I plan, create and publish lots of social media and blog content for one particular client of mine, so making sure that I have a constant source of ideas is something that comes with that. No one likes to be sat in front of a screen thinking “I need to put out a post. What should it be about?” The energy should be on creating a really good piece of quality content, not just putting something out for the sake of it.
When I started that particular client project, I knew I needed to have a plan. And what’s great about having a plan is that I can still deviate from that, add in reactive pieces as they come up in industry news or from the client, but it means that there is always something to talk about on the blog and social channels that is relevant and on-brand.
Here’s how I ensure there’s a constant stream of content ideas
Generating a content plan
To ensure that the content covers all the areas of the business and related content, this could be relevant to service areas or products, I have these set up as content categories. This fits with the blog categories on the website and doesn’t necessarily mean that the type of content is for selling that particular thing.
Then, I have different content themes and campaigns – these might be affected by industry news, seasonality, etc…
So, although these aren’t ‘ideas’ as such in their own right, knowing that it needs to be a post about ‘X’ category within a ‘Y’ theme makes it easier.
I then have an Asana board to capture any random ideas and store research on.
Setting up the content calendar
It’s nothing revolutionary, I simply write a content calendar on a spreadsheet to cover the social channels and the blog.
It’s made up of a series of columns covering the month and more ahead.
I have a date column, then a column for the type of content, whether it’s a blog or a social post or a video. I’ll link the spreadsheet cells with any related assets and resources, such as a link to the brief for the blog content and to the article on Google docs when it’s written, so it keeps everything in one place. Then I’ll add in a link to the final article when it’s published on the website.
For the social media posts, there are columns for each channel as they’re not all posted to equally or with duplicated content.
- Date
- Theme/Campaign
- Category: Product, service, news, industry, advice, etc…
- Type: Blog post, photo, link, video etc…
- Related URL for the product/service/webpage
- Status: briefed/published
- Notes
- Asset: YouTube video, image, blog post, or other resource
- Social caption:
- IG story
- IG image
I don’t fill all the columns out at the same time. Typically, I’ll look ahead to the next month and plan out the theme and distribution of the content. So that takes care of columns 1-4.
The other sections are filled more as I go along.
What’s the benefit of planning content?
The biggest benefit of planning content is the obvious one of always knowing what you’re going to post and where, and never running dry on ideas, it also forces you to be accountable to what you’ve planned. Sure, you can change the plan. In fact, that happens often. You could even complement the plan by adding to it.
I find that getting the planning out the way first leaves much more space to work on the briefs and content and gives me a really good overview of the content spread.
What’s also really useful is having all the resources that you’ve created in one place. This means that you’re constantly building a bank of content ideas that you can draw on if you do ever get really stuck.