Your Content Plan: Turning Strategy Into Action

What is a content plan?

Defining a content plan in simple terms

A content plan is where strategy turns into action. Strategy is about who you’re speaking to and why. The plan is about what you’ll say, when you’ll say it, and where it’s going.

If you haven’t done the strategy work yet, start with our comprehensive content strategy article.

If you’re ready to create content, check your brand voice is honed, that should give you everything you need to map topics clearly.

A good content plan doesn’t just save time, it makes things happen.

It gets the whole team on board (like doughnut Friday’s), and makes content output consistent and accountable. According to Roketto, just 40% of marketers have a documented content strategy, and most of the success stories come from that group.

Why a content plan matters for growing brands

After working with dozens of growing teams, one thing’s clear: content without a plan rarely performs.

A content plan keeps your marketing focused. It outlines what’s being created, when it’s going live, and who’s responsible.

As part of your content planning process, you and your team need a shared source of truth.

We’ve seen that when this happens, campaigns run wild (like a cat on a freshly polished floor), content quality improves, and marketing becomes a consistent engine, not a last-minute scramble.

For us, an editorial content plan isn’t just admin. It’s operational clarity. It builds trust across your team, reinforces strategic goals, and keeps your audience front and centre.

Before we dive into the tactics, lets just consider the different markets.

Content planning for B2B, B2C and E-commerce

B2B content planning: building trust and authority

For B2B brands, content planning is about more than frequency. A strong B2B content plan focuses on building long-term trust, showing credibility, and positioning your brand as a helpful resource in the decision-making process.

That’s where a persona-driven content approach comes in.

The more clearly you understand the roles, challenges, and motivations of your audience, the easier it is to create useful, relevant content, if you need help with this we have you covered with our persona guide here.

This is also where content strategy for B2B shines. Instead of publishing for the sake of visibility, each piece serves a purpose: to inform, to reassure, to lead the conversation.

Thought leadership content like opinion pieces, white papers, and in-depth guides help demonstrate authority and start meaningful conversations.

B2C and ecommerce: high volume, high visibility

Content for ecommerce websites needs a different kind of energy.

It’s not about slow nurture but fast connection, a sort of “speed dating” for content.

Most ecommerce content strategies rely on fairly standard product-focused content that boosts visibility, drives conversions and builds brand recognition.

That means a regular drumbeat of activity across search, email, and social.

Guides, video demos, comparison articles, customer reviews and seasonal campaigns all help to capture attention and drive traffic.

A successful ecommerce content strategy also ties into broader trends. By aligning content with product drops, offers, and customer questions, you stay front of mind and in feed.

The content planning process

Aligning your plan with strategy and goals

Our process always starts with strategy: mapping audience needs, goals and messaging before moving to planning.

We run dedicated workshops that take clients from persona creation right through to a documented strategy and weekly content planner.

Take long term client Gasket Guy for example. Once we developed detailed personas and a strategic content map, their marketing transformed from ad hoc to high-performing across multiple channels and formats.

Once the strategy is defined, the planning phase brings structure and accountability. Our downloadable content planning spreadsheet below helps you draw up a big picture story for a year, then map content weekly, with slots for platforms, formats, assigned owners and metrics.

From here, consider how each piece will be distributed and what it’s meant to achieve as well as how realistic it is to produce.

Setting clear content objectives

Before diving into formats or schedules, the first step in any solid content planning strategy is to define your content goals.

Most content will fall into one of five goal categories:

• Driving traffic (often through SEO-optimised blogs or shareable social posts)
• Generating leads (via valuable downloads like eBooks or white papers)
• Converting leads (think case studies, service breakdowns or product comparisons)
• Raising brand awareness (fun, shareable, or thought-provoking content)
• Retaining or upselling existing customers (via email series, updates or loyalty-focused blogs)

If your team doesn’t know which of these goals they’re aiming for, your content risks being ad hoc or ineffective.

This isn’t just theory, according to a 2023 study by Marketing Examined, businesses that define clear objectives for their content are up to 40% more likely to report successful marketing outcomes.

Next time you’re adding to your content calendar, assign one primary goal to each idea. It forces clarity, makes results measurable, and keeps your team aligned.

Building a persona-driven content framework

Every piece of content should serve a purpose, and a specific person. That’s the heart of persona-driven content planning.

Start by identifying your key audiences. What do they care about? What questions do they ask? What would help them move forward?

Once you’ve mapped those needs, start structuring your content with clusters. This means choosing a central theme, such as sustainability in manufacturing or digital transformation in ecommerce, and building a set of related topics around it.

This approach, often referred to as content cluster planning, helps ensure relevance and consistency across formats. It also supports SEO by clearly signalling authority on a specific topic.

A content audit process can help you review what you already have, spot gaps, and align new ideas to the personas and clusters you’ve defined.

Over time, these clusters become springboards for blog series, video content, or social campaigns, all created with a specific audience in mind.

Identifying content themes and formats

Once your strategy and personas are in place, it’s time to define themes and formats. This ensures your content covers what matters most and does so in a way your audience prefers to consume it.

Map out your main content themes based on business priorities, audience needs and search data. Then link those to formats: blog posts, guides, webinars, short-form videos or email campaigns.

Using research tools to shape your plan

Guesswork is great for pub quizzes, not so much for content planning.

Keyword and topic research tools can help you build a plan that’s grounded in what your audience actually searches for.

Start with tools like AnswerThePublic, Moz Keyword Explorer, or AlsoAsked to uncover the real questions people are asking. These give you insight into not just keywords, but intent.

Platforms like BuzzSumo can show you what content is already performing well in your industry. Filter by topic, engagement, or platform to spot trends worth jumping on.

If you’re working in a niche market or B2B sector, tools like SparkToro can help reveal where your audience hangs out and what they pay attention to online.

Creating a practical content calendar

Building your weekly content plan

A strong weekly content plan does more than just fill your diary (and make you look popular). It keeps your team accountable, ensures consistency, and reduces the time wasted wondering what to post.

Our weekly content plan template breaks your calendar into manageable chunks, with dedicated rows for each platform, event or special day.

Whether you’re planning a blog, newsletter, or LinkedIn post, you’ll know exactly what’s due and when – and be able to see if theres an overload in particular weeks.

The key is to build a publishing schedule that fits your audience and resources. Don’t aim for five blogs a week if you don’t have capacity.

Consistency is better than intensity.

Start with one or two reliable pieces and build from there.

Tools and templates to simplify the workflow

You don’t need a complex system to manage your content calendar. Simple tools like Google Sheets, Airtable, or Notion work well when set up with the right structure.

For team use, build out an editorial workflow that makes roles clear. Who’s writing? Who’s reviewing? Who’s scheduling?

Fro web content you could give our content management tool, Wordflow a try. Then you can start assigning and planning content with your team.

Otherwise, a simple content workflow might look like: Brief > Draft > Review > Approve > Publish > Measure.

Align this with your wider marketing calendar and make sure you’re feeding in analytics regularly to adjust as you go.

Maximising your content with repurposing

Repurposing content makes your work go further, and it feels great, like turning leftovers into tomorrow’s lunch.

One in-depth guide can become a series of blog posts. Those posts can be sliced into social media snippets. And the highlights can feed into your next email.

This approach saves time and increases consistency. When you plan with this in mind, your weekly content calendar becomes easier to fill.

Instead of creating something new from scratch every time, you’re working smarter with what you’ve already produced.

Using your calendar as a base, you can map out content types across the month and work backwards.

For example, if your goal is a monthly newsletter, you might plan two blogs and four social posts to support it, they need scheduling in well before the next month.

Planning around special days and cultural moments

Special days give your content relevance and reach.

Tapping into national awareness days, cultural moments or seasonal events helps your content show up when people are already paying attention.

We’ve created a full special days article (with more events on it than your nan’s calendar). You can use them to spark ideas, from supporting serious causes to fun holidays.

For example, if you’re a B2B brand working in sustainability, World Environment Day (June 5th) is a great hook for sharing thought leadership, publishing a case study or showcasing impact.

If you’re ecommerce, National Pet Day (April 11th) might be a chance to launch a fun viral campaign or offer.

Add these dates to your content calendar early in the year. This gives your team time to create relevant, on-brand content that adds value and feels timely.

Optimising and evolving your content plan

Tracking performance and filling gaps

Once your content is live, the job isn’t over.

Research shows content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates three times more leads. But that only works when someone is owning it.

Now it’s about learning from the data. Analytics tools like Google Search Console, GA4, and Ahrefs show you what content is visible, how users interact with it, and where the gaps lie.

A simple content gap analysis helps spot what’s missing. Are people searching for things you haven’t covered? Are high-performing topics under-served? This insight helps you create more of what works and stop wasting time on what doesn’t.

Look closely at search intent.

If someone clicks on a post but bounces quickly, it might not be answering the question they had.

Tweaking titles, intros or format can make the difference between a missed opportunity and a meaningful engagement.

Making content planning a team habit

Content performs best when it’s not left to one person.

Building a shared culture around content means ideas come more freely, production stays on track, and quality stays high.

Encourage the whole team to contribute ideas.

Customer service might hear pain points daily. Sales might know what objections need tackling.

Designers and developers can help visualise complex topics.

This shared pool of knowledge makes content stronger.

A shared content assets library also helps. Think templates, tone of voice guides, post formats and brand elements. When these tools are in reach, content gets made faster and stays on-brand without constant rewriting.

Planning should become a rhythm. A regular meeting, a shared calendar, a monthly review. Make it simple, make it visible, and keep the momentum going.

Why informational blogs are at the heart of content strategies

Most service pages are locked in competition with every other business offering the same thing. But your blog? That’s where you get to stand out.

It’s where you can share your unique perspective, answer real questions, and go deep into what your audience cares about, without trying to sell a thing.

Search engines reward this kind of content, just look at Wikipedia. Informational websites consistently rank because they help people learn, not buy – they answer the questions we are all asking.

By breaking down your services into helpful, human, and searchable topics, you bypass saturated product keywords.

The traffic may be lower, but the quality and relevance are often higher, and easier to rank for.

If you want to get better at writing blogs that build trust and visibility, our guide to writing the perfect blog post walks you through it, step-by-step.

Get started with your Content Calendar Template

With those simple pointers in place, here is our 8 step guide to setting up your content calendar, we’re going to use social media as an example (but you could use the same process for creating blog content, newsletters etc):

1. Download our 2025 calendar template or create your own content calendar.
2. Look through the recurring special days, big events for this year, key business dates, and any trade shows or industry-specific dates and plot them into your fresh calendar.
3. Decide on a realistic posting activity based on your resources. Remember, consistency is the golden rule so it is better to plan weekly posts and stick to it than to post in sporadic flurries.
4. Start to plan content ideas for each platform in line with your calendarised days, some might be a short written post, some might involve an image or video that needs creating.
5. Plot any large bits of content to be created well time ahead of time, ie if you need a video in August, schedule the filming in June – again you can use the content calendar for this.
6. Create a content library for your assets. This need only be a shared folder with subfolders marked for either the month or the content type ie images, articles, videos, etc. Decide on a labelling format and stick to it.
7. Design a workflow for you and your team. Make sure everyone is clear on their responsibilities and deadlines. Decide who will sign off and schedule the posts.
8. Get creative! Look at what events are coming up and start thinking about how you can build a campaign that leads up to and beyond the event. What combination of posts will you put out? How will you ensure they reflect your brand?

See our special days article for the monthly breakdown of key special days and promotional ideas.

Ready to take control of your content?

A solid content plan turns good ideas into consistent results. If you’re ready to move from reactive posts to a strategic content calendar, we can help.