7 Easy Steps for Content Planning for the New Year

Set yourself up for success with a little auditing and planning. 

The start of a new year allows you to reflect, review and refine your content marketing. Here are some content planning tips that will help you create a strategic outline for your content marketing for the new year.  

Take a moment to review what’s working and identify what you will double down on to maximize your content marketing for the year ahead. 

1. Audit Your Content

Take a look at your analytics and the performance of your content. 

Which posts received the highest engagement? 

Are there certain topics or visuals that generate a lot of interest or questions from your audience?

Identify themes or topics that resonated with your audience. 

Review your web traffic, sales and other insights. 

What generated sales or interest in your products and services? Which activities or actions boosted sales for you? 

Take note of what’s working and not working. What moved the needle for you? 

It’s important for you to stop doing what’s unnecessary and start focusing on content and activities that are effective in your business and content marketing. 

Remember: You don’t need more content, you need effective content.

Related: 5 Tasks for Your End-of-Year Content Marketing Checklist

2. Goals

Assess your marketing efforts over the past year. Did you accomplish or surpass your goals?

Which activities helped you move closer to achieving your marketing goals? Where did you fall short and why?

What will be your goal? (e.g. audience growth, website traffic, lead generation, brand partnerships, sales, etc).

The best thing you can do is to create a spreadsheet or document where you can check in on your progress and track what you are focusing on each quarter and how you will be measuring your work.

If you need help, I do have a content calendar template on Airtable filled with a Content Marketing Goals tab that helps you set and manage your goals.

Free Guide

If you need help maximizing and repurposing your content, check out this content repurposing guide. Download this Content Repurposing Guide to present your content in a new format and expand its lifespan and reach.

3. Identify KPI’s

As you identify your content marketing goals, be sure to identify your key performance indicators so that you know how you will track and measure the impact of your marketing.

Measuring your goals and the impact of your efforts is important so that you continue to iterate on what’s working. 

The Pareto Principle can be an effective way to view your input and output of work. 

The Pareto Principle states that 80 percent of your results are from 20 percent of your actions. You can apply the 80/20 rule to your content marketing efforts. Double down on what moves the needle for your brand and business and either delegate or stop doing activities that don’t create an impact on your bottom line. 

So make sure you’re maximizing your content marketing by identifying what those 20% actions should be.

Related: 6 Ways to Improve Your Content Creation Workflow

4. Audit Your Tools

Which tools will you use to help you create, publish, manage and automate your work? 

Identify which platforms you will invest your time and resources on and identify a content posting framework that will help you stay consistent without causing burnout. 

Here are some suggestions for tools that are great to use for your content creation (with affiliate links):

Airtable: To help you with your content calendar, inventory, CRM or other data management. 

Canva: Creating graphics, videos, social media posts, presentations or PDF guides can all be created within Canva. 

Tailwind: To help you schedule and manage your Pinterest account and generate traffic for your blog, online shop or other channels. 

Planoly: Managing your Instagram account will be easier with a visual planning tool such as Planoly. 

Epidemic Sound: Creating YouTube videos? You can find a library of great sound selections here. 

Asana: Need to manage your projects and general operations of your brand or business? You’ll need a good project management tool. Consider using Asana to keep you on track with your goals, projects and tasks. 

Convert Kit: If you’re building your email list, you’ll want to consider Convert Kit to help you grow and nurture your audience. 

Social Squares: There are many ways to get stock images, but sometimes all of those stock images start to look the same and recognizable across different sites. 

Related: 8 Tools to Help You Manage Your Editorial Calendar

Content Calendar Template

Get access to this course and content calendar that helps you maximize your channel distribution and helps you with your content marketing.

5. Plan By Quarters

Once you have your goal for Q1 identified, you want to create a plan of activities and actions you will do to help you achieve your goals.

For example, if one of your marketing goals is to increase brand awareness, you might focus on pitching to be a guest on podcasts, or guest speak at a conference or lead a workshop or event.

You might pitch yourself to go live on video with another peer or company/brand. You want to get specific on what your goal is and what you will do to help you get those results.

Here’s an example on how to plan a quarterly goal:

Q1 Goal: Increase Visibility

Actions:

• Create a compelling story and value that I can leverage to pitch myself and bring value to a host’s podcast community.
• Research and connect with podcast hosts that align with my brand and audience and pitch to be a guest on their podcast.
• Pitch myself to 15-20 podcast shows. Follow up and identify other opportunities to collaborate.
• Promote my products/offerings during the podcast episode (e.g. email list, product/service). 

Result: Raise awareness about my brand/business by guest speaking on podcast shows 8x’s a year.

Extra bonus: Boost email subscribers or social media followers through guest podcasting.

Give yourself some clues on the actions you will take and remember that if some marketing tactics don’t seem to work, you can always modify your tactics and still accomplish your goal. For example, if pitching yourself to podcasts doesn’t seem to be working, you can try modifying your pitch or you can try pitching yourself for events, workshops or other speaking engagements—that will still help you increase your visibility. 

Related: Maximize Your Projects and Tasks for Success

6. Do Your Research 

Review the notes, themes and key takeaways from your content audit and insights and start making some connections to how you can improve and stay ahead of trends and topics for your audience. 

• Look at your analytics: Which content is receiving the most engagement such as saves, comments, shares or likes. What resonated with your audience and why do you think it performed well? What sparked engagement in your content?

• Look at industry insights: Immerse yourself in high-quality and well-researched content to help you better understand complex topics or issues. Become well-versed in a topic so that you are able to articulate it with clarity and help cut through the noise.

• Look at your audience’s needs: How well do you know your audience and their needs? What are the internal, external and philosophical problems they are facing when it comes to purchasing or engaging with your brand? 

Be sure you understand who your audience is and to put their needs at the top of your content planning and marketing goals.

Related: Improve Your Content Research

Content Calendar Template

If you’re interested, check out this Airtable Content Calendar template that comes with 10 templates to help you stay strategically focused on your content marketing efforts. 

Get access to this course and content calendar that helps you maximize your channel distribution and helps you with your content marketing.

7. Map Out Your Ideas

Which topics, themes or holidays are important to your audience and how will your calendar align with those topics?

Creating high-quality and valuable content takes time and so you want to ensure you’re also maximizing every piece of content you’re creating.

When plugging content into your calendar, make sure you identify the following content:

• Long-Form Content: This type of content can look like blog posts, podcast episodes or videos. Your long-form content offers context, insights, actionable advice and is a valuable source of information for your audience. Maximize your long-form content by intentionally repurposing it as often as you can. 

• Curated Content: This is the content that helps you nurture your audience, builds trust and establishes you as a trusted source for information. Your newsletter helps you share your expertise, share your personal journey, lessons learned and offer more meaningful conversations with your audience.

• Promotional Content: Map out what you will launch and when you will promote it. This is a good way to reverse-engineer your planning. You want to create content that helps build a buzz around your launches and promotions. People won’t know your offer or service exists unless you talk about it and share the transformation or results you can provide. 

• Short-Form Content: Short-form content is built from long-form content. This is content that you create for your social media posts such as graphics, quotes, Twitter threads, 30-60 second videos or Stories.

• Holidays and Observances: Be sure to capture holidays or themes that are relevant for your audience.

What’s the first thing you will do to review and refine your content marketing for the new year?