20 Resources for DIY Content Planning and Strategy
Planning and publishing content on your website or through your email newsletters is a great way to engage your customers and keep them loyal to your brand. But if you don’t have a ton of experience, learning about content creation and content activation, and planning your content can take quite a bit of time.
While we would love to help you with your content marketing, we also know that some small businesses would rather tackle it themselves, so we wanted to provide some resources to get you started. It’s selfish really: if you are able to grow your business by using our tips, maybe once you are ready to hire marketing support, you’ll think of us.
So here ya go! Let us know if you have specific questions!
DIY Content Planning and Learning
- The best and most comprehensive resource for learning about content marketing is the Content Marketing Institute. They have blog, research reports, and loads of educational information to get you started. We happen to love their annual conference as well. Begin with the Getting Started link in the right sidebar.
- While Contently is a software company who will try to sell you on their services, they also have an awesome blog and magazine called The Content Strategist. This may be a great place to start for those of you a little more acquainted with the basics of content strategy.
- BuzzSumo, HubSpot, and CoSchedule are all in the same situation as Contently in that they’re a service first and foremost. Their blogs are a little more broad and have posts about everything digital marketing, but they still have some excellent posts with ideas on how to plan, execute, and measure your content.
- If you’re a reader, we highly recommend the following books:
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- Everybody Writes by Ann Handley or Content Rules by Ann and C.C. Chapman
- Content Inc. or Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi
- The Content Fuel Framework by Melanie Deziel
- Talk Triggers by Jay Baer and Daniel Lemin
Most of these books can probably be found at your local library or on Libby too.
Looking for something more bite-sized? We love following these folks on social media:
These are all general ideas to learn about content, but one of the most important pieces of this puzzle is to apply all of this to your audience. Obviously this takes effort to really get to know your people, but an easy way to get a pulse on your crowd is to just ask them. We love Instagram polls in your stories for something like this. You can ask what they want to hear about next, how they feel about a new event or product, and so many more ideas. This can help you plan out content that is perfectly customized to your business.
Ready to take the next step? Check out these DIY resources for content production (writing and design).