11 Tips for Creating an Effective Content Marketing Plan

Many beginner marketers confuse a content marketing plan with a social media publishing schedule. While a publishing schedule is essentially a simple calendar where you log planned social media posts, a content marketing plan is a comprehensive year-round calendar where you plan content creation across all your company’s communication channels (both online and offline).

What’s included in a complete content marketing plan

• Topics you’ll cover each month.
• Products you’ll focus on each week and month.
• Publishing schedule for blog posts.
• PR – press releases and PR activities.
• PPC campaigns broken down by month.
• Email marketing – themed campaigns.
• Social media – topics for each month and week.
• Affiliate marketing – campaigns planned month by month.
• Guest posts – articles published on other websites.
• Influencer campaigns.
• Paid marketing campaigns.
• Events relevant to your company’s focus.

Why having a content marketing plan matters

A content marketing plan stems from your content strategy and ensures that all your communication channels promote the same topics during the same periods (a period can mean a month or a week, depending on your brand’s needs).

With a solid plan in place, you always know what topics you’ll be working on, so you’ll never find yourself stuck wondering what to brief your copywriter on next.

A content marketing plan also ensures you’re covering topics that are relevant to a given time of year and are backed by keyword research. This means you won’t end up publishing content on your website that nobody is searching for or cares about.

On top of that, the plan is essential for evenly distributing campaigns throughout the year. Without it, you might end up running three sales events and six influencer campaigns in one month — and nothing at all the next.

TIP 💡: Want to learn how to write articles that generate traffic and revenue, step by step — plus get a sample brief for copywriters? Read more on our Patreon.

How to create a content marketing plan

Personally, I’ve been using a template in shared Google Sheets for several years now. This way, I can access it anywhere, anytime — and even when multiple people are working on it simultaneously, it’s always up to date. You can easily build your own content marketing plan template in an hour or two, or you can grab ours for the price of a coffee — buy it here. A content marketing plan is essentially your content strategy translated into a calendar format.

1) Do your prep work

Before you start filling in the content plan template, jot down the following:

• Your most important products to promote (best sellers and highest-margin items).
• Product seasonality (pool cleaning tablets probably won’t sell much in winter, for example).
• Key events coming up this year – Christmas and Easter are obvious, but if you make grooming products, Movember matters too. Perhaps you attend trade shows or host your own events.
• The most important topics for your brand – this doesn’t just mean trending subjects like sustainability. For instance, you might know that your customer support team is overwhelmed with installation queries for certain products, and you need to create more content to reduce those support tickets.

💡 We’ve already covered how to properly prepare content topics in detail in our article on content marketing.

2) Products to promote

Once your prep work is done, fill in the products you want to promote for each month. Use seasonality as your starting point and layer in your best-selling and most attractive products. Prioritise those with the highest margins.

Monthly theme and weekly topics

Based on the products you’ll be promoting each month and their seasonality, define your monthly themes and weekly topics.

Example: July

• Product of the month: Cashew nuts
• Monthly theme: Cashews and summer recipes

Weekly topics

1. Storing cashews, fun facts about cashews, types of cashews
2. Cashew butter and cashew milk
3. Sweet cashew recipes (smoothie bowls, chia with cashews, cashew ice cream)
4. Savoury cashew recipes (summer salad dressing, cashew cheese)

3) Plan your blog posts

This section is driven by keyword research from your SEO specialist, who should also suggest the best topics to start with. We schedule blog posts based on two criteria:

• They’re relevant to the monthly theme and feature the product of the month.
• They have strong SEO potential.

If you want to be ready for a seasonal peak from an SEO perspective, it’s better to publish themed articles 2–4 weeks ahead of the rest of your channels. This gives your content time to start appearing in organic search results (i.e. to rank). Here’s why:

If your December plan is to talk about baking a traditional Christmas cake across all channels and you publish the recipe on 15 December, by the time it starts ranking in search, Christmas will be long gone.

We brief copywriters a full month in advance to make sure articles are ready on time. Keep your blog plan in a separate spreadsheet tab where you track the status of each blog post — when it was briefed and when it’s scheduled for publication.

4) Events

This is where you log all events happening each month. Think Valentine’s Day, Christmas, Easter, shopping events (Amazon Prime Day, etc.), sales events (Black Friday), anniversaries tied to your brand, company events (exhibitions, conferences), and so on. This gives you a full-year overview and ensures you never forget to work these events into your publishing schedule, PR activities, and email marketing in time.

5) Email marketing

In the email marketing section, note down email campaigns linked to events or other marketing activities (shopping days, Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, etc.). You can also include automations that only run during specific periods — for example, Christmas recipes, pool maintenance tips, autumn film roundups, or holiday-themed playlists.

6) PR activities

PR activities need to be planned well in advance, and it’s crucial to factor them into all your outputs because other marketing activities may build on them. That’s exactly why they need a dedicated spot in your content marketing plan.

7) PPC campaigns

This section is particularly important for larger businesses that use PPC advertising beyond simply supporting existing e-shop promotions. If you’re not planning any larger themed PPC campaigns just yet, feel free to skip this part entirely.

8) Affiliate marketing

Most larger e-commerce businesses already run affiliate programmes, but few go beyond the basics. Yet affiliate marketing can drive surprisingly impressive revenue, and it’s entirely possible to plan dedicated campaigns specifically for your affiliate partners.

9) Influencers

The penultimate section of the content marketing plan covers planned influencer campaigns. Although you’ll certainly track influencer marketing in more detail elsewhere, it’s extremely important to make sure campaigns don’t overlap with other major initiatives.

For example, if your e-shop is running a birthday celebration with a flat 15% discount on everything, your influencer shouldn’t be running a campaign with the same discount at the same time. Why? It can skew the results of both campaigns. However, you could arrange for the influencer to promote your birthday sale instead.

10) Guest posts

Guest posts are typically blog articles you publish on partner or related websites. This section will mainly be useful for larger businesses or those with a more robust content marketing strategy.

11) Other marketing campaigns

This is the catch-all category for any remaining marketing campaigns that don’t fit under the sections above.

Content marketing plan template to download

Does all this sound great, but you’re not sure how to put a marketing plan together? Grab the plan we’ve been using and refining for years. For the price of a coffee, you’ll get a ready-made template — all you need to do is fill it in.

💡 If you need help putting together a marketing plan, don’t hesitate to get in touch at info@lkmedia.cz. You can find our pricing here.