In an earlier post to the Boston Content blog, I talked about how four simple phases in your content operations can help you make sense of the loose, frightening project of owning "content" for your business. I'm calling this the Content Spectrum, and the goals are simple: be efficient, be thoughtful, and keep your and your company's goals in mind the entire time. Above all, don't just jump into creating content and then blast that to the world - the process MUST be carefully followed because producing and controlling media is such a loose, far-reaching idea. So many moving parts can derail a project and eliminate success.

While it may be fine to sit down and churn out a personal blog without much thought, chances are pretty darn good that your company has real business objectives to hit.

Today, we're focusing on the first step in the process: Planning. 

Planning requires that you look ahead to Production, Distribution, and Analysis and map out the various steps, resources, and due dates along the way.

In the eyes of too many, planning seems corporate and too process-driven, but having launched content both big (e.g. Chevy campaigns) and small (like weekly templates to meet quotas) for Dailybreak, I can tell you with absolute certainty: a lack of planning and foresight can lead to hours upon hours of wasted time, unnecessary back and forth, and tons of frustration. Things won't run smoothly, and you won't hit your, your company's and/or your client's goals.

GOOD PLANNING EXAMPLE: THE CREATIVE BRIEF

At Dailybreak, our planning stage often includes one key stakeholder (a sales rep, an account manager, or an internal project lead) filling out a creative brief for my team of writers, designers and content strategists. These briefs cover topics ranging from creative assets to which we have access (e.g. a video made by a third party), due dates, production owners, and more. They're simple documents that take just a few minutes to complete, but they are critical. Because "planning" is an idea that doesn't directly produce anything, skipping this step is often both easy for others to do and more or less guaranteed to result in chaos and failed projects.

It's your job to ensure that doesn't happen.

Here's a loose example of what a creative brief looks like for a project focused on graphic design:

THREE THINGS TO REMEMBER WHEN PLANNING YOUR CONTENT

Start by focusing on the OUTCOME: I can't emphasize this enough. Not only should you scope the project, but you should very clearly define the metrics of success that you're using. Why is this so critical? Because as the person responsible for creating content, if you list out your colleague's or team's idea of success up front, you can accurately and confidently make decisions or even change the project to hit those goals. After all, others know what they want as an outcome, but you know how to get them there. Unfortunately, they may not understand that the content they want produced comes into conflict with the results they're seeking. Knowing success metrics upfront helps you gently move them to the right solution while pointing to their goals the entire time.

Manage expectations: During planning, you have the ability to set proper expectations in terms of turnaround times and gauge direction by proposing loose frameworks for concepts ("What if we did THIS?"). Your job is not just to execute but to be the content leader in the room and manage expectations. Doing so then let's you...

Allocate resources appropriately: Remember in school, when teachers would only award the 100 or the A+ for tests in math or science? Your papers could never seem to get that perfect score. That's because the amount of edits, ideas, and hours spent on a humanities project can go on forever. You can ALWAYS tweak a paper, an article, a video, or a graphic. Media is only "final" when you decide to stop working on it and publish it. By stepping back during your planning stage, you can be sure to allocate resources more concretely and decide who's in, who's out, in order to be more efficient when you move to production.

TOOLS TO HELP YOU DURING PLANNING

There are myriad tools and apps available to help you during this stage. Just a few that I've personally used or have seen others use:

Google Drive: docs that are shareable are critical

Dropbox: (ditto)

Trello: a project management web app that's simple and almost fun to use; they've dubbed themselves "white boards with superpowers," and I agree (available on desktop and mobile)

Wunderlist: an interactive To Do list (desktop, mobile)

A team-wide "Idea Board": At Dailybreak, this is a spreadsheet that lists headlines, topic labels, links to sources of inspiration or resources, and a standalone list of content "templates" we run. Templates are more turnkey or regularly posted items that can be published quickly and predictably while the team spends time fleshing out more unique or complex ideas. After all, your audience - or boss - demands content regularly, so a repository of ideas and quick-hitting templates help you meet the demands and still have time to, yanno, sleep and stuff.

Creative Briefs: these will look drastically different company to company, project to project, but putting the scope and goals of a project on paper in the same format every time develops consistency, sets expectations, and helps avoid missing details or deadlines.

Bottom line: be sure to plan things out carefully to collect all the many moving pieces behind creating content. When you're ready to move forward and confident you have goals set, resources allocated, and expectations properly communicated, move onto the next phase: Production.

Next time, we'll explore the Production phase of the Content Spectrum and explain why we all spend too much time thinking about this step in our creative process.

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