7 Steps to Creating a Content Plan That Drives Results (Part One)

If you’re struggling with how to create a content plan that drives engagement and sales leads, you’re not alone. Many business owners and marketers find the content planning process overwhelming as they stare at a blank calendar with no clear direction in mind.

Whether it’s not knowing where to start, feeling disorganized, or wondering if your efforts are even worth it, you’re likely dealing with one or more of these common challenges:

• Not knowing what your audience actually wants.

• Struggling to tie content efforts to business goals.

• Running out of ideas or feeling like you’re repeating yourself.

• Lacking consistency in posting.

• Feeling disorganized when managing ideas and deadlines.

If this sounds familiar, you’ve come to the right place. This two-part blog series breaks the content planning process down into seven simple steps that will help you:

• Understand what your audience wants and how to deliver it.

• Align your content with business goals.

• Organize your ideas into a manageable content plan.

• Build a content calendar that keeps you consistent.

7 Steps to Creating a Content Plan That Drives Results

These seven steps will help you move from ad hoc content creation to a purposeful content strategy that produces the right content to meet specific business needs:

1. Stop Winging It – Understand Why Your Business Needs a Content Plan

2. Get Inside Their Heads - Identify What Your Audience Wants to See

3. Meet Them Where They’re At – Understand the 5 Stages of Buyer Awareness

4. Set Your Direction – Define Clear Goals That Align with Business Success

5. Bring Order to Chaos – Organize and Prioritize Your Content for Maximum Impact

6. Choose Wisely – Pick Content Types and Platforms That Work Best for You

7. Follow the Plan – Build a Content Calendar You’ll Stick To

Part One of this series focuses on the first four foundational steps that explain how to develop an effective content plan. Part Two will discuss the remaining three steps, which cover how to implement your plan.

Let’s begin with understanding what an effective content plan can do for your business.

Step 1: Stop Winging It – Why Every Business Needs a Content Plan

Many business owners and marketers create content reactively or as ad-hoc tasks—posting whatever comes to mind as they scramble to meet deadlines. Consequently, they risk posting on a variety of topics that don’t necessarily work together to deliver a cohesive message to their audience. They may focus on content that feels easy or safe rather than address what their audience is actively searching for.

This approach invariably leads to fragmented messaging, superficial posts, and missed opportunities to connect with their target audience.

What a Content Plan Can Do for Your Business

A solid content plan helps transform this chaos into clarity. It provides structure and purpose, ensuring that every piece of content aligns with your business goals and speaks directly to your audience’s needs. Instead of wondering what to post next, you’ll have a roadmap that keeps your efforts focused, consistent, and effective.

A well-structured content plan will help you:

• Speak to your audience using language that means something to them.

• Address audience pain points at each stage of their buying journey.

• Generate a steady stream of content ideas that are focused and aligned on a cohesive messaging strategy.

• Create consistency that builds credibility and trust with your audience

• Keep your brand top of mind, building momentum for long-term growth.

Once you stop winging it and start treating content creation as a strategy rather than a task, you’ll be on your way to creating purposeful, impactful content that resonates with your audience and drives measurable results.

Next, you’ll want to focus on understanding your target audience. For your content to be effective, you need to understand who you’re creating it for and what they truly need.

Step 2: Get Inside Their Heads – Identify What Your Audience Wants to See

Effective content starts with knowing who your prospective buyers are so you can better understand their mindset, anticipate their questions, and address their specific problems and concerns.

It’s common for business owners and marketers to believe they already know what their target prospects want. In many cases, that may well be true. But it’s also true that in some cases, business owners and marketers confuse need and want. They know what their audience needs and then assume that’s also what their audience wants.

Don’t Assume Buyers Want What They Need

Need and want are not necessarily the same, particularly if your solution solves a complex problem your audience doesn’t fully understand.

For example, if someone believes cardio is the only suitable exercise for weight loss, they would initially dismiss a fitness coach’s muscle-building program as unsuitable for their needs. However, suppose the Fitness Coach posted content explaining how increasing muscle mass will burn more calories throughout the day than a single hour of cardio. That same individual might then be persuaded to want the program once they understand how it can get them the calorie burning they need.

Similarly, a manufacturing manager might believe a new conveyor belt system is the best way to improve production efficiency and dismiss a robotic arm solution as irrelevant to their needs. However, if a provider of robotic solutions were to post content explaining how robotic arms can streamline processes, reduce costs, and offer greater flexibility than conveyor belts, the manager might begin to see how this alternative solution can better meet their goals.

These examples demonstrate why your content will be most relevant to your audience if it first speaks directly to their wants and then leads them to believe that your solution is what they need to get what they want. Before anyone can become excited about investing in your solution, they must first believe they need it.

Conduct A Buyer Mindset Analysis to Truly Understand Your Audience

A Buyer Mindset Analysis evaluates the current headspace of your prospective buyer. It helps you understand your prospect’s problems, challenges, frustrations, goals, aspirations, roadblocks, and motivators—from their perspective, not yours.

For example, after completing a Buyer Mindset Analysis, you might learn your audience prioritizes quick solutions, leading you to restructure your website copy, social posts, and sales pitch to emphasize how quickly your product or service will solve their problem.

Alternatively, you may find your audience struggles with feeling overwhelmed by complex solutions, prompting you to simplify your messaging and create step-by-step guides that break down your product’s features into easy-to-follow benefits.

A Buyer Mindset Analysis also documents the language your prospective buyer uses to talk about their problems, challenges, and frustrations. This enables you to incorporate their language into your content to make it ultra-relevant to them.

You can download my Buyer Mindset Analysis template from my Resources page. This template includes detailed instructions for completing it and provides 15 sources you can leverage to research your target audience in detail.

For more information about how to leverage a Buyer Mindset Analysis to create content that builds deeper connections with prospective buyers, visit my recent blog post Unlock the Secret to Understanding Your Buyers with a Buyer Mindset Analysis.

Once you’ve completed your Buyer Mindset Analysis, it’s time to map out of the type of content your prospective buyers need as they progress through their buyers journey, which can be broken into five distinct stages.

Step 3: Meet Them Where They’re At – Understand the 5 Stages of Buyer Awareness

Generally speaking, there are five stages of awareness people will go through before making a purchase decision. This applies whether they are consumers purchasing for themselves or business owners and employees purchasing for their businesses. The amount of time they will spend in each stage depends on a variety of factors, including the complexity of their problem, what it will cost them to fix it, and the number of available solutions.

1. Problem Unaware Stage: Potential buyers are unaware they have a problem, often accepting existing challenges as normal.

2. Problem Aware Stage: Buyers recognize they have a problem and seek to understand its causes and implications.

3. Solution Aware Stage: Buyers understand potential solutions to their problem but are not yet familiar with specific products or services.

4. Product Aware Stage: Buyers are aware of specific products or services that can solve their problem and begin evaluating them.

5. Ready-to-Buy Stage: Buyers have gathered sufficient information and are ready to make a purchase decision.

Understanding the needs of your prospective buyers at each stage of their buying journey will enable you to deliver more targeted content and thus a better buyer experience than your competitors.

For a more in-depth explanation of these five stages and the type of content to provide at each stage, visit my blog titled Words to Wins: Aligning Content With Buyer Needs. This blog also includes a detailed example of how content for each stage fits together to create one cohesive message.

The awareness stage(s) you’ll want to focus your content creation efforts on will depend on your overarching business goals, which we’ll discuss next.

Step 4: Set Your Direction – Define Clear Goals That Align With Business Success

A content marketing strategy that’s fully aligned with business objectives helps drive measurable results by ensuring every piece of content serves a clear, strategic purpose.

When you know what success looks like, it’s easier to define and set KPI (key performance indicator) targets that will show whether your content is generating the desired result.

For example, a business looking to break into a new market could assign to the marketing team awareness, engagement and conversion KPIs similar to the following to provide direction and assess the effectiveness of their content efforts:

Awareness metrics

• 1000 new website visits per month from the target market within the first quarter (tracked using filters in tools like Google Analytics).

• 50 organic visits to the company blog per month from content optimized for new market keywords (tracked using Google Search Console to monitor clicks and impressions for target keywords).

Engagement metrics

• 10% conversion rate and/or average time on page of 2 minutes for market-specific landing pages (tracked using the Google Analytics Pages and Screens report filtered by source/medium or campaign).

• Increase engagement rate (likes, shares, comments) by 15% among the target audience within 3 months (tracked through platform analytics to view engagement metrics specific to posts targeting the new audience).

Conversion metrics

• 100 newsletter sign-ups from the target market within the first month of launch (tracked using form submissions to the newsletter platform).

• 50 registrations for a webinar targeted to the new market (tracked through the webinar platform).

A business looking to steal a competitor’s customers would take a different approach, where the owner might assign one or more of the following KPI targets to the marketing team:

Awareness metrics

• Rank on the first page of Google Search Results Pages (SERPs) for 3+ keywords that include competitor’s names or phrases (tracked through Google Search Console or paid platforms such as Ahrefs).

• 500 organic website visits per month to pages targeting competitor comparisons (tracked using the Google Analytics Pages and Screens report to analyze traffic).

Engagement metrics

• Maintain an average time on page of 2+ minutes for blogs or landing pages comparing your offer to competitors’ offers (tracked using the Google Analytics Pages and Screens report to analyze user engagement).

• 50+ shares per month for competitor-related social posts (tracked through platform analytics).

Conversion metrics

• 5% conversion rate (where prospect requests free trial or demo) on competitor-focused landing pages (tracked through form submissions and/or calls from a dedicated number).

• 10 new customers per quarter who switched from a competitor (tracked by including a question on a sign-up form asking what product they were already using).

The Importance of Creating Content with Purpose

Content creation requires significant time, effort, and resources. Therefore, it’s critically important that every piece of content works together to drive the desired results.

Simply having a content plan is no guarantee of success. Without a clear content strategy that’s aligned with your business objectives, you risk investing in content that fails to deliver what’s needed to drive the business forward.

When your content plan is purpose-driven and tied to well-defined goals, it becomes a strategic tool that not only supports business growth but also maximizes your return on investment.

That’s why KPIs play a vital role in creating content with purpose and should be defined at the planning stage, prior to producing and posting content. While the true value of metrics comes into play once your plan is in action, setting goals now lays the foundation for tracking success once you begin implementing your plan.

KPIs will provide clear direction for your marketing team, ensuring their efforts align with your expectations. By defining specific, actionable KPIs that reflect your business objectives, you can guide your team, measure their progress, and continuously refine your content strategy to achieve meaningful results.

The Bottom Line

A well-structured content plan will help you create purposeful, impactful content that resonates with your audience and drives measurable results that align with business objectives.

Effective content planning involves understanding your target audience’s mindset at each stage of buyer awareness so you know the right type of content to provide at each stage.

You must also understand the importance of aligning your content plan with business goals to obtain the greatest ROI for the time and resources you invest in content creation.

This alignment will help you develop KPI metrics and targets that guide your marketing team in focusing their content efforts on the buyer awareness stage(s) most critical for moving your business forward.

But the best plan in the world won’t be successful unless you can effectively execute it.

That’s why next month’s blog will review the remaining three steps to creating a content plan that drives results—prioritizing content topics, choosing the right content platforms, and prioritizing/organizing your content ideas into a content calendar. (As a bonus, I’ll provide a link to my content calendar template with tips for grouping similar activities for more efficient content production.)

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FAQs About How to Create an Effective Content Plan That Drives Results

Still have questions? Here are some common ones about creating a content plan that drives results.

What Is a Content Plan, and Why Is It Important?

A content plan is a strategic roadmap that outlines what content to create, when to create it, and where to publish it. It’s important because it ensures your efforts are intentional and aligned with business goals, helping you save time, stay consistent, and deliver content that resonates with your audience. Without a plan, your content is more likely to be fragmented and less effective in achieving measurable results.

How Does SAGE Methodology Help with Content Planning?

SAGE Methodology offers a structured, step-by-step approach to content marketing strategy and planning. It includes four Steps: Study, Align, Generate, and Evaluate. The first two Steps, as covered in this blog series, focus on understanding your audience (“Study”) and aligning your content with your business objectives (“Align”). The third and fourth Steps guide you through implementing your plan (“Generate”) and measuring its performance (“Evaluate”), with adjustments as needed. This comprehensive framework ensures your content raises brand awareness, connects with your target audience, and drives measurable results, such as generating more leads and sales.

What Are KPIs in Content Marketing, and Why Are They important?

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are measurable metrics that evaluate the success of your content in achieving specific business goals. In content marketing, metrics are data points used to track performance, such as website traffic, social media engagement, lead conversions, or sales. KPIs differ from general metrics because they are directly tied to your strategic objectives.

KPIs are important because they provide a clear way to measure whether your content efforts are delivering the results you want. For example, if your goal is to increase brand awareness, a KPI might be the number of new website visitors or social media impressions. If your goal is lead generation, the KPI might be the number of newsletter sign-ups or free trial requests. Without KPIs, it’s difficult to know what’s working, what isn’t, and where to focus your efforts to improve performance.

By defining KPIs at the start of your content planning process, you ensure your strategy is goal-driven and purposefully aligned with measurable outcomes, allowing you to track progress and make informed decisions over time.

How Do I Stop “Winging It” with My Content Marketing?

To stop “winging it,” you need to commit to a structured content plan that aligns with your business goals. This begins by stepping back and defining what you want to achieve with your content—whether it’s increasing brand awareness, generating leads, or nurturing existing customers. A structured plan ensures your efforts are intentional, not reactive.

The foundation of a successful content plan includes understanding your audience’s needs and priorities, setting clear KPIs (key performance indicators) to measure success, and mapping out a strategy to guide your content creation and distribution. A content calendar can help you plan and organize your efforts, ensuring consistency and purpose. Ultimately, moving from ad-hoc content creation to a planned strategy saves time, reduces stress, and delivers better results.

What Is a Buyer Mindset Analysis, and How Do I Conduct One?

A Buyer Mindset Analysis helps you understand your target audience by identifying their priorities, pain points, and decision-making process. Unlike basic demographic data, this analysis focuses on uncovering what motivates your audience emotionally and practically, as well as the challenges they face when deciding on a solution.

For example, you might discover that your audience values affordability over premium features. This insight could guide your content toward practical, cost-saving solutions rather than complex product overviews. A Buyer Mindset Analysis ensures your content is not only relevant but also resonates deeply with your audience.

To conduct a Buyer Mindset Analysis, download my free Buyer Mindset Analysis template, which includes 15 sources for gathering research insights about your target audience.

How Do I Align Content Goals with Business Objectives?

Aligning content goals with business objectives starts by identifying what you want to achieve for your business. For example, if your objective is to increase brand awareness, your content goals might include creating shareable social media posts or SEO-optimized blogs that attract organic traffic. If your objective is to generate leads, your content goals might focus on gated content like eBooks or webinars that capture contact information.

Mapping out clear KPIs (key performance metrics) for each goal at the planning stage ensures your content efforts remain focused and measurable. By defining specific, actionable KPIs that reflect your business objectives, you can guide your team, measure their progress, and continuously refine your content strategy to achieve meaningful results.

Have more questions? Learn how SAGE Methodology can transform your content strategy at https://dybledigital.com/sage-content-marketing.