As the saying goes, ‘proper planning prevents poor performance’ – and this adage rings true in the world of social media marketing. At Plann, we think every business needs a content marketing plan to guide the way they show up online.
If you’ve tried and failed to develop your social media content plan, we get it. It’s not an easy feat, and it’s time-intensive for small businesses and solopreneurs. Instead of leaving you to labor over an Excel spreadsheet, we’ve put together a simple nine-step guide to building a content marketing plan that actually drives results.
Content planning is the key to making social media feel easy, and could be your gateway to more creativity, flexibility, and reactivity. It’s time to make 2025 your best year yet digitally – let’s get to work.
What is a content marketing plan?
A content marketing plan is a detailed outline of all the content you’re going to post for your brand broken down by channel. It’s a formula for what to post, when, and why. If outlined correctly, will make showing up online (and seeing success!) easy.
It’s up to you how far you want to take your content marketing plan. Some organizations like to split out their social media content plan from the rest of their platforms (e.g., website content, email marketing), whereas others prefer a broad view of every campaign: past, present, and future.
At the very least, your content plan should include your key channels as well as some overarching objectives and an explanation of your content pillars.
Why your brand needs a content plan
If you’re a small team or strapped for time, spending a day or more defining a content marketing plan may seem overwhelming – but we promise that the benefits outweigh the costs by a landslide.
Here’s what building out your social media content plan could give you:
- A holistic view of your content strategy: A content plan lays your business’s content strategy out on the table. Instead of dealing with pieces of your strategy in siloes, having everything detailed in one document will give you a holistic view so you can identify where things are working or going wrong.
- An efficient outline of your objectives: Your social media content plan should summarize your online objectives – for example, converting customers or building brand awareness. It’s a guiding light for posting to your digital platforms and will improve decision-making when you’re questioning whether a piece of content is brand-aligned or not.
- A resource for all staff members: Every digital marketer knows that onboarding new staff to an established brand is tough stuff – but it’s much easier with a content plan in place. Your social content plan acts as a ‘strategy on a page’ that new staff members can pick up, read through, and run with, with minimal confusion or questions.
- A cheat sheet: We’ve all experienced creative block before – that frustrating feeling when you’re fresh out of ideas to entertain and engage your audience. Instead of taking an involuntary digital detox, refer to your social media content plan to realign with your objectives. This is a surefire way to get ideas percolating again and ensure they’re on track with your goals.
- A way to justify your decisions: If you need to justify your digital content to higher-ups within your business, agreeing on a social content plan first is a great way to ensure everyone is on the same page. This means there are no surprises on all sides – and if a post ever does get called into question, you can reference your content strategy to justify it.
9 steps to devising a foolproof social content plan
Drafting up an airtight content strategy doesn’t have to be daunting – and once it’s all down on paper, you’ll enjoy more clarity and direction than ever before.
This 9-step content marketing plan template will help you construct a detailed roadmap of exactly what, why, when, and how you post to your digital channels.
Step 1. Determine your purpose
Kick things off by figuring out exactly what you want to achieve by posting content online. This is where you outline your bigger objectives, such as raising brand awareness, attracting new audiences, building community, and converting leads to customers. You may choose to drill down on just one, or include a few with varying importance.
Step 2. Define your channels and audiences
Once you’ve got your goals established, it’s time to define where you’ll show up online and who you’re speaking to. If you already have a digital presence, write down all of your existing platforms – for example, social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Pinterest, as well as other digital avenues such as email marketing, your brand’s website, and your blog. If you’re just getting started with a new biz, list all the digital platforms you can think of.
We suggest numbering the channels you’ve written down in order of importance to your brand. Unless you’re a huge business, it’s unsustainable to have a strong presence on every channel, and defining your priorities will help you focus on nailing your content where it counts.
You can then dive into your insights to understand your audience on each platform. If you have the time, build out audience personas for each of your digital marketing channels, detailing who they are, what content they enjoy, and how they behave.
Step 3. Audit what works (and what doesn’t!)
A content audit is the most strategic way to figure out what your audience resonates with. It can help you focus your efforts and free up time and resources.
Using Plann, you can execute the key elements of your content marketing plan digitally, including your content pillars.
To perform a content audit, list all the content you have created by the channel for a set time period, either manually or using an analytics tool like the one available in Plann. Once you’ve got a clear picture of what’s been posted by channel, review your results, looking for the following:
- Top performing and bottom performing posts overall
- Posts with skewed metrics (e.g., that receive strong reach but poor engagement or vice versa)
- Any content categories that emerge (e.g., help-based content, edutainment, memes, etc.)
- Patterns by post type (e.g., static image vs carousel vs video)
- Content gaps and opportunities
Aim to draw a handful of conclusions from analyzing your results. Keep these off to the side – we’ll use them later to design your social media content calendar.
Step 4. Build out content pillars and types
Every brand needs three to five purposeful content pillars to guide its output on social media and beyond. Using what you have learned from your content audit – particularly the content that works well – and your brand’s goals, define overarching pillars that can then be broken down into actionable content types.
Here’s an example we’ve drummed up for a sporting goods brand:
- Content pillar: Foster camaraderie
- Content types: Event-based content, community gatherings, relatable memes and videos, and influencer partnership content.
- Content placements: Instagram Reels, TikTok, Instagram broadcast channel, Facebook community group, email marketing, loyalty program, brand app.
Using Plann, you can execute the key elements of your content marketing plan digitally, including your content pillars.
Everything you post should fall under at least one of your pre-defined pillars. Under each content pillar, list as many content types as you can think of (e.g., memes, how-tos, explainers, etc.). It’s up to you how broad or granular you want to be – just make sure it’s actionable.
Step 5. Design your social media content calendar
While it’s a separate entity to your social media content plan, your content calendar is just as important – and designing the two outputs in tandem will streamline your content creation.
Draft your content marketing plan and social media calendar using Plann’s built-in tools.
Draw up a calendar and add fields for the day, post theme, channel, post type, content pillar, status, and any other relevant information you’d like to track. You can do this as a spreadsheet or use a social media scheduling app like Plann, which is designed to make content planning easy and visual.
Step 6. Start creating content
Creating content is a key part of your content marketing plan, as you won’t know your strategy is sound ‘til you test it out. Using the roadmap you’ve defined, begin creating content that satisfies at least one objective, falls under one or more content pillars, and is tailored to one or a range of priority channels.
You can also use this step to outline the mechanics of how you create content within your team. Include roles and responsibilities in a section of your content marketing plan. If you’re using a digital system to track your social content plan and/or content calendar, you may be able to assign these roles digitally so your team members receive notifications when their part of the deal is due.
Step 7. Identify opportunities to repurpose
Before you schedule content using your go-to scheduling software, consider the breadth of your content and how you may be able to repurpose one idea across various placements. In 2025, the social media landscape is saturated, and it’s impossible to reach your entire audience – so don’t hesitate to create two, five, or even 10 pieces of content that focus on a single concept.
A video that works well on TikTok could have the same cut-through on Instagram Reels if edited differently. An Instagram Reels script could be turned into a blog post. A blog post could spark inspiration for a condensed, short-form LinkedIn post – and so the cycle continues. Stats show that 60% of marketers find their repurposed content actually performs better than the original – if that’s not enough reason to give it a shot, we don’t know what is!
In your content marketing plan, lay the ground rules around repurposing – how often will you do it, and how will you differentiate between each content piece? Then, translate this into your content calendar by identifying opportunities to repurpose existing and upcoming content across channels and mediums.
Step 8. Set reporting metrics
Every good social media content plan is driven by data. After all, we’ve got so much information at our fingertips – it would be remiss not to use it to guide your content strategy. In the final part of your content marketing strategy, define how you will measure content performance and quantify success.
You may choose to break this down by channel, macro goals, or content pillar, depending on your business objectives. Consider setting monthly KPIs to hit in addition to quarterly or yearly goals to measure your long-term success.
Step 9. Post, analyze, and realign
The final piece of the social content plan puzzle is testing and adjusting your strategy in line with performance. Start by executing at least a few weeks of your new content marketing plan and observing whether your posts deliver on your objectives or fall short. Then, using the analytics available to you (either through a scheduling tool like Plann, or natively on each platform), measure this success in a concrete way against the KPIs you’ve set.
Fitness content creator Brittany McCrystal repurposes the same recipe across multiple Instagram posts with different hooks.
Take what you learned from this exercise and tweak your social media content plan. It’s important to view this document not as a static source of truth but rather as an ever-evolving manifesto of how your brand shows up online. The digital landscape changes every single day, so it only makes sense that your strategy will shift as time passes, too.
Every brand needs a content marketing plan to define its social media strategy, so now’s the time to get cracking on yours. With a structured yet flexible ‘digital blueprint’ laid out on paper, you’ll take all the hard work out of social media content creation and make way for the good stuff – creativity, freedom, and fun.
Ready to supercharge your success on social media?
Looking for an all-in-one content creation suite that allows you to manage your social media channels effortlessly? From mapping out your strategy and designing your graphics to saving plug-and-play hashtag sets, you’ll find everything you need inside Plann.
Go on, redeem your 7-day free trial of Plann Plus. If you don’t like it, keep using Plann for free!
