The Three P’s of Content Marketing – Planning, Production, and Promotion – form the foundation of any successful content marketing approach. These three elements work together to ensure your content efforts are strategic, consistent, and effective at reaching your target audience.
Planning is where everything begins. This involves identifying your target audience, understanding their pain points, and setting clear, measurable goals for your content. Without proper planning, you’re essentially creating content in a vacuum. What we typically see at Ronin is that businesses often skip this crucial first step and jump straight into content creation. They know they need blog posts or social media content, but they haven’t defined who they’re talking to or what they want to achieve.
Effective planning means developing detailed buyer personas, conducting competitor analysis, and mapping your content to different stages of the customer journey. You’ll also need to establish your content calendar, decide on publishing frequency, and determine which topics will resonate most with your audience. Studies indicate that companies with documented content strategies are significantly more effective than those winging it.
Production focuses on the actual creation process – using the right tools, maintaining brand consistency, and ensuring quality across all your content formats. This isn’t just about writing blog posts; it covers everything from video creation to infographic design, podcast production to social media graphics. The key here is developing systems and standards that ensure every piece of content reflects your brand voice and meets your quality benchmarks.
Our experience shows that production becomes much smoother when you have clear style guides, content templates, and approval processes in place. For social media marketing, especially, consistency in tone, visual elements, and posting schedule makes a massive difference in audience engagement.
Promotion is often the most overlooked element, yet it’s absolutely critical. Creating great content means nothing if nobody sees it. Promotion involves sharing your content through the right distribution channels at optimal times. This includes your owned channels (website, email list), earned channels (PR, influencer partnerships), and paid channels (advertising, boosted posts).
What’s become clear to us at Ronin is that many Australian business owners spend 80% of their time on production and only 20% on promotion. Marketing research suggests this should actually be flipped – successful content marketing typically involves substantial promotional effort to amplify reach and engagement.
