How to create a content marketing plan in 12 steps (with examples and templates)

A strong content marketing plan is the backbone of every high-performing marketing organization. It helps teams align on priorities, publish the right content at the right time, and ensure every asset—blog post, video content, case study, social post, or thought leadership campaign—supports strategic business goals. But without a clear roadmap, content production can become chaotic, inconsistent, and difficult to measure.

In this guide, you’ll learn what a content marketing plan is, why it matters, the step-by-step process to build one, common planning challenges, and a sample plan you can use for inspiration. You’ll also see how Airtable helps content teams plan smarter, work faster, and stay aligned—no matter how complex their content engine becomes.

What is a content marketing plan?

A content marketing plan is a document that outlines how your organization will create, publish, promote, and measure content across channels. It’s a blueprint for the content you produce—detailing your target audience, goals, messaging, content formats, workflows, timelines, and success metrics. While it often refers to digital marketing content, a content marketing plan might also include event content meant to be consumed in-person.

A content marketing plan can take many forms: a detailed document, a hub built into a collaborative platform, or a system of calendars and dashboards. What matters is that it centralizes the decisions and data your team needs to execute content efficiently and consistently.

Explore this dedicated resource for a deeper dive on building your content strategy, including audience segmentation, messaging frameworks, and asset planning. But think of it this way: a content marketing plan brings the content marketing strategy to life.

Why do marketers need to create a content marketing plan?

A content marketing plan is a content management plan. Without structure and alignment, content marketing quickly devolves into reactive function—publishing whatever seems most urgent rather than content that creates strategic value. Content is also the engine driving marketing plans forward—without close partnership with campaigns, social media, email marketing and more, these channels fall flat or tell an inconsistent story for customers or prospects.

High-performing content teams build plans because:

It aligns content to business goals

A plan ensures every piece of content supports strategic objectives, such as demand generation, product adoption, brand awareness, or customer education.

It enables consistency across channels

Your blog, social media channels, email marketing, events, and sales enablement content should work together—not compete for attention. A plan helps unify messaging, tone, brand voice, and timing across all of these channels and functions.

It helps teams prioritize and resource effectively

When demand for content creation grows, a clear roadmap helps teams determine which projects deserve focus and which should wait.

It improves collaboration with stakeholders

Sales, product, leadership, and other stakeholders can review the plan upfront—reducing ad-hoc requests and last-minute pivots. Content creators can use their plan as a starting point when brainstorming content ideas or consulting with internal stakeholders.

It provides accountability and performance visibility

A plan outlines timelines, owners, workflows, and KPIs so teams can measure content performance and prove value. For example, SEO content is typically evaluated on search engine results page (SERP) rankings and improved rankings for the backlinks embedded in the content, whereas high-quality gated content like whitepapers or bespoke reports are usually evaluated on downloads or leads generated.

It reduces churn, confusion, and duplication of work

When everyone has visibility into what’s planned, what’s in progress, and what’s been published, channel owners can amplify this content more effectively, and content teams can focus on producing and optimizing higher-quality content.

12 steps to creating an effective content marketing plan

Follow this proven 12-step framework used by high-performing marketing teams to harness great content ideas into an established content marketing plan that drives your content strategy forward.

1. Define your business and marketing objectives

Start by clarifying what the business is trying to achieve—revenue growth, expansion, drive interest in a new product, or increase brand visibility in a new market. These objectives shape your content priorities and KPIs.

2. Clarify your target audiences

Identify your primary and secondary audiences, their needs, behaviors, and motivations. This includes demographics, buyer personas, customer journeys, and information gaps you can solve through content.

3. Map your customer journey

Good content centers the customer, speaking directly to their pain points and highlighting how your product is a solution to them. An established customer journey is the roadmap for that content.

Determine what content helps buyers move through the marketing funnel, through awareness, consideration, decision, and post-purchase. A customer journey map helps ensure you create valuable content that meets customers where they are, whether they’re existing customers engaging with you already or potential customers just discovering what you’re all about through a brand awareness campaign.

4. Conduct a content audit

Review all existing content to identify strengths, gaps, outdated assets, and repurposing opportunities. A good audit saves significant time and helps avoid duplicate work. For example, you will likely realize you don’t always have to create completely new content from scratch, but rather optimize, update, and repurpose what you already published on your blog or product landing pages.

5. Analyze your competitors’ content

Evaluate how competitors use different types of content, such as blog posts, social media, video, SEO, thought leadership pieces, infographics, and customer stories. Identify opportunities to differentiate—or outperform them—through unique content formats and messaging.

6. Choose your content themes and pillars

Organize your plan between three and five core message pillars. These themes help guide editorial planning and ensure content ladders up to brand and product messaging.

7. Select your content formats and channels

Blog posts, newsletters, long-form guides, case studies, gated assets, social posts, videos, webinars, and podcasts all serve different purposes. Choose the formats that support your goals and available resources. Furthermore, different marketing channels serve different purposes, so the content for each of them shouldn’t be created equal—the content for an email newsletter to prospects will be significantly different from the bite-size content published on social media platforms, even if they are based on the same content piece. Consult early and often with channel owners, using templates or marketing plan examples for additional channel-planning guidance.

8. Build your content calendar

A content calendar helps you schedule content production and publication across all channels. It also gives stakeholders visibility into priorities and progress.

Learning how to create a content calendar goes beyond putting items on a calendar. Review this in-depth guide and this library of editorial calendar templates to get started.

9. Establish workflows and approval processes

Define who does what, when, and how. Typical workflows include writing the brief, drafting/creating the piece, editing with stakeholders, design, final review and QA, and publishing. Clear workflows help teams avoid bottlenecks and improve consistency.

10. Assign ownership and responsibilities

Document roles across the content lifecycle, including writers, editors, designers, product marketers, social media managers, SEO partners, and any other stakeholders involved in each project. Accountability ensures smooth execution.

11. Set KPIs and measurement frameworks

Choose metrics aligned to your objectives: SERP ranking, traffic, engagement, conversion rates, pipeline, revenue influence, brand lift, or customer activation. Build reporting dashboards to track performance over time, across channels. The same content piece may perform differently across marketing channels, and a more holistic picture of cross-channel performance helps teams make better content.

12. Revisit, refine, and optimize the plan regularly

Content strategy isn’t static, nor are the themes and deliverables in the content plan. Review performance monthly or quarterly, gather stakeholder feedback, and adjust based on market changes, internal priorities, or audience behavior.

Content marketing planning challenges

Even experienced content teams encounter obstacles. Common challenges include:

Too many requests, too few resources

Content teams often face high demand from sales, product, leadership, and growth teams. A plan helps filter requests through strategic priorities.

Lack of centralized visibility

If briefs, calendars, approvals, and assets live in different tools, misalignment is inevitable. A unified system improves efficiency.

Shifting priorities

New product launches, competitive moves, or market changes can derail plans. Agile planning processes help teams adapt without chaos.

Poor handoffs between teams

Breakdowns often occur between writers, designers, PMMs, and reviewers. Clearly defined workflows and SLAs help maintain quality and speed.

Difficulty measuring impact

Many teams struggle to unify data from web analytics platforms, such as Google Analytics, the company’s CRM of record, social channels like LinkedIn or TikTok, and lifecycle marketing platforms. A measurement framework and aligned martech stack helps solve this.

Sample content marketing plan

Below is an example of what a simplified content marketing plan could look like. Your template can be more detailed or customized depending on your organization’s needs.

1. Business objective

Increase qualified pipeline for the enterprise segment by 20% in FY26.

2. Content goals

3. Target audiences

4. Core content pillars

5. Quarterly content roadmap

Q1: Foundational SEO content, new webinar series, product launch assets
Q2: Case studies, gated guide, social engagement series
Q3: Industry report, pillar-based blog cluster, refreshed nurture sequences
Q4: Year-in-review content, event promotion assets, video series

6. Content formats

Blog posts, gated guides, customer stories, social content, paid campaigns, webinars, emails, video.

7. Publishing cadence

8. KPIs

Common content KPIs include organic traffic, engagement rate, pipeline influence, MQL volume, conversion rate, customer activation.

Build a content marketing plan with Airtable

Airtable helps content teams centralize their entire planning and production process—from strategy to execution to measurement. Rather than stitching together briefs, calendars, assets, and approvals across multiple tools, Airtable gives teams a single source of truth for:

And with built-in AI, you can connect your content roadmap to real-time production, reduce bottlenecks, and adapt plans as priorities shift.

Explore how Airtable supports marketing organizations of all sizes.