Why Quarterly Planning is Essential to Crack Content for your Business

By Claire Winter.

Before the new year begins, many people will create their resolutions hoping that they will have achieved them by this time next year. Unfortunately, many new year’s resolutions can fizzle out. The same thing can happen to yearly content plans, especially if they feel more like a long ‘to-do list.

What is good about an annual plan is that it is a valuable tool for setting out a long-term guide of what is expected to be achieved by the end of the year. However, what is excellent about quarterly planning is breaking that long-term plan and splitting it into four, making it far easier to work towards. But why is it essential?

Quarterly content planning is great for tracking progress, so you can reflect on the previous quarter and explain the improvements hoping to be made in the next. You can also look at the metrics from the last quarter and repurpose or create similar content that got high engagement rates.

Having a decent plan allows you and, or your team to time block and plan when you will create and schedule content.

Secondly, whether you work with a team or on your own, quarterly content planning is great for setting deadlines and preventing overwhelm. When people can complete deadlines with enough time, there is less stress on everybody, which gives more time for creating and editing, increasing efficiency. Not only this but having your whole team involved with these meetings can boost morale. It’s an excellent platform for everyone to express their views, ideas, and opinions. Plus, it creates a more manageable structure for everyone to follow.

Thirdly, we are in a world that is constantly being updated by new information. If you have an annual plan, you’re not leaving much space to fit new themes or topics that may be of interest and help promote your business. Quarterly plans allow you to change hashtags, try new types of content and add trending news stories to your content mix.

Lastly, quarterly planning allows you to review the progress of your content marketing strategy, marketing budgets and any paid ad campaigns you have run.

The Necessities in a Quarterly Content Meeting:

A Calendar: In other words, make sure you create a timeline of what work needs doing, when it will be completed and who will review it. You can do it the old-fashioned way or use my free 2022 content planner, which is editable and has awareness days and hashtag suggestions included.

Mailing Lists / Subscribers: Make sure you understand your target market and how you are growing your mailing list. Are you doing this with webinars, quizzes, whitepapers or free guides?

What core content are you creating? How are you driving traffic back to your website? Are you writing blogs or creating vlogs or podcasts?

What Should Be the Key Points?

What are the goals for this quarter? What were they for the last quarter? What happened last quarter and needs to change for the next quarter.

Look at KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators). 

Establish the focus for each social platform

Establish the different types of content you will use, for example, news, webinar, how-to, tips, best practices, templates, research, guides and inspiration.

Looking at deadlines or any upcoming events which may help boost performance.

What are your Call-To-Actions going to be?

Remember to make content planning fun; I host content planning parties every year to help entrepreneurs plan their content for the year. Getting excited about what your business has to offer in 2022 makes it so much easier to create great content for your business. 

Claire Winter is the host of the Cracking Content podcast and a Copy and Content trainer and coach. She is passionate about helping coaches and creative entrepreneurs to amplify their expertise through storytelling, content, and PR so that they can get more sales and make a bigger impact through 1:1 coaching, her digital courses and membership.

Claire currently writes for all 41 Families magazines that cover the UK, which reach 9 million parents a year. She has have been a content creator for 20 years and helped thousands of business owners get more sales with their content marketing. She is a trained NCTJ journalist and started her career at ITN in radio and television. She also runs a free Facebook community called Cracking Content where she shares writing, content, and PR tips.