If it’s not in the plan, then it typically doesn’t happen. And if it does happen, then corners have been cut and sacrifices made. That’s a harsh reality, especially with today’s lean digital marketing teams. That’s why, when working with our Oracle Marketing Consulting clients, we take an expansive view of content planning.
How expansive? When doing content planning, we think you should be able to answer the following six questions:
1. What are all of my sources of potential content?
Before contemplating creating any new content, audit your existing content. Build a content matrix and slot in all of the content you have, determining along the way what’s useful and what isn’t.
When doing your content audit, be sure to include:
Chances are that you have considerably more content available to you than you assumed.
Learn how Oracle Content Management can help you aggregate, manage, and edit your content for delivery across channels.
2. What are the narratives I’m trying to tell?
While it’s fine to have one-offs, you probably want most of your content to contribute to a bigger story that you’re trying to build. That narrative might be organized around a campaign, month, season, or event.
For example, we have retail clients that build narratives around Cyber Monday, travel clients that build narratives around the Alaskan sailing season, and media clients that build narratives around the Olympics.
Mapping out your narratives helps you to see if you’re telling a compelling and complete story. It also helps you tell if you’re striking the right balance between promotional and non-promotional messages, whether those non-promotional messages are educational, instructional, editorial, informational, entertaining, social, or something else.
3. Which campaigns involve complex content?
All campaigns aren’t created equal. Some are relatively straightforward—perhaps consisting of only text and images and leveraging existing landing pages. Others might involve 20%, 50%, or 250% more time and resources because of what they entail. Planning for these campaigns appropriately is a critical part of content planning, which is as much about planning for people as content.
For example, when working on email marketing campaigns, plan to allot extra time to campaigns that include:
Speaking of testing…
4. What tests am I going to run?
Having an A/B testing plan that’s integrated into your content plan is dramatically more useful than simply doing ad hoc testing. With a solid testing plan, you can:
Your test plan should also include tests of your automations, which can yield bigger gains from testing because they tend to generate returns that are much higher than broadcast campaigns.
To ensure you’re maximizing your automation opportunities, get our checklist of 110+ Automated Campaign Ideas via a free, no-form download.
5. What changes should I make to my automated campaigns?
In addition to testing, your triggered campaigns can also benefit from updates that keep them aligned with your narratives. For example, during the holiday season, retailers should consider:
For a detailed look at possible seasonal updates, check out Seasonal Automated Campaign Adjustments to Stay Relevant.
6. How do I prepare for peak season campaigns?
For most brands, there are one or two or more peak seasons that are central to their businesses, and therefore central to their content planning efforts. During these times, campaign volumes tend to rise considerably, which can severely tax marketing teams.
To ease this burden, create as much content and as many campaigns as possible ahead of time. With our clients, our goal is to have 80% of campaigns built early or to build 80% of individual campaigns. Sometimes that last 20% won’t be known until much closer to the launch date because of unknowns around supply chains or just wanting to stay nimble to jump on what’s popular or trending.
While smart content planning can help you use your resources efficiently, sometimes you just need more resources to get everything done. This is almost always the case during peak seasons. In these instances, you have two options:
If you need help handling your peak season digital marketing campaign workload, reach out to Oracle Marketing Consulting.
Ready for a deeper dive?
We discuss all of these issues and more in the on-demand webinar below on content planning. Watch it for advice on how to deepen your content planning and make your marketing operations run more smoothly.
We hope you enjoyed “Content Planning: Advice from Oracle’s Global Digital Marketing Agency.” Some of our other on-demand webinars include:
Need help with content planning? Oracle Marketing Consulting has more than 500 of the leading marketing minds ready to help you to achieve more with the leading marketing cloud, including a Creative Services team with extensive experience with content planning.
Talk to your Oracle account manager, visit us online, or reach out to us at [email protected].
Leave a Reply