we encourage our clients to acquire and review assist data (towards sales) as well as evaluating primary engagement metrics, e.g. page views, shares, video views etc. After the establishment of data priorities, we combine the outputs of content audits and content gap analysis to deliver a ‘data first’ perspective on content planning. The plan will detail content ideas, asset types, platforms, schedules and integration with complementary digital activity, typically for quarterly periods. As a draft, a sample calendar looks like this:
We then map content components to stages within the customer journey, which can (as an option) relate to target audience personas, either previously created by you or by Oban as part of the strategy.
To recap, we believe that performance focus is an essential and ‘stand-out’ component of our content planning approach. Also, our LIMEs (Local In-Market Experts) support effective multi-market activity by ensuring careful vetting of all content plans from a local perspective.
In practice, this means that we consider a broad range of market specifics before submitting a content plan. Example factors can include in-market seasonality analysis, cross-referencing dates of local religious and cultural events, understanding when competitors may be more or less active, and (of course) ensuring that content ideas are a good ‘fit’ from linguistic and cultural perspectives.
