4 Content Planning Mistakes You Could Be Making Right Now

One of the most important aspects that’ll set your marketing campaigns toward meeting your goals is your content. No matter how well-planned your projects are, if your content isn’t contributing enough to move you toward your collective marketing target, then your strategy still wouldn’t work as expected.

Common Content Planning Errors

Errors in planning and strategizing your content are quite common, even for the best marketers. Despite these being a part of the process, you might not be aware you’re committing some of these. With that said, here are four of the most common content planning mistakes you could be making right now:

1. Not Documenting Your Strategy

Once you’ve sat down with your team and decided on what you’re going to come up with, it’s important to document the strategy. Don’t rely on oral agreements only as you’re bound to forget your plans if you solely depend on your memory to help you remember.

Here are some insights on how you can start documenting your content marketing strategy effectively:

• Pinpoint specifically who your target personas are. Remember, you’re not just creating content for the public. You should have a specific group of individuals as your target. Otherwise, your content may seem too general or have no sense of direction at all.
• Map out your content creation process. This means determining which processes, workflow, and other types of content-related decisions will work out to be the best for your team.
• Create a calendar. This step should specifically indicate when you’re going to post. It’s like your list of deadlines to meet such that all content would be ready at least two to three days before the posting date. Digital calendars are helpful for this purpose as they bring an easy way to manage your schedule.

2. Not Having A Plan At All

What’s content planning without even starting with a strategy? Before you proceed with marketing your business, it’s important to start by having a plan. Otherwise, you could be diving right into content marketing without even knowing what to do.

Remember, you can’t just copy the strategies applied by other websites or businesses, especially if they’re running a different niche as your business. Having no plan at all is like planning to fail. You may end up wasting company resources and time on strategies that don’t even hold water at all.

It’s very important to sit down and have a well-defined plan for content marketing. Use this as the foundation of all your content-related strategies. With one, it’s like you’ve got a blueprint to guide you to check whether or not your goals have been achieved and whether or not the strategies you’re applying are effective and up-to-date.

3. Not Understanding Who Your Audience Is

Do you know who your target market is? Or are you planning to eyeball your content, post general information, and hope it’ll resonate well with a specific market? If this is the case, then you’re hurting your content’s ability to hit each of its goals. No matter how well-written your content is, if it doesn’t resonate with your target people, then you still won’t have many audiences.

For instance, you’re trying to reach out to the millennials for the content of your website. However, your content is boring, technical, and full of legalese. Your target millennial audience won’t even bother to go through your content, that’s for sure.

4. Not Measuring Progress

How do you know if your content is meeting goals, and how do you know it isn’t? It’s not enough to merely post regularly and then stop right there. You’ve also got to take it a step further by measuring the progress made by each of the content you’re posting. It’s easy to do that now with tools like Google Analytics, so there’s no reason for you not to do so.

Measuring your progress is needed, so you can determine how much traffic certain content is bringing into your website. This will help shape future decisions with content marketing as you can also use this to have insights on what content is favored by your audience, so next time, you can focus on those.

Conclusion

This list of potential content planning mistakes you could be making is for your awareness. When you’re aware you’ve been committing these, you can create the appropriate changes to avoid having these happen repeatedly.

You can apply the right fixes to your business website or marketing strategies to bring you right back on track and improve your competitiveness. It pays to start with your audit and double-check to see whether or not any of the mistakes above apply to you.