What Is an Effective Content Plan and How to Prepare It?

Today let’s talk about writing a content plan and why you should not neglect it. 
Content plan is a prepared set of categories and themes for a specific website, blog, or a social media channel, which also contains the dates of their publication. 
Having an accurate content plan allows you to follow one strategy, thus increasing its efficiency. What’s more, by sticking to deadlines, you can select and prepare valuable content in advance. 
With a prepared content plan you will always remember what type of content and in which social media platform you are supposed to publish. No more chaotic videos/photos/texts placement as long as you already know what you need to prepare for each post. 

An effective content plan must include these 5 categories:

  1. Education 
  2. Entertainment 
  3. Engagement 
  4. Motivation
  5. Promotion  

The goal of educational and entertaining posts is to nurture relationships between you and your clients/potential clients, build loyalty. Engaging posts make your audience interact with your content, motivation posts – obviously motivate. Promotional posts aim to attract new clients. 
Let’s take a closer look at these categories.

Education

Educational posts are meant to deliver new knowledge and skills to your reader. 
Ideas for educational posts:

  • Tips & guidance
  • Instructions on how to use your products
  • Q&A regarding your service/products
  • Links to relevant articles, studies, reports
  • Recommendations for books, training and webinars on topics related to your business
  • Live streams with a topic that specifically interests your audience

The best type of educational content is the one that solves a PROBLEM. For example, some kids’ parents would definitely pay attention to the headline: “The most effective method to help your child study better/ like studying”. For a career coach, an educational post could be a video about “5 tips to get hired after your first interview”. 

Readers’ problems usually start with “how”. What you should do is “educate” them by giving a solution to their “how”. 

Entertainment + Engagement 

The initial purpose of Social Media was to entertain the audience. Therefore, education is great, but you should let your followers have fun with your content as well. 
Post some memes, share funny stories (also stories of your own), repost entertaining videos. What would be even better is to ENGAGE your audience with contests, giveaways, polls, Q&A, and quizzes. This way you will get people to interact with your content, giving your account a lot more chances to get noticed by more potential clients.
Clearly, engaging content does not always have to be funny. Sometimes you can ask more serious questions, e.g., “How do you prefer spending your holidays? At home or traveling?”, or post some informational type of quizzes, e.g., “top 5 myths about keto diet”. 
However, remember not to overload your audience with “serious” information. 

Motivation

The word “motivation” speaks for itself. The more you motivate your audience – the more they trust you, want to become like you, thus want to buy your product/service to achieve that. 
What can you post?

  • Think what motivates your audience specifically: whether they need to be told that they are unique or it’s about accepting their own weaknesses. 
  • Put yourself in their shoes and think what would motivate them now.  

Promotion

First of all, don’t be scared to promote your business on social media! Having up to 20% promotional content is totally acceptable. 
Which posts are promotional? 
Those containing information regarding sales, special offers, discounts:
“Buy 3 pairs of skates for the price of 2!”
“A special offer only today! 50% off for all of my online courses”
“First 20 signed up members get a webinar for free”
However, promotional posts are not only those with “direct selling”. They also can include your clients’ testimonials, a mission of your business, problems you solve, etc. 

When to post? How often? 

Let’s take an Instagram example, which, likewise, you can apply to other Social Media

  • Post 2-4 times a week: your audience will get a constant reminder about you without getting exhausted. 
  • Always try to post at the same time: you “teach” your audience a habit of checking your profile regularly. 
  • Want to know your best time to post? Check statistics! It’s a great way to know the highest activity of your audience, which may vary for every business. 
  • Try to post IG stories every day to have that “clickable circle” around your profile picture.
  • Don’t forget about IG Reels (at least once per week) – proven method to get more profile visits.
  • Better avoid posting promotional content on the weekend, instead focus on “lighter” type of information, more entertaining. 
  • Use apps for scheduling and planning your content (e.g., Later, Preview). 

Something else you must know about a content plan… 

  • Create a content plan at least for two weeks ahead
  • If you notice a particular type of content is more effective than others, use it more often, but without exaggeration
  • Make a separate content plan for IG stories. Make it coherent, corresponding with what you offer/talk about in your posts 
  • Remember about the visual look of your profile – It may be a decisive factor whether to follow your account or not   

We’ve prepared a template with an example of a content plan for a month for coaching business. Feel free to use it to create your own.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kAxMlRdVyBpURt-NRXEIkp2Bj3piWjku8JCwoXW3fyc/edit#gid=0 

See you at Salut Blog 🙂

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