How to Create an Effective Content Marketing Calendar?
All brands today are leveraging digital marketing to boost their business. And it has been doing wonders for them. Content marketing is an essential branch of digital marketing. It plays a critical role in building your brand’s image and connecting with your audience seamlessly.
However, the most challenging task in content marketing is to be consistent. No matter how excellent the content quality is, consistency is essential as it will help you stay visible. This visibility, in turn, will help your customers get the assurance and comfort that, as a brand, you value and care for them.
To keep your audience engaged, you need to have a well-prepared content marketing calendar. This calendar will help you and your team plan all the required content accordingly and deliver messages to your customers in a consistent manner.
Let’s dive deep and understand everything about a content marketing calendar.
What is a Content Marketing Calendar?
A content marketing calendar is a detailed, well-written, and well-planned schedule that depicts which platform the content should be published on and the time and date when it should be published. The calendar also makes sure that you plan the content for a specific period and connect all the different pieces of content to provide collective value-add information. Here is a sample content marketing calendar template:
An essential aspect of an effective content marketing strategy is to keep the content relevant and consistent. So, planning ahead of time for all your content marketing efforts, from publishing promotional blogs to posting social media posts, will ensure you do your best on these two aspects.
The primary research should cover identifying the social media platform their target audience is most active on. You can then devise a content calendar and post content to achieve your marketing goals.
Importance of Content Calendars
Now that you know what a content calendar is, you must know the importance of having a content calendar. Content marketing can be a great weapon to have in your arsenal if you make sure to anticipate and bridge all the cracks that can crop up while executing it. One of the best ways to fill these gaps is designing a content calendar that will lead you in the right direction. This is especially helpful when you are trying to blend various marketing strategies to boost your business..
Let’s take a look at three popular benefits of a content calendar:
- Keep Content Organized
The goal of creating any content is to generate maximum interaction between the customer and the content. Having a content calendar ensures you accomplish all your content goals at the right speed. Let’s say you have created an excellent article for friendship day, and you plan on repurposing that article to create multiple posts for multiple platforms.
Now, if you miss out on publishing the article (and the supported content) on that day, the content will lose its relevance. At the same time, you will miss out on an excellent opportunity to connect with your audience. A content calendar makes sure that you plan, organize, and segregate all your content and its relevant platform information into days and weeks months in advance, ensuring nothing gets overlooked and everything goes as planned.
- Collaboration Between Teams
The most effective way to eliminate any errors is through proper communication. Communication is the most vital tool for a company’s success, and the content marketing team must use it effectively. Make sure the content writers, graphics designers, webmaster, and team members are on the same page. Connecting the entire team via a content calendar will help the company achieve its marketing goals and ensure everyone gets the required information in one place and at the right time. Having everyone in the exact location also makes the delegation process much more straightforward, as all members will have a clear idea of their responsibilities.
- Don’t Miss Out on Special Days
Missing out on posting on special days allows your competitors to go one-up on you. A content calendar is designed keeping in mind all special days, and it ensures you don’t miss out on posting relevant content on these special days.
A content calendar is also an important tool that motivates you to post excellent quality, unique, and relevant content every day, including on special days. A significant benefit of a content calendar is that you have access to all the previously published content. This helps to repurpose and modify the content in the future. This also saves you from creating low-quality, last-minute content to stay visible.
How to Create a Content Marketing Calendar?
Most marketers create a content calendar for an entire month. You also can choose to create your calendar on a weekly, bi-monthly, or quarterly basis. Let’s now look at some best practices that can be followed to create a simple yet effective content calendar.
- Choose the Right Tool
It is always great to include as many details as possible in a content calendar. Based on the level of details you plan to embed in it, you can choose a platform to prepare it that is best aligned with your needs. Most marketers choose Google Sheets as the base to create a content calendar template as it is easy to share, edit and provide access. Google Sheets also lets you create multiple tabs, allowing you to organize content based on types or the publishing platform. Some other popular tools include Microsoft Excel, Loomly, and Google Calendar.
- Choose the Right Content Mix
Pick the right set of content types that will work best for your business. Analyzing and researching your competitors closely will help you pick the content types that will work for your business. Do not keep posting the same type of content all the time, as you may miss out on reaching people who read different types of content. Also, the kind of content you choose should be ideal for your target audience. For example, it wouldn’t make sense to develop content for Instagram when most of your target audience is present on Facebook.
- Choose the Perfect Frequency
As we have seen previously, any post loses its sheen and relevance if it doesn’t reach your target audience. You should therefore find out when your target audience is active on different platforms. This helps you ensure you aren’t spamming your audience with huge quantities of meaningless content. Tracking user patterns is a must for maximum audience engagement.
- Leverage Content on Special Days
Apart from posting daily content, it would help if you brainstormed with your team to develop creative content ideas that can be posted on special days. These posts will significantly impact your business as they help you stay connected with your audience. It is also recommended to have a separate tab in the calendar to plan and design content for these days.
- Keep an Eye on Performance
Content marketing does not end with planning and building content as per the content calendar. A marketer must also keep a vigilant eye on how the content is doing by analyzing various aspects using the relevant analytics. This data will help marketers fill any gaps in execution, make sure all content reaches the right audience, and record the necessary engagement as planned.
If things are going south, you should immediately make the necessary changes based on the data collected. You should either alter the type of content or the frequency of posting. These changes must reflect in your content calendar to make it more effective.
Components of a Content Calendar
The best content marketing calendar template is never too complicated. It is easy to understand, updateable, and flexible for future optimization. Here is a list of a few must-have components for your content calendar:
- Content title
- Content-type
- Date of completion
- Publishing date
- Keywords (primary & secondary)
- Meta description
- CTA
- Publishing platforms
- Status
Conclusion
The content calendar is a vital asset to your content marketing strategy. The visibility of your brand and the audience engagement with your posts depends on your content’s consistency. There are a lot of factors that come into play when building content. Without a proper plan or schedule, it is challenging to get well-prepared content, graphics, and quality checks in the stipulated time. Alternatively, please get the help of experts to frame your content calendar and execute it flawlessly.
