Sometimes I write about what's on been on my mind for ages. Others I write about what I'm going through at this very moment. Today we are in the latter situation.
How to plan content and forecast its impact
Let's say you're about to propose a year-long content plan to your internal team or a client. Whether you're in content marketing or you're publishing to reach an audience, you have big dreams for transforming your company's content from beast-like to prince mode.
The only problem is convincing the powers that be your ideas are worth their time and investment. Shifts in content strategy are expensive. Most seasoned executives know that even in the rapid-fire digital world, holistic content and brand changes take months to plan properly and, once executed, can take six months to two years to pay off.
You can't predict the future, especially in publishing. You never know exactly which pieces of content will be hits and which will be a waste of time and money. But you can, as the finance folks have taught us, forecast your impact. Knowing which levers to pull and buttons to press takes some experience—especially for those of us who prefer to avoid math (as always) — but once you have a framework to think it through, it becomes easier with time.
Many of the big, pie-in-the-sky content strategies I've put together have been tabled or deemed not worth the investment. But those that do make it to the execution phase generally turn out as planned. Here's how I think about planning with content's impact in mind.
1.What are you trying to accomplish with content?
All successful content strategies tie back to specific business objectives. There are a gajillion ideas and tactics that you pull out of the magic box (and good content creators typically have no shortage of ideas), but only the ones that move that proverbial needle count.
Deborah Carver
I always start by drafting a classic strategy statement. For example:
To establish our brand as the leader in [W for authority], we will develop content that [X for audience], [Y for product], and [Z for revenue].
Obviously you can make this guiding statement as long or flashy as you want, but the idea of the strategy statement is to spell out the goals of the content as they align with business needs — without numbers for the moment. Strategy statements are rallying cries to entice your stakeholders to invest in your ideas.
You'll likely want to workshop this statement and goals with your boss and stakeholders early on before you present the whole kit 'n' caboodle. If you're working with clients, make sure you've run the strategy statement by your main contact or someone internally who knows the client's business — an account manager or executive sponsor — to get preliminary sign-off. Get feedback on the scope of your proposal before you bring the full plan to fruition.
Keep these statements realistic, but ambitious, for the size of your business and budget. Speaking of...
2.What resources do you have to work with?
A realistic content plan starts with understanding the practical realities of your role and your company's needs. Sure, you could make a feature film with strategic product placement in exactly three very cool scenes, but unless you have a feature film budget, it's unlikely the idea will fly very far.
It's most helpful to assess budget, talent, time and performance.
- Budget: Content costs money, especially if you want to pay professionals fairly for their work. If you're working in content marketing, remember that the general guideline for total marketing investment is 10% of annual revenue.
That 10% has to accommodate all marketing activities, and often owned content teams are competing with performance marketing, events, public relations, and other investments. If you're lucky, content feeds into those other tactics, but every company and every team is different.
If you're a mission-driven organization or a publisher, the percentage of annual revenue you have to budget will vary, but it'll never be more than 30% of total revenue. And in every business, you will likely be asked to do more with less. Be realistic and specific about your allocation. - Talent: What internal and external resources do you have? Did you hire an exceptional video producer last year, or perhaps a social media specialist who has 10xed the account performance since they started a few months ago? Are you particularly well-suited to create certain types of content? And if you don't have the resources in-house, can you find vendors who work within your budget to make the content impactful?
- Time: How much time will it take to produce the content, by your estimate? Great! Now add 25-50% to what you just wrote down.
Unless you've produced many similar assets in recent years and have the approvals and workflows down to a science, digital content always takes much more production time than anticipated. Particularly if you have grand plans to redesign a website or restructure a program, be honest with how much you can accomplish in a set amount of time.
Web development and video production specifically have a habit of incrementally taking longer to accomplish than possible and then suddenly you're months past your initial deadline and scrambling on the finishing touches to get the thing out the door. (And if you're not already tracking ongoing budget and hours as the project is in production, your CFO and I are begging you to start.) - Existing performance: Content professionals, when starting with a new role or a new client, are often tempted to pull an Orange Juice: Rip it up and start again. I've written before about how movies and tv encourage this type of thinking, with new hires sweeping in to reinvent the business, then succeeding in the first few months. But fiction is fiction.
In reality, in even the most drastic company restructures, there are zero circumstances where pulling up the entire foundation and starting from scratch with content is the best idea. Of all the tactics where you could pull the dial all the way back to zero, owned brand content — whether in marketing, publishing, mission-driven, or enterprise content strategy — is the least likely to show any rewards for tossing that bathing baby away in a bucket.
Brand and digital reputation take time and money to build. In content, where everything takes a really long time to show impact, where you're already showing up is near-universally an advantage. Know where your brand's existing strengths are so you can build steps in a new direction rather than taking a random moonshot. Understanding where you already have content advantages is essential to future success.
Now that you have a written statement of where you'd like to go and an honest account of where you're at, it's time to start your forecast.
Deborah Carver
3.What's in the realm of possibility?
If you're a creative, it's likely you already have a laundry list of everything you'd like to do in your role. If you're managing other people and stakeholders, they also have laundry lists of their own (or maybe just one or two pet ideas).
It's time to get their input. Whether in a brainstorming meeting (no wrong answers! only expensive ones!), individual interviews, or deep research, I recommend cataloging everyone's requests. People who have ideas love being asked about them, so do that! Ask! Get input! Dream big! Stay gold!
Look at your audience research and the audits your agencies have given you. Those ideas are worth considering.
Then write everything down and organize your ideas by effort, noting the given the dimensions above. Eventually, the ideas will start to look more like tactics: the practical actions, assets, and touchpoints with your audience that affect strategic outcomes. If you can't see how an idea will be executed, or if it feels wildly off-base from the strategy, scratch it out.
Some tactics — say, rewriting title tags — might be very low-lift to implement. Others, like the new video series you'd like to pilot, will take much more work. It's another area where your experience comes into play: if you know exactly what resources a tactic takes, it's going to be much less effort on its face than jumping into the great unknown.
Take into account political and personnel considerations as well: an exec's pet project will likely be easier to get across the finish line than a junior salesperson's. The workplace is, after all, an extremely political space.
Assign an "effort" score to the tactics that remain. I tend to just indicate "low / medium / high," but you can choose a continuum if that's your jam.
4.What do you know versus what you can guess?
In step four, understanding your numbers — those metrics and benchmarks I'm always going on about— is key. If you follow the formula outlined in step one, your strategy statement addresses brand, product, and revenue. In some companies, you might have clearly identified targets — an increase in share of voice as measured by brand impressions, significant growth in net new customers, and a defined dollar value for revenue.
Deborah Carver
In other companies, you might receive a little less guidance. In that case, I'd advise you to look at the measurement model from a few weeks ago and pick the engagement and commitment metrics that look like "business growth" to you. (Hint for all the business noobs: Growth involves more people and more money.)
Revisit your list of tactics, already scored by effort, and write down which metric will each effort impact the most. Just pick one.
Start with what you know: If you have historical data or pilot projects from any of your proposed tactics, by all means, look at that old data. It will serve as the foundation for your new data (aka your forecast).
Then, guess the rest. And I mean, guess the rest like an experienced content producer. Don't just pull "this will increase traffic" or "increased awareness" out of your ass. Meaningless traffic hasn't mattered for years, and if you don't believe me, check out Ben Smith's Traffic.
Make educated guesses like, "We know traffic around this topic attracts subscriptions, so we think this adjacent topic will do similarly well."
Or, "When our competitor brand does a bunch of podcasts, their search volume in Google Trends rises. We think it will have the same impact on our brand."
Or, "If we optimize and structure our content to be more machine-readable, it will be more likely to be picked up in AI overviews."
It's likely you can make educated guesses as to the impact of your content plan — you are in the role where you are making the plan in the first place. If a tactic is completely new to you, check for outside proof of meaningful impact of the tactic's effectiveness. It's what the science types call "hypothesizing" and what I call "writing a check your ass can cash."
Deborah Carver
Assign each tactic an impact score, much as you did the effort score. But this time, be specific about the metric you expect a tactic to impact the most. If that metric isn't directly connected to the strategy statement, outline its relationship to the metric that defines success.
Then, "forecast" how much you think you can grow the metric based on your experience. Perhaps you want to use a complex formula, but it's more likely you're aiming at a percentage. The more established the business, the more likely the impact will be incremental (+5%) rather than game-changing (+50%). New businesses will likely be looking in terms of multiples for impact (4x or 10x).
Think of the worst-case scenario for your tactics — like, say, a devastating algorithm update that tanks your reach. Make sure, in the aggregate, you have enough other tactics in the works to make up for a bad call.
Spend more time considering: What if it all turns out mediocre? Even in this scenario, your content efforts should have a measurable impact, even if it's not a grand slam.
Think of the best-case scenario: what if you have one or more major hits? How would your organization adapt and react?
Don't bite off more than you can chew. Remember that fraud is bad.
Write out the rationale for yourself and prepare to be asked about it later.
I advise against overly complex statistics. In content, as long as we're informed of the numbers and are realistic about what we're working with, it's generally more than enough to just eyeball it.
The last two questions in this process are relatively easy to answer without an in-depth score assignment:
5.What is your risk tolerance?
Let's address your company's risk tolerance here, but you can put your personal risk tolerance in parentheses. Unless you have the coolest chief creative officer imaginable, it's likely your organization's risk tolerance for content shifts is medium to low.
If you haven't already, here's where you start killing your darlings. That big idea you have that is high effort, low impact—toss it out. High effort, high impact can be worth it, but make sure it's balanced out with some of the more mundane maintenance like "build out more effective customer service materials."
6.What is your timeline?
Identify when you need to show results, and by how much. If you're going through a really in-depth strategic process like preparing for a website redesign, create clear milestones that delineate progress, as well as your initial forecast of impact.
If you've worked through all the steps above, it's likely you're ready to map out your content plan.
- Focus first on low effort, high impact tactics.
- Make sure you are not putting all your eggs in one basket. Especially in digital content, diversification of tactics is key. Ensure you're addressing brand, product, and revenue with your content plans (unless your marching orders are to address only one).
- Keep building from where you already have seen success, while still pivoting creatively while there's appetite for risk.
- Review your plan with core stakeholders before presenting to the whole team.
- Keep your budgets and timelines in order as you execute.
- Rinse and repeat.
Of course there's no actual mathematical formula to forecast content! It's narrative!
But if you went through all the steps above, the hard ones, the ones where you have to realistically think about resources and potential impact, you'll likely be several steps ahead on the road to approval.
And if your boss wants you to add in more moonshots and big ideas, then by all means, get out those schematics.
The Content Technologist is a newsletter and consultancy based in Minneapolis, working with clients and collaborators around the world. The entire newsletter is written and edited by Deborah Carver, independent content strategy consultant, speaker, and educator.
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Did you read? is the assorted content at the very bottom of the email. Cultural recommendations, off-kilter thoughts, and quotes from foundational works of media theory we first read in college—all fair game for this section.
I have a content plan to make (see above), so I'm avoiding links for the moment. But HAPPY SAGITTARIUS SEASON to my fellow loyally blunt travel buffs and party-loving archers.