For your company’s branding and messaging efforts, learning how to develop a content calendar is critical. It not only brings together all of the topics you wish to discuss and allows you to share them with your team. It also establishes a framework for regularly planning, scheduling, and writing content.
Creating Content Based On A Calendar
Instead of following a list, editorial content should be scheduled using a calendar system. Let’s go over the advantages:
Content can be planned around crucial anniversaries, such as important days throughout the year or upcoming marketing events.
You can create material in little chunks around various themes — Keep track of what topics you cover on a regular basis and what topics you could expand on – and make time for it.
Everyone is aware of the situation — A content calendar for marketing keeps your team and other departments up to date on what you’re working on.
It’s a lot easier to keep track of the content creation process if you give yourself and your team ample lead time to post the content on time.
The most important thing to remember when creating a marketing content calendar is to keep to it and produce on a regular basis. That isn’t to say you can’t change topics or themes, but sticking to a schedule of recurring topics ensures a consistent flow of content creation — otherwise, the calendar won’t work. What Is A Content Calendar And How Do I Make One?
Isn’t it easier said than done? However, if you consider it, the subject you want to write about is all around you! Here’s how you can create content without having to start from scratch.
- Examine your current content assets. Yes, you read that correctly: repurpose. The first place you should look is here. Return to your blogs, company presentation materials, published research, and any webinars, podcasts, or videos that you’ve created. Consider your material to be reusable assets that can be dismantled, reorganized, rewritten, and updated.
- You might be able to extract four or five bits of material from your most recent podcast, or significant sections of a whitepaper, and turn them into a highly readable blog or series of infographics.
- Make core products out of content. Maybe you’ve started publishing quarterly digests or organizing the odd online event, such as a training class, webinar, or forum. Why not do it on a more frequent basis? Scheduling these goods on a regular basis will help you meet your content objectives and will help you provide these activities with your company’s own unique brand identity.
- Plan ahead of time and align your calendar with your other marketing initiatives. Your editorial schedule is a living document that evolves and grows in response to how well you execute your bigger marketing strategy. It should be in sync with your social media marketing strategy (which, of course, has its own schedule), email newsletter service, and even paid media efforts.
- To evaluate the success of your content, have post-mortem sessions. Review your content statistics and determine which content performed best during your content marketing planning meetings. Perhaps you’d like to update or amend any previously published content, or you’d like to expand on a popular topic. It’s up to you whether you improve your meta content, the tone of your content, or the length of your articles; let the facts lead you.
7 Things to Include in Your Content Calendar
Always double-check that your content calendar contains all of the necessary information. Here’s what you should put in it:
- Publication Date: The date on which your work is made available to the general audience.
- Content Type: Is it a blog, a podcast, an infographic, or a white paper, for example? Sort it out.
- Writer and Due Date: The deadline for creating this content, as well as who is responsible for creating it.
- Proposed title or topic: a brief description of the subject.
- Specifics: What is contained within the content; essential points or phrases
Keywords: 6 Experiment with your SEO strategy to uncover keywords that can help your content rank higher.
- Your Action Item: Make them aware of a special deal or direct them to a landing page.
Remember to use pre-defined brand personas to target the proper audience and to structure your content around SEO best practices. Content marketing can help you improve your SEO efforts — and vice versa. The two are inextricably linked. Good keyword research is almost as crucial as a well-thought-out content strategy. A Word on Content Calendars for Social Media
Social media material is a component of your overall content development process, but because it is updated at a much faster rate, it has its own calendar. The information for each content type is comparable to what we’ve already discussed.
Remember to categorise your social media postings by genre, such as infographics, links to blog entries, evergreen posts, promotions, videos, and so on. Template for Your Content Calendar
Content calendar templates are simple to create; there are numerous resources available on the internet. They’re simple to create on an Excel sheet, colour code, and categorise based on the content you intend to publish.
It’s more important to stick to a system that works for you. Here are a few of your finest alternatives.
An App for Calendars
Even if it’s a little old-fashioned, a paper calendar or even Google Calendar can help you stay organised. The disadvantage of utilising a calendar is that you can’t keep track of all process elements as quickly, which means you’ll typically end up using another document and spending time updating it as well.
Spreadsheets can be created in Excel, Google Sheets, or any other spreadsheet programme.
This is arguably the simplest way to collect and examine all of your information at a glance – and you can sync this information into a calendar app with a little code.
Collaboration-based systems, such as Kanban boards like Trello or interactive project management software like Slack, are very popular. Visual tasking using color-coded boards is popular with apps like Trello, which serves as the foundation for social media management apps like Buffer. Slack fosters communication synergy and is simple to use on the go.
Personalize And Customize
It’s critical to design an easy-to-understand framework for the content calendar template. Review and categorize content categories; fine-tune content themes; reschedule if needed. It’s time to put the strategy into action once it’s been laid out.