Whether you're just starting out with content marketing or you've been using the same approach for a while, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy plan — to make sure it's up-to-date, innovative, and engaging for your prospects and customers, no matter when or how they intend to buy.

Find the template of the content plan with an example here

These next questions will help you to define a content strategy:

1. Who will be reading your content?

Who's the target audience for your content? For how many audiences are you creating content? Just as your business might have more than one type of customer, your content strategy can cater to more than one type of reader or 

2. What problem will you be solving for your audience(s)?

Ideally, your product or service solves a problem you know your audience has. By the same token, your content coaches and educates your audience through this problem as they begin to identify and address it.

3. What makes you unique?

Your competitors likely have a similar product as yours, which means your potential customers need to know what makes yours better — or, at least, different. This is where content comes in.

4. What content formats will you focus on?

What forms will your content take? Infographics? Videos? Blog posts? Having identified the topics you want to take a position on, you'll need to determine which formats to budget for so you can best express that position.

5. What channels will you publish on?

Just as you can create content in different formats, you'll also have different channels you can publish to. Channels can include owned properties, such as your website and blog; and social media properties, such as Facebook and Twitter. We'll talk more about social media content strategy in the step-by-step guide later in this article.

6. How will you manage content creation and publication?

Figuring out how you'll create and publish all your content can be a daunting task. It's important for a content strategy to know who's creating what, where to an e-book or free tool will continue generating leads for you as time goes on — long after you click Publish.

The reliable source of traffic and leads from your evergreen content will give you the flexibility to experiment with other marketing tactics to generate revenue, such as sponsored content, social media advertising, and distributed content. Plus, your content will not only help attract leads — it will also help educate your target prospects and generate awareness for your brand.

By following this link you will find a content plan template that is being used by many marketing agencies and brands.

The idea behind its structure is as follow:

We publish content every day. Intensity of the content is up to your resources and goals. 

Vertical is days, horizontal is rubrics. Each rubric is to be published 3 days in the row under red, yellow and green colors:

Red - is a teaser/appetizer. With this color we open up the rubric for the week. It’s a short teasing post: like story or something as “Hey you know that males of Koala only has sex once in a lifetime? It’s sad but true. Stay tuned”. 

Yellow - is a next day continuation of the rubric with a more detailed content. Pictures, videos and anything that will keep the audience in the loop.

Green - is content with the biggest impact on the rubric. Long reads, video presentations, webinars etc. Everything that will give a detailed explanation of the rubric and the answer for the key question.