Content planning for generating leads

Key Takeaways

Understand what a content plan is and its role in generating leads
Understand the rationale for creating a content plan
Learn how to go about planning your content

Creating a robust content plan is crucial for generating leads. It helps you understand your existing content supply and develop your content runway.

A considered content plan ensures you have the correct building blocks in place to embark on your lead generation strategy. It keeps you focused on your objectives, while allowing for flexibility.

Having established the value of content in your marketing strategy (lead to article 4 – Lead generation strategy and tactics), we turn to the practical aspect: how do you go about creating an ongoing stream of content?

A content plan to keep your focus

A plan is always a good starting point. In particular, a content plan documents the policy, process, resource and decisions for executing your content marketing strategy¹. This strategy is informed by the areas and topics you want to focus on, to attract new and retain existing clients.

Content planning forms the building blocks of your content efforts. It helps ensure you stay focused on your bigger objectives, while you systematically build awareness and grow interest among your audience.

Think of it this way:

Decide what your business objectives are;
Decide who your ‘ideal client’ is – who you want to target;
Determine what their needs are – how you can solve their problems;
Define what you want to convey to this audience – your areas of expertise (link to article 4 – Lead generation strategy and tactics); and
Develop a plan for the content that feeds your objectives.

Every business’s content plan will be different – after all, you have varying target markets, areas of expertise and budgets. After creating a plan, you will:

Have an outline of the type of content you need;
Understand how much and how frequently you need content;
Determine what you need to ensure a steady flow of content.

Why content planning?

By first developing a plan for your content needs, you can make sure that you build on your message in a structured way. This helps your audience gain trust in your abilities to help them. Only when they can trust that you can solve their problems, will they be ready for more of a sales pitch.

If you and your team just create content, you run the risk of not catering for all your audience needs, duplicating or obfuscating your messages. Content planning can ensure you can see the whole picture first, including any gaps.

With a plan, you can ensure the necessary balance in the types of content you produce, e.g. blogs, reports, events, etc. In addition, it helps you build variety into your plan, e.g. adding video or graphics alongside the written word.

Box-out: Be nimble and opportune

An important element to remember is the need for flexibility. While having a plan gives you structure and focus, your client environment is dynamic. This means you should allow for some flexibility in your plan to capitalise on opportunities that arise organically. For example, the opportunity to share your views for a publication, or being nimble enough to comment on a topical news event.

The key to making the most of these opportunities is to be quick off the mark. As you often won’t have much time to prepare for some of these opportunities, don’t be overly concerned about producing long research pieces. This is the time to draw on your key messages and keeping your audience in mind. By making sure you say something that adds value, keeping it simple and speaking to your clients’ needs, you will do valuable brand-building.

And: less is more!

How to create a content plan [present as a downloadable template]

Here is a simple plan to organise your content needs.

Define your marketing purpose

What are your business objectives?
What do you want to achieve through your marketing?
Define your areas of expertise

Who do you want to target?
What problems are they looking to solve?
What are you good at?
What do you want to be known for?
Do an audit

What content do you have already?
Do they fit into your areas of expertise?
Do they serve a clear purpose to reach your business objectives?
Looking at your categories of expertise, are there any gaps in your existing content?
What other content do you need?
Create ‘buckets’ of content

Group all connected pieces of content together, based on your areas of expertise – these include existing content and that which needs to be created
Categorise each piece of content in terms of the purpose it serves:
- Raising awareness
- Building to consideration
Helping with conversion
Build a plan with your content blocks

Prioritise which pieces of content you need to produce
Adapt other relevant content to fit your purpose
Create a content calendar

Ensure your content calendar aligns with your marketing / promotional calendar
Promote / release relevant content during the relevant months
Provide for relevant news opportunities in your content plan (e.g. Budgets, interest rate announcements)

At the end of this process, you should have a rough idea of how much content you have, what is still relevant, what needs updating and what needs to be created from scratch. From this, you will also get a clear sense of your current content frequency and how that compares with the rest of the industry.

You might end up with something like the following, for example:
– 2-3 blogs per month
– 1 in-depth article per month
– 2 social posts a week
– 1 article in a guest publication every two months

– 1 event (e.g. webinar) every three months

While this may seem like plenty, remember that you can say the same thing in many different ways – there is opportunity to leverage one piece of content multiple times (link to article 9 – Feeding the content beast).

¹ https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2021/07/create-flexible-content-plan-results/

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