One of the big pain points we’ve been hearing about lately from clients—and would-be clients— is content overwhelm. Brands know they need some kind of content marketing, but they’re unsure of how to start or where to turn.
Without the in-house expertise to develop a sound strategy, content ‘planning’ often looks like throwing spaghetti at the wall across a bunch of channels, with no clear objectives or results achieved (like follower growth, new leads, or a bump in sales). So these folks are wallowing a little. And often working with a limited budget that can’t accommodate bringing on a full-time agency.
How do we help? Usually, Forge & Spark specializes in going deep to develop content strategy. We do this for organizations via a series of detailed workshops that combine to create what we call a Content Roadmap, containing a literal library of data on a client’s content plan, including target messaging, OKRs, branding, audience research, story pillars, competitor auditing and much more (seriously, these things are often 80+ pages long).
But what about when you just need a plan … right now? For situations like these, we’ve recently developed a Quick-Start Content Plan —a 90-day content plan whipped up in as little as a week. We guide our clients through the essential steps to building a content strategy and framework to start getting effective content off the ground ASAP. Our expert team of journalist storytellers, eagle-eyed social strategists, and design whizzes have done this many times. So they can pack a lot into that short time!
We’re sharing the essential steps and worksheets below for those who want to learn more or give it a try. Feel free to bookmark, borrow, or use them in your quick-start planning efforts.
In as little as a week, you’ll be ready for your 90-day content sprint. Take your mark…
Jump-Start a 90-Day Content Marketing Plan: Our Day-by-Day Guide
DAY 1: Set Goals for Your 90-Day Content Sprint
First, you’ll need to decide what you want to achieve with your content. Consider the overarching business goals you’re working toward and how content can help. For example:
- Highlight a specific aspect of your product or services that needs more attention
- Build up a newsletter subscriber list and use it to sell products
- Highlight a particular kind of messaging (e.g. DEI, sustainability) to grow awareness of your brand as purpose-led
Then you can get more granular. For a 90-day content plan, we’d suggest setting three essential—yet modest and measurable—objectives. Something like:
- 50 new followers, likes, or comments on Instagram
- 20 email inquiries about products or services
- A 5% shift in audience demographics on LinkedIn
DAY 2: Identify Your Target Audiences
We recommend choosing a maximum of two target audiences to reach and engage over the next 90 days. Consider especially: prospects that don’t know you yet but who need you, prospects familiar with you but who haven’t bought from you, and customers you want to engage or keep loyal to you.
We use this table to help Content Sprint clients get clear on their target audiences:
| PRIMARY AUDIENCE | SECONDARY AUDIENCE | |
| 1-sentence description of audience | ||
| General demographics: gender / location / age group | ||
| What is their main focus when it comes to your content or offerings? | ||
| Is there a problem they’re trying to solve when it comes to your brand or offerings? | ||
| What benefit might they get from your content? | ||
| What makes their experience with your brand, products or services unique? | ||
| If they’re not yet a customer, why might they not be following or buying from you? What’s in the way, and how might your content overcome that? | ||
| What channels are they on and/or what kind of content has worked best with them? | ||
| Are there any questions these folks often have that you could answer in your content? |
DAY 3: Establish Your Communication Framework
What are you most interested in having your target audiences do, and how will you do it with content? Use the ‘Get ___ To ___ By ___’ framework to sort this out. This will help you to determine your most important Call to Action (CTA) for your content.
GET (name your primary audience/s) __________________________
TO (define a certain action) ___________________________
BY (list key messages and channels) ___________________________
Develop a One-Sentence Key Message for Your Sprint
What do you need to say in your content to prompt the action defined above? This should be your overarching messaging to guide your content.
Add Supporting Messages
What proof do you have to support your key message above? Consider stories you could tell, customer testimonials you could provide, case studies, anecdotes, infographics or data you could share. Summarize those ‘proofs’ below.
Day 4: Choose Your Channels and Content Types
Set Your Top 3 Channels
For ‘sprint’ clients, we suggest zeroing in on a home-base content channel and 1–2 ‘broadcast’ channels.
Usually, the home base channel will be the main hub for your brand, where your audience can learn more about you and buy from you—a website, blog, YouTube channel or e-commerce platform.
Channel 2 should allow you to reach your target audience where they like to hang out: usually a social media platform like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, or TikTok. Consider this your “growing awareness” channel.
Channel 3 could be another social channel or somewhere else that your best audience consumes content—like your own e-newsletter or a secondary social channel with many active, engaged followers. Consider this your “engaging with interested leads” channel.
Types of Content for Each
What kinds of content will you share on each channel? For efficiency, we recommend breaking it down into: Macro Stories – which usually appear on your hub channel – and Micro Stories, published on Channels 2 and 3.
Macro stories: Your “anchor content”
These are juicy topics and content pieces that deserve long-form, deeper storytelling. They often offer sub-themes and ‘side quests’ you can explore in social posts tying back to the anchor. Think blog posts, long-form videos, podcasts, and more.
Micro stories: Social posts that stand alone OR tie back to your anchor
These are smaller ‘hits’ of content that don’t necessarily warrant the long-form treatment—but still serve your key messages and goals. They can either tie back to your anchor content or tell their own self-contained stories.
Say you’re an outdoor-gear company. One micro story might be an Instagram Reel of an expert sharing tips on breaking in a hiking boot, for example—driving back to an anchor video on your website about choosing the right shoe insert; with shopping links. Another micro story might be a photo album highlighting one of your people’s favourite hikes (with products in play).
We love simple, template-able formats for micro stories, such as quotes and testimonials from clients and/or team members, photo albums, tip carousels, and roundup videos.
Day 5: Establish Your Content Cadence, Content Anchors, and Milestones
Now we get to planning.
Start with the big rocks. What are your anchor pieces of content for your next 90 days? We recommend keeping it simple, and trying for one macro story per month. With that, you can create a whole swath of micro-stories on social, and have something good and juicy to share in a newsletter, too.
A month’s worth of super simple milestones might look something like this.
| When | What | Channels |
| Sept. 1 | Publish Month 1 Anchor Post/Article/Case Study/Video | Blog |
| 2–3/week | Schedule Social MicroStories to Support Month 1 Anchor | Socials |
| Sept. 15 | Send out newsletter to promote Month 1 Anchor | Newsletter |
Ready to Sprint: Execute Your Content Plan and Monitor Performance
And GO! You’re all set to create and deploy content for your 90-day sprint. Now you know exactly where you’re headed, and how. You’ve created a clear plan, based on a solid foundation of strategy, audience targeting and brand messaging. All that remains is to execute the plan and then track your performance based on the goals and target metrics you set above.
Of course, nothing is set in stone, either. This method of content planning is agile and adaptable, so you can adjust your content plan as priorities arise over the quarter, bringing new messages into the stream and updating as needed. But meanwhile, you have a solid lineup of posts and stories queued up and ready to engage your audience.
We hope you have found this exercise helpful. We heartily encourage you to download this framework and use it in whatever way works best for your brand.
We’re here to support you at any time. We’d love to chat about how you can become one of our Quick-Start Content Plan clients, working through the process alongside a team with extensive storytelling and content planning experience.
Our talented group of pros includes journalists, social strategists, designers, SEO experts, and more who have been through the content-planning process many, many times. With our knowledge base and experience, we can jump in quickly and efficiently at any time. We can sprint, or take it slow and methodical.
Check out al the details about our Quick-Start Content Plan here or get in touch to chat about your content needs.
