Content plan

A content plan in practice is a spreadsheet or a board with one row per post: date, channel, topic, format, who produces it, who approves it and whether the assets exist. It is built once a month in an hour long meeting with marketing and someone from sales in the room. Without sales you get a plan about the company instead of a plan about what customers are actually dealing with.

Why it pays: a B2B company on LinkedIn had an expert who could write well but only wrote when he had time, which meant never. Once a content plan set two posts a week, with marketing proposing topics and him only dictating them into his phone, the profile got moving. Neither the quality nor the budget changed. What changed was knowing in advance what the subject would be.

How it is done: collect topics from sales calls and customer questions, sort them into a few recurring strands, spread them across the calendar around your season and your own deadlines, then produce. You supply dates of events, launches and holidays, plus one person who approves within two days. A month of planning takes about half a day. If UGC is in the mix, creators need lead time.

Where it gets overdone: a six month plan detailed down to the last post. Formats on social shift faster than a plan like that can be approved, and half the topics expire unused. One month firm and the next in rough outline is a healthy compromise. And beware of a plan made of public holidays and international days of this and that; that is filler, not content.

Our content plan has an extra column called what for. Every row says what the post should do: explain a service, show the work, bring in enquiries. Rows nobody can fill in get deleted. Try it today: go through your last ten posts and add that column retroactively.