What is a Content Runway?

How a Content Runway Differs From a Content Plan

What is a content runway? For a course creator business, it’s part of the larger content plan. A content plan is a fairly easy-to-explain thing: it’s a plan for creating and sharing content. The idea is to organize your content ahead of when you need it. Your content strategy for that plan includes when and how you share it with your audience to maintain consistency.

If you’re a course creator, your content plan may have a few differences from a service provider, however. The largest difference is that you’ll have a few marked content seasons:

1. Launch Content: content during your launch
2. Content Runway: what fills your content calendar leading up to a launch
3. Evergreen Content: everything you share in the launching “off-season”

Launch content

Launch content will include the social media posts, email sequences, and sales pages you use to sell your course during a launch. Whether it’s a course live launch or an evergreen webinar launch, there will be specific content you create solely to sell this course while you’re launching. That leads us to an obvious question: what are you posting when you’re not launching?

Content runway

Think of the content runway as the content that leads up to your launch, or as pre-launch content. Just like an airplane needs a runway to take off and fly, your content needs a plan or pathway that shows you where it will go before that flight. It makes sense, even to a four-year-old, that airplanes don’t just go from standstill to flight–there’s a lead-up where they make all the fun zzzzzzsshvvvvvv noises before they hit the air.

Don’t like the airplane runway example? Then think about sitting in a movie theater, waiting for the featured movie. You arrived at the theater, maybe bought a pack of Junior Mints, then sat down and watched a few previews of movies you might like before the main event. The content runway is everything leading up to the feature.

Evergreen content

I like to think of evergreen content as all the stuff you’re posting and creating when you’re not prepping or in a launch. While it doesn’t have to be evergreen, it’s always in a state of testing to see whether it’s content you’ll keep around and lean on again and again. This is what you’re sharing in the launch “off-season” to prime your audience, engage the portion of your audience not yet ready to buy, and build upon the marketing foundation you’ve put so much time into before.

A content plan for a course creation business can and should have a careful balance between launch content, your content runway, and evergreen content.

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