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Get startedIn most situations, if you’re talking about a plan and a strategy, they’re usually the same thing. But not in content marketing. Instead, in the world of content creation, these two development pieces work together to create a roadmap and a step-by-step guide to get your content from ideas to published pieces. Today, we’re exploring content planning vs content strategy and all their similarities and differences:
Content strategy is the vision that guides your content development to help you reach specific business goals. It includes a lot of high-level ideas that aim to help your brand become more successful in a variety of areas. Some of these areas include increasing brand awareness, making more sales, or pulling in more qualified leads.
One of the most important parts of content strategy is determining how your creation efforts match up with key performance indicators (KPIs) and brand goals. When you make these matches, it’s easier to predict how your content marketing efforts will make your company successful. This alignment also makes it easier to create a content plan that helps put your ideas into action to reach those goals or milestones. The key components of a content strategy include:
Content Planning is a process of determining what content to create and when to share it. Content calendars are the best-known example of content planning tools. Within these planning documents, your entire team can see when you plan to create each asset, who completes the work for each step, and when and where it goes live to the world. There are six important elements of content planning that include:
Though some people use the terms plan and strategy interchangeably, they’re not the same thing in content marketing. Content strategy is the “why” behind your marketing. A content plan is the “how.”
A content strategy is your vision for the types of pieces you want to create and how you want your audience to connect to and engage with them. Your content plan takes that vision and puts it into action. The plan lays out the actionable steps and the processes to follow to make the vision a reality. To create the best content marketing possible, you need both parts.
Without a content plan, your strategy is just an idea. It won’t get you anywhere on its own. And without a strategy, there’s no point in having a plan. There wouldn’t be anything for your team to work toward within the plan.
Content planning also works as a check and balance system to determine how realistic your strategy is. Because the strategy is your vision for content marketing, ideas can often be loftier than your ability to actually follow through on them. With a content plan, you’re able to see how much of your strategy you can bring all the way to completion. Use your content plan to question your strategy in areas like:
If you’re using content marketing, you should have a content strategy. Without it, your development efforts won’t have ties to specific brand goals. Lack of strategy can also lead to disorganization and wasting time and other resources. Without a strategy, your team may be less productive and efficient. That means your marketing department isn’t reaching its full potential.
Creating your content strategy typically comes before creating a content plan. You have to know what you’re creating and how it affects your brand first. Then you can put together an actionable step-by-step roadmap for development.
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As we’ve said, you shouldn’t have a content strategy without a content plan. The plan helps you work through potential challenges or snags that come with daily content marketing creation and promotion, like:
Rather than revising your strategy and overall vision every time you encounter a challenge, it’s better to adjust your content plan for the execution. Your goals and ideas shouldn’t change, but how you reach them might.
We’ve mentioned multiple times already that content planning and strategy work best when you use them together. The “why” and “how” work together to get ideas from your team to your audience and turn them into tools to collect leads, conversions, and sales. The content plan helps keep the content strategy on track. It gives direction and points your creation efforts toward the right goal.
One way to think of the relationship between a content plan and a strategy is to picture it like a frame in bowling. Your content ideas are the ball and the pins are your business goals. The lane is the path you want to take to get from point A to point B and make your ideas reach your goals. If you’re new to bowling, you’re more likely to hit the gutter until you get better at the game. The same idea applies to those new to content strategy. Your ideas have the potential to fall off track before they reach your goal without proper guidance from a content plan.
In bowling, you use bumpers to make sure the ball stays out of the gutter while you’re learning. In content marketing, your content plan acts like bumpers for your strategy. It keeps everything on track and focused so you can achieve success.
The more focused and direct your brand strategy becomes, the more credible your company appears to the audience. Credibility increases trust and loyalty, which helps you reach your goals even faster. And the easier it is to reach your goals and find what works, the more data you have for the next strategy and campaign.
When you partner with CopyPress, we work with you to develop your content strategy. In your first one-on-one meeting, we discuss your brand goals and ambitions. This lets our team create a one-of-a-kind strategy tailored to your needs. Then, we develop the content plan so that you know the clear timeline for the creation, publication, and distribution of all your pieces.
We also have a host of tools and professional contacts to help you with the individual steps of content planning and strategizing along the way. You can test out one of these tools today by requesting your free content marketing analysis report. Our tool helps your strategy planning tracking metrics for content planning by giving insights about your search engine positioning, potential syndication partners, and showing how your content stacks up against the competition.
To get a preview of your information today, share your web address with us below. Then take the time to customize your report profile so we can provide the most accurate results—in as little as an hour.
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