Incorporating content is essential to ensure the success of your business as it creates brand awareness, encourages consumer engagement, and is excellent for your SEO. Knowing all this, you would not be crazy to get the ball rolling on some good quality, regular content for your onsite blogs and social media channels.
But before you start creating content, develop a content calendar and plan your content for all platforms for a month or at least a few weeks at a time. Your content calendar can be straightforward, such as an Excel spreadsheet or Google document, or a handwritten desk planner, or it can be a unique application if you’re tech-savvy.
Content marketing is critical to your marketing strategy and your brand’s ability to attract and convert your target customers. But content marketing is not a simple discipline. There are many aspects to this, including centrally planning, developing, and publishing your content through various channels. A content calendar is the best tool you can use to keep it organized.
If you are not yet convinced that you need a contact calendar as part of your marketing strategy, read on and let us convince you!
1. Outlining is Important
Instead of focusing on quick posts and wins, content calendars help you focus on a long-term strategy. Organizing the structure of a content calendar and determining content columns helps you identify the type of content and when it needs to be posted.
Your business uses multiple social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, and it is essential to recognize that each platform serves a different purpose. Creating your content calendar and keeping in mind all platforms helps you present your content differently to that channel’s audience.
Keep in mind that content is meant to serve as a calendar guide, not a rule. Content can be prearranged and planned, but pop-up, live, and user-generated content must be sprinkled in as it arises. Social media aims to be social, and users engage most with timely, relevant content.
2. Map out your Content Resources
Every content creator has experienced that sinking feeling of time frame with no explicit content available to fill the gaps. A content calendar will enable your internal team and potentially your external team of content producers – writers, designers, illustrators, photographers, and videographers – to be ready to produce engaging content without fear of missing a deadline.
3. Stay on Schedule
Another significant benefit of a content calendar is that it keeps you on a schedule. A good marketer stays busy, and sometimes when extensive campaigns and promotions are happening, things like blog posts are easy to slide through the cracks. A content calendar sets the expectation and can help a marketer or marketing team stay focused and publish content consistently.
4. Time Saver
While this point is very self-explanatory, content calendars help marketers plan content ahead of time, indicate which assets are needed for execution, and determine when that content will go live. It saves a lot of time during the week because everything is pre-determined. Thus you can be more efficient and productive.
5. Deeper Customer Understanding
Freeing up more time, the content calendar will allow for increased success and more targeted pieces that your audience wants to see. The structure provided by the content calendar is also a means of tracking. Do you notice the pattern? Does the content that goes live on Monday do better than any other day? It will help marketers fix their strategy by setting optimal post times, defining the target audience more, and confirming which type of content is more engaging. At the end of the day, it will determine what is working and what is not, so marketers can focus efforts on duplicating the campaigns that are producing results.
6. Perfect for Brainstorming
When you begin to organize your content topics with your team, chances are some of you will have a surge of creativity that will generate new ideas.
By monitoring and analyzing your audience engagement and feedback, you will gain valuable insights into their preferences, which can be applied later to your content strategy and adjust accordingly.
7. Be Relevant
When you plan your social media content in advance, you get the benefit of receiving feedback from your team. Your calendar also can be shared for further input, so you can ensure that you are putting in the best and most relevant social media posts to achieve both your firm’s business development and marketing goals.
Team members from different dept. can use their unique knowledge sets to inform the choices you make on each platform. For example, your business development team can add their insights on current trends and client pain points to ensure what is happening in your post’s market.
Staying connected to the market and up-to-date on what is essential to potential buyers will help you stay relevant and increase your ability to close the sale.
8. You won’t Have to Create Content on the Go
Creating content on the go is stressful and puts a lot of pressure on your team because they are constantly working on tight, daily deadlines. It can also reduce your creativity when you are forced to create content because it has to be done and not because they are motivated to create it. Instead, use your content calendar to develop your content days, if not weeks, in advance. There is nothing worse than realizing that this is prime time on Instagram and you have nothing to post!
Conclusion
Creating content is really fun, but if you want to do it correctly, you won’t shy away from an ad hoc, on-the-go approach. On the day you are about to write your next blog post, brainstorming on some ideas will not only reduce it. Furthermore, it can harm your content marketing in the long run.
The key to success lies in aligning each part of your content with your overall branding and marketing strategy, as well as creating a consistent schedule, and for that, you need a detailed and itemized content calendar.
Maybe this all sounds like a lot of work, but once you’re around it, you’ll really save yourself (and your team) a lot of time, energy, and trouble. A content calendar can do wonders for developing your blog, producing high-quality content, and delivering it successfully.