The core content strategy defines what content you will create and how you will use content to achieve your objectives and meet your user needs. The good thing is that, by now, you should already have an idea of what your core content strategy will be. If you're still not sure, go back to user-research.

(Halvorson, Rach, & Cancilla, 2012, p. 29)

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Structure

What is the information prioritization, organization, formatting?

• Global information architecture 
• Navigation items 
• List of pages 
• List of content (images, texts) 
• Links between pages 

(Cable, Cable, & Caddick, 2011, p. 5)

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Substance

What do we want to communicate?

Great content needs to engage, inform, be well-written and intuitively organized (Halvorson et al., 2012).

Content first. Always. And keep in mind that content is useless unless it does one or both of the following: 

• Supports a key business objective 
• Fulfills your users’ needs
  
  (Halvorson, Rach, & Cancilla, 2012)

For your content planning, focus on the right contents. A bowl of mac & cheese with a peanut butter jelly sandwich is still (to this day) the favorite meal of an hungry kid. No need to prepare beef wellington for vegetarians. By selecting the right contents, you will find out that your website becomes easier to manage, more user-friendly and easier to reference on search engines (Halvorson et al., 2012).

The goal here is to balance your content, your product and your users.

(Nichols & Chesnut, 2014, p. 113)

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Alright. That being said, here's what you need to plan:

• Audience: Who are you trying to reach? Create personas and user stories. 
• Messaging: What do you want your users to remember? Create a communication axis. 
• Topics: Audience + Messaging = Topics. Create content templates for each. You will use that for the next remaining points. 
• Purpose: What's the purpose for each piece of content? 
• SEO Strategy: What should be the keywords? 
• Voice and tone: What tone of voice do you need to use with this audience you're trying to reach? 
• Sources: Where will your content come from?

(Halvorson et al., 2012)

Here's an example of template you can use for planning your content: 

(Cable, Cable, & Caddick, 2011, p. 4)

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Reference

 by Kristina Halvorson, Melissa Rach, and Sarah Cancilla

by Steve Cable and Richard Caddick