Want Social Media Content that Aligns With Your ICP? Here’s How to Plan It In 2024

Content planning isn’t just about creating and scheduling anything on your social handles. To ensure your social media content is reaping results, you need a solid plan in place.

Step 1: Create Multiple Content Buckets (based on your ICP and strategy)

While you get the clarity of content type and niché from a content strategy, it doesn’t tell you about the different content formats or themes you can experiment with. But when you create a content bucket, you can get clarity on the similar domains that overlap your niché and the formats that would align better with them.

Note: Content buckets are not content topics.

For example, if you make content around social media, you can explore content buckets like,

Tools and softwares for social media
Latest trends in the domain
Social media hacks and secrets
Social media algorithms
How to topics in the social media domain
Trending social media memes

Step 2: Brainstorm Ideas for Content

Once you know which themes you have, the next step is brainstorming content ideas and formats that would go under each bucket.

Start by writing down the ideas for each bucket. For example, the bucket “Tools and softwares for social media” can have content ideas like “best tools every marketer should use” or maybe “best social media softwares for beginners” and more.

Once you understand the topics, it’s time to analyze the competition and keyword opportunities to help you rank and gain more engagement for your target audience.

Step 3: Decide When is the Best Time to Post

A lot depends on and makes a difference in the best times to post on social media. The trickiest part is – the “best time to post” keeps on varying from one profile to another and one channel to the other. So, how do you figure it out for yourself?

Start by getting clarity on who you are posting it for. For example, if they are from the corporates, they are likely to be most active before the working hour starts or after the operating hours end. After that, try to understand your goal behind posting it and determine when your ideal audience is most active to engage with your content.

If you want to rely on the algorithms instead, you can choose any tool like Hootsuite, which offers you suggestions regarding the optimal posting times based on different platforms and profiles. There are also many similar platforms to Hootsuite that you can try if budget seems to be a concern for you as a beginner.

Step 4: Assign Responsibilities to Team Members

It may seem tempting to do it all alone and eventually lose track of things until the day comes when you forget the password of your social profile. That’s where it becomes very crucial to divide the responsibilities among your team members.

For example, as soon as you have the strategy figured out – assign the responsibility of creating content themes to your content marketer, group up your writer and marketer to figure out the ideas, forward the posts to designers, and finally, check the content for approval.

Step 5: Create a Social Media Calendar for Scheduling and Publishing

Now that everything is ready and approved, we are not done yet – go ahead and start working on your social media calendar. It’s okay if you do not want to get fancy here because you can prepare a social media content calendar right out of Google Sheets for yourself.

For example, check out the one by Semrush.

It’s just a typical column-based calendar that’s editable, easy to keep track of, and simple to understand and update by everyone.

While it’s a convenient process to maintain your calendar, as a busy agency, you might not always have the time to manage the calendar manually. In that case, you can choose to automate the process with a tool that can allow you to schedule your posts beforehand (all at once) and get done with it.

Now that you know how to plan social media content for your channels, go ahead and start creating amazing content today!