Content strategy plan

What a content strategy plan is

A content strategy plan is a written document that settles, in advance, the decisions that would otherwise be made fresh every time someone sits down to publish. Who is this for. What are we saying to them. Where does it go. How often. Who does which part. How we will know if it worked.

It is short on purpose. The useful version is ten to fifteen pages, and the part people actually use is two. A strategy that lives in a sixty-slide deck is not a strategy, because nobody opens it a second time.

Who this is for

An owner or manager who has been publishing without a plan and can feel it: every month begins with "so what should we post", the blog covers whatever someone thought of, and nobody can say whether any of it has produced a customer. It also suits a business that has just had a content audit and now has a list of fixes but no programme to put them in.

It is not for a business that needs the writing done this week. The plan comes first; it is what stops the writing being wasted.

What the plan contains

Seven sections, each answering one question, each as short as it can be.

1. Who it is for. Two or three buyer portraits built from research, not assumption: what they already know, what they worry about, how they phrase the problem.
2. What they need to hear. The list of questions those buyers ask before they spend, ranked by how close each sits to a purchase. This list is the plan's engine.
3. What we will publish. The topics you can own, the formats that suit them, and the pieces you will produce first. Also the subjects you will leave alone.
4. Where. Which channels carry the work, and which you will stop feeding. Most businesses are on two channels too many.
5. How often. A cadence set against the hours your team actually has, because a missed schedule costs more than a slower one.
6. Who does what. Idea, draft, review, publish, measure: a name against each, and how long each step is allowed to take.
7. How we will know. Three or four numbers, chosen now, that will judge the work at 90 days. Qualified inquiries is always one of them.

Appended to it is a dated 90-day schedule: what is published, where, by whom, on which date. This is the first content calendar, and the plan is what makes it possible to keep.

What goes into it

The plan is built from four sources, and I gather all of them. Your existing content, reviewed. Your competitors' content, reviewed for what they win with and what they miss. Your buyers, through sales-call notes, the support inbox, search data and, where you allow it, a handful of short calls with recent customers. And you: what you sell, what you are proud of, what you refuse to do, and where you want the business in a year.

If an audit has already been done, its findings are the first source and the plan is faster and cheaper.

A worked example

An illustration. A three-person landscaping company publishes a blog post whenever the owner has a free evening, roughly every two months, and posts photos to two social networks with no pattern. Inquiries come from word of mouth and a listing site.

Listening to their sales calls shows their buyers ask the same eight questions before hiring anyone: what it costs, how long it takes, what happens in winter, whether they need a permit, and four more. None is answered on the site. The plan says: answer those eight questions on the website, one page each, one every ten days, in the order buyers ask them; stop posting to the network that brings nothing; keep the photo channel that brings referrals, on a fixed weekly day; and count inquiries that mention the website. That is the whole strategy. It fits on one page, and a three-person company can run it.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. What you sell, who buys it, what is not working. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. Scope and number agreed before anything starts.
3. Research. Two weeks. You give read access to analytics and search data, forward the kinds of questions customers ask, and put me in touch with two or three customers if you are willing.
4. The draft. You read it. We talk. Anything that will not work in your business is changed.
5. The final plan and the 90-day schedule. Delivered with a walkthrough call for whoever will run it.

Three to four weeks from first call to final plan is typical.

What it costs

The pricing page shows the published band: $2,500 to $5,000 CAD, fixed, depending on how much research is needed and how many buyer types there are. A plan that follows an audit sits at the lower end.

What happens next

You run it, or your person runs it with coaching, or I run it as content production management. The plan is written so that any of the three works. At 90 days we look at the numbers chosen in section seven and adjust; that is the quarterly review, and it is how a plan stays a plan rather than becoming a document.