Create a Winning Content Marketing Plan (Free Template Inside!)

Is your content marketing delivering real ROI? For many brands, the answer is no. They invest years publishing content on blogs and social media — yet sales from organic traffic remain flat.

What’s missing? A well-crafted content marketing plan.

It’s not about flooding your channels with content. It’s about orchestrating each piece to play its part, from traffic to tangible results. Many brands focus so much on just increasing traffic numbers that they overlook the bigger question: Is that traffic leading to measurable business growth?

In this post, I’ll show you how to custom-build a content marketing plan that fills your sales pipeline (not just your blog). This is the same process we use for clients to attract organic search traffic that converts.

It’s baked into our SEO services because it gets our clients results like this:

Don’t forget to download the free template at the end of the article to help you map out each element of your plan.

Successful Content Is Planned with Precision

Whether outsourcing content or building an in-house team, content marketing is a significant investment. You deserve to see real returns.

But those returns don’t happen by simply publishing and hoping for the best.

We see it all the time. Companies invest thousands in content creation, but their traffic remains flat.

The disconnect happens with low-effort content, but high-quality writing from credible experts doesn’t guarantee success. Without strategic direction, even the best content misses its mark.

One of our clients is a case in point. When they arrived at our doorstep, this organization had a high-authority website and a library of original, expert-written blog posts.

But its traffic was stagnant, and so was membership growth. These are a few of the issues we found:

• Choosing topics misaligned with search intent
• Publishing without clear conversion paths or calls to action
• Not measuring which content was driving traffic or revenue

Here’s the hard truth: You can have beautifully written blogs, stunning social posts, and expert-level content, but if each piece doesn’t guide your audience toward a specific next step, you’re leaving conversions on the table.

A solid content marketing plan solves these issues by ensuring every piece serves a specific purpose in your sales funnel. It uses data to:

• Optimize content based on keyword research and user intent
• Create clear paths from informational content to engagement
• Track ROI through conversion metrics, not just traffic

With strategic improvements to existing content, we increased traffic by 233% for the client in my example above. At the same time, we built a path for visitors to become subscribers, which continues to grow this organization’s membership.

By mapping out your content in advance, you can create a cohesive journey that guides visitors naturally to your product or service. It keeps content teams focused on content that drives business results, not just vanity metrics.

Think of your content marketing plan like a GPS for your business: You’re not just looking to get somewhere but to arrive at the right destination efficiently and consistently.

Let’s dive into the steps you can take to develop your own data-driven plan.

How to Create Your Content Marketing Plan: A Step-by-Step Guide

When we begin a new project, we approach it like plotting a journey. We need to know the destination, where we’re starting from, and the best route to get there.

It’s a methodical but agile approach that helps us get results for clients in many industries — from established ecommerce brands to membership communities and online education.

Below, I’ll walk you through each step, with practical resources to help you implement it yourself. Follow along with the template, or reach out if you’d like to discuss a custom plan with our team.

1. Define Your Goals & Metrics

What do you want to achieve with your content marketing plan? Your first instinct might be to start with a content-creation goal, like publishing 50 blog posts. Or a traffic goal, like getting 500k visitors per month.

But what will those blog posts and traffic accomplish for your business?

Your plan should be crafted to achieve a sales-related or business outcome. Then, you can work backward to determine KPIs for content marketing to support that outcome.

Here are a few examples of specific goals with KPIs to measure how well your content marketing plan is working:

• Increase organic traffic revenue by 25% in six months
• Generate 100 qualified leads per month from blog traffic
• Achieve top 3 rankings for ten high-priority keywords

The examples above are all potential benefits of SEO for ecommerce and many other industries. However, all of them take time and consistent effort to show results.

If you want to track a few big goals simultaneously, I support your ambition! But the more realistic and focused you can make your plan, the more likely it is to succeed.

And don’t despair that picking a narrow focus will limit your plans because the content marketer’s job is never done! You can circle back and start a new plan with fresh goals after phase one. The beauty of this approach is that each phase is informed by more and more performance data.

2. Know Your Audience

Who exactly is the consumer of your product — and your content?

This step is essential for everything that follows, from topic research to copywriting.

You can go quite deep into creating a buyer persona with a fake name and a whole imaginary life. But at minimum, document the key points that will help you find and convert more of your ideal customers:

• Demographics: Age, gender, location, income level, education, job title
• Pains: Challenges, frustrations, and problems your product can help solve
• Gains: Hopes, desires, and goals your product can help achieve
• Habits: Habitual patterns and platform preferences related to content
• Priorities: The most important factors in the decision to buy, such as price, convenience, or quality
• Knowledge level: Familiarity and expertise with the niche or products, such as seasoned expert or first-time beginner

Get these details into your template. To get more detailed, you can create a separate document to elaborate on this and the next few steps. A detailed set of content guidelines, shared with everyone working on your content, will help everyone stay aligned with your goals.

3. Define Your Brand Voice

Knowing your audience is half of the killer-content equation. The other half is your brand voice. When all your content consistently sounds like your brand, it stands out from competitors and builds trust with your audience.

Without a brand voice, content is generic. And when the voice is all over the place, it’s not winning over any specific group — your target audience won’t know they’re in the right place.

Add these core elements to your content plan template:

• Tone & Personality. The emotional qualities that define your brand and writing style. Break it into four dimensions (humor, formality, respectfulness, and enthusiasm) using this framework from NN/g.
• Language & Style Guidelines: Specify vocabulary level, industry terms to use/avoid, and any additional style guidance.
• Core Messaging: Document differentiators, key benefits, and messages to reinforce your brand and products.

This will help everyone working on content stay consistent, writing with an authentic voice to engage your ideal customers.

4. Choose Your Content Types

Based on your goals and audience, decide what types of content your plan will include. This could be blog posts, videos, podcasts, or social media content.

When choosing content types, consider your resources and expertise. While trying everything at once is tempting, it’s better to over-deliver in one or two formats than to spread yourself thin on multiple platforms.

I encourage you to also think beyond choosing a channel or format. Consider which part of your customer’s journey needs to be developed:

• Top-of-funnel (Awareness): Create helpful informational content like blog posts, social media posts, podcasts, or videos to attract potential customers and help them discover your brand.
• Middle-of-funnel (Consideration): Use product comparisons, case studies, FAQs, and testimonials to build trust while people evaluate their options.
• Bottom-of-funnel (Decision): In ecommerce SEO, optimize product and category pages to attract and convert bottom-funnel traffic. In other industries, you need conversion-optimized landing pages and a clear path for users to find them at the right time.

If you need help identifying which stage needs attention first, read our guide to conversion funnels. It will walk you through examples and strategies for driving traffic at each stage and using content to guide visitors through the stages.

5. Audit Existing Content

You might be tempted to skip this step and jump straight into a new plan. Don’t!

Existing content can be a gold mine for your content plan in a number of ways. In many cases, you can:

• Get a head start on your traffic goals by leveraging rankings and backlinks you’ve already won
• Avoid wasting resources (and causing keyword cannibalization issues) to cover topics that already exist on your site
• Get quick wins by optimizing content for correct search intent

Results can be dramatic, especially if you’re starting with a large site and years’ worth of underperforming content.

Calling this step a “content audit” sounds like a big undertaking, but it’s simply a list of all your website pages with traffic, backlinks, and rankings data.

The output will be a spreadsheet like this:

You can start with GSC and an SEO tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.

Start by exporting your data:

• Go to your GSC property, click Full Report on the Overview tab, select your desired time period, and export the data as a CSV. 
• Extract the Pages.csv file to see organic clicks for each page, then import it into a new spreadsheet to create your audit document.
• Follow the rest of the steps in the Ahrefs content audit guide. This includes a template sheet that simplifies the process. 
• Import your GSC data into their template, then use their step-by-step instructions to add and evaluate keywords, backlinks, and other key metrics.

How much “auditing” you do next is up to you. You could have thousands of pages and blog posts to assess, looking at each one for traffic or conversion potential.

To save time, follow the advice in the guide from Ahrefs:

I recommend following the 80/20 rule and auditing the top 20% of pages with the most organic traffic or backlinks. You’ll probably get 80% of results from doing this.

Joshua Hardwick – Ahrefs

From that 20%, decide which of these pages supports your goals. Note in your Content Plan Template to start optimizing these pages.

6. Create a List of Target Topics

If you haven’t got your hands full with findings from your content audit — it’s time to research new topics for your content plan.

Here are a few ways to find ideas:

• Audience needs and pain points: Remember a few steps back when you defined your audience? Use their needs and pain points to brainstorm potential topics. Always validate demand and search intent with keyword research tools like Semrush or Ahrefs.
• Competitor research: Start digging around your top competitors’ websites and social media to see what they’re doing with content marketing. But the pro move is to find out exactly which keywords they’re targeting and which pages bring them traffic. Again, Ahrefs and Semrush both include excellent competitor analysis tools for scraping the data and extracting insights. We use these tools to perform a “gap analysis” and identify keywords a competitor ranks for that you don’t.
• Your content audit: Look at any content that’s already performing well. These might be great building blocks for new content hubs. Use them to plan new, interlinked pages covering sub-topics or related topics with unique sets of keywords and search intent. This strategy can attract unique visitors and build topical authority.
• Your customer journey: Cover “the missing middle” in your content plan with a clear path for potential customers. Top-funnel informational content can be great for attracting organic traffic, but conversion rarely happens directly from an informational blog post. Include any case studies, lead magnets, product reviews, or email campaigns you want to cover in your plan.

With the above methods, you can generate a solid list of topics and keywords — but a list is not a plan! The next steps are all about planning, creating, and publishing the content ideas you’ve generated.

Export your Google Analytics data and identify the top 20% of your pages. Analyze whether each page has the potential to support the goals you identified in step one.

7. Plan Your Content Calendar

A content calendar transforms your topic list into an actionable publishing schedule. But it’s more than just assigning dates to each piece of content. It’s a central place to organize all the steps and people involved in your content.

Project management platforms can serve as both a content calendar and collaboration tool, so you can:

• Maintain consistent publishing cadence
• Keep your team aligned and accountable
• Track content status from idea to publication
• Organize all communication in an accessible place

Our content calendars are customized projects in Asana. This makes it easy for us to work with people outside our agency, including client teams and freelance writers.

There’s no reason to switch if you’re already using Notion, ClickUp, or Monday. It’s most important that your content plan is organized in a platform your team will actually use.

Start with a simple templated project — you can always add customizations later (I’m always switching up our custom fields and columns as we find ways to work more efficiently).

Here’s how to build your initial calendar:

1. Pick a platform (your project management tool of choice)
2. Set up a content calendar project (use one of the platform’s templates to get started quickly) 
3. Add tasks for each of your highest-priority topics
4. In each content task, add relevant details you’ll need for content creation (target keywords, format, examples)
5. Set a realistic publishing frequency based on your capacity
6. Assign publishing dates to each topic
7. Leave room for unexpected opportunities and adjustments

Remember that content marketing is a long game. While it’s good to be ambitious, it’s better to publish consistently — and content has to be high quality to get results. Set a sustainable pace so you don’t burn out trying to do too much at once.

8. People and Process

Now that you’ve set up the basics in your content calendar, it’s time to get granular.

Remember, your content calendar is more than a list of topics and dates. It’s like a pipeline that keeps content moving—from idea to done—while staying on track with budget, timeline, and quality.

Even if you’re a one-person content operation, following a standard process helps with quality control and momentum.

Here’s how we break down content tasks:

Each topic is a single task, broken down into at least ten steps, depending on the project. Specialized team members handle different stages — SEO research, writing, editing, and publishing — but the content calendar is organized for smooth hand-offs and communication within the main task.

Your steps will differ depending on your content types, resources, and budget. But even if you’re doing many steps yourself, standardizing the process into a checklist will help with quality and consistency. That way, you won’t forget something important, like proofreading.

Once you know all the steps, who will complete each one? Hiring freelance writers can speed up the process — and you have a head start with onboarding, thanks to all your diligent preparation so far. But make sure you also factor in steps for creating article briefs so writers know what you want and keep a close eye on quality.

It takes time for newly-published content to get organic traffic. However, immediately after publishing, off-page SEO can help bring some direct traffic and engagement. Include a step for sharing and promoting each new piece of content.

9. Set Up Measurement and Analytics

Remember those goals and metrics we defined in step one? Now, it’s time to set up systems to track them properly. In your content plan template, note how and when you will track, analyze, and report on your results.

Checking rankings and traffic can be addictive. However, checking every day is not necessarily productive since SEO takes time.

But you need to watch for trends, monitor traffic drops, and ensure your strategy is working. So, set a frequency for analysis that allows you to stick to the plan patiently and adjust course when necessary.

Google Analytics is your foundation, but you might need additional tools depending on your goals. Here’s what we typically track for clients:

• Traffic metrics: Overall organic traffic, page-specific traffic, and user behavior (time on page, bounce rate) using Google Analytics
• Revenue attribution: Assisted conversions and multi-channel funnels in Analytics to understand content’s role in the sales process
• Keyword rankings: Tracking a keyword wishlist of terms we want to own, we set up position tracking using tools like Semrush or Ahrefs
• Conversion metrics: Sales, email sign-ups, or other goal completions from organic traffic
• Content engagement: Social shares, comments, and backlinks acquired

Download Your Free Content Planning Template

Ready to transform your content marketing? Our free template follows the proven framework we use to get results for our clients.

Download it today, and use it to build your strategic plan.

Need expert help with any of these steps? Get in touch.