Whether you use a social media management platform like Hootsuite or a more real-time marketing approach, planning content can often seem to take forever. From analysing your campaign’s monthly metrics, to researching your next campaign’s content, you need to keep ahead of current trends and know which platforms and content format work best for your business and why.
While social media and digitisation are associated with fast paced trends and immediate delivery of content, experienced marketers know that the best strategies follow detailed monthly schedules, for which consistency is key.
If you want to engage as much of your existing audience as possible, remain relevant, and discover the importance of planning regular content that is pleasing to look at as well as shareable and engaging, this blog is for you.
Below, I have compiled my top tips on how best to plan your content strategy to increase your online presence, grow your brand awareness, and attract new people to recognise and love your brand, just as much as you do.
Research your audience, current trends, and public holidays
A first basic important step when creating your content plan must include researching upcoming public holidays and observances. This will keep you aware of trends occurring at certain times of the year, around which you can adapt your content to appropriately incorporate these recurring themes. Additionally, official news websites and industry trade press are ideal places to keep informed about current affairs.
It is also important to be aware of your target demographic profile. The more information you have about your audience, the more reliably you will know what content interests them, and which social media platforms they use. This information is important for you to be able to plan and share content which is most likely to result in successful engagements, and ultimately successful conversions.
A good place to start your research is the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Their data can provide you with a breakdown of those who have internet access and what they use it for, compared to ‘non-internet users’.
Which tools are best to help you plan content?
Once you have researched your audience and have an understanding of their topics of interest, you can begin to plan your content. There are a number of different tools which are helpful. Buzzsumo can provide social insights for your content marketing and SEO campaigns, and reveals content which the majority of your target audience are engaging with. Other similar sites can provide you with comparable ideas.
Another tool Google trends, analyses its most popular search engine queries over time, across different regions and languages to provide you with an insight into what topics are popular and worth incorporating into your own campaigns.
If you have a website, Google Search Console is useful for more detailed analysis which allows you to measure your site’s search traffic and performance, fix any issues, and improve your site’s content and, in-turn, its visibility in Google Search results.
What platforms do your audience use and why?
Following your audience research and content planning, you may have collated a mix of curated and original content on topics that interest your audience. But how do you know if this content you have so carefully prepared is going to reach your desired demographic successfully?
Social media polls and surveys are a great way to determine where and when your audience are active online. Alternatively you could use eCampaign software to distribute questions to your subscribers. Running competitions on social media can also prove great indicators of different platform’s rates of activity and engagement.
Additionally, keeping an eye on what content performs best in your feed, including times, format of content, platform, and engagement levels is all important information you need to review, to better understand who your audience are and how best to communicate with them.
With so many types of content, including blog posts, videos, infographics, images, white papers, and newsletters, different audiences will have differing preferences. Taking the information learnt from your analysis will allow you to plan a schedule which incorporates a variety of post types at optimum times, and on the best suited platforms for your businesses’ audience.
What are the best days and times to post?
Social media management platforms often provide pre-formatted suggestions for the best times to post on different platforms. While it is helpful to have an idea of when your audience may be active and respond to your content, you need to know when your audience are online to actually make an impact.
Social media analytics tools like Buffer Analyse, can show you a break down of your best performing content. From here you can deduce the times and days which have had the most engagements and the least, and plan your future campaign around when your audience are most inclined to be online and engage with your content.
Like any aspect of digital marketing, this analysis needs to be a regular activity and in this fast-paced industry, tweaks are often required each month for content and strategies to remain relevant and engaging.
Know what content format works best on which platform
Your content needs to be something which people are drawn to and want to interact with, however, sitting pretty alone will not suffice. Popular content is usually relatable, engaging, and more importantly shared.
The pandemic has significantly changed our behaviour online, from interacting with friends, to work and shopping, and being entertained. With a heavy focus on connectivity, video rapidly grew in popularity in 2020, and research from Smart Insights shows predictions for it to grow stronger still in 2021.
However just because video is a poplar content format, that does not correlate to it being equally successful across all of the social platforms.
Analysing your audience engagement and campaign activity is key to understanding what content works best on which platform, and with this information you can plan your content strategy.
Plan your strategy
Once you know your audience, the content they crave, and the platforms to reach them on, with some monthly metrics analysis you can continue to build upon a digital marketing strategy which works for your business. As 2021 approaches, predictions from Kantar suggest marketers may need to begin to think a little bit more about brand loyalty, consider different marketing techniques and improve strategies to help retain subscribers. As ever, the “real skill” of marketing will continue to be getting the channel mix right.
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