Social media has become an integral component of most marketing strategies. With so many social media channels at our fingertips, it’s crucial to stay organized and plan when and what you will share on each platform. Have you ever thought about what most parties and social media have in common? Planning! And although we might not be able to help you with your next party, we have the perfect solution for planning your next social media marketing campaign — using a content calendar! To get started, here’s everything you need to know about content calendars and why they’re so important to staying organized.
What Exactly Is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar (sometimes known as an “editorial calendar”) is a written schedule that outlines when and where you intend to publish new content. Upcoming content, status updates, planned promotional activity, collaborations, and revisions to existing material amongst others are common features of content calendars.
Why Are Content Calendars Necessary?
If your blog is only a pastime where you post occasionally, you probably don’t need a content schedule. However, if you’re using content marketing to promote your business, maintaining a content calendar can be great.
Content marketing and content calendars
Content calendars can benefit your content marketing strategy in different ways:
To begin, a content calendar guarantees that all your content-related duties are completed. If your content creation schedule is unorganized, in some cases you might forget to post, or you’ll post less frequently and fail to update old articles. In other words, a calendar ensures that nothing slips through the gaps.
A calendar facilitates collaboration with your team (and partners). If you have a one-person blog, you might not even need a content calendar. If, on the other hand, workers and contractors contribute to your content, you’ll need something to keep everyone on the same page.
Also, a content calendar provides a high-level overview of your forthcoming activities.
For example, we use our schedule to ensure that we don’t publish two guides on the same topic at the same time. We can visualize our complete marketing strategy for several months in this manner.
Create timely content
It is possible that you may forget to write content about important occasions if you don’t have a content calendar to remind you. A content calendar can help you develop content that resonates with your audience.
How to create a content calendar
Choose which channels and platforms to focus on.
Are you making a content calendar just for your blog? Or are you looking for something to assist you prepare content for social media and guest publications?
Begin by explicitly outlining the channels and platforms you intend to prioritize in your calendar. This will assist you in categorizing your calendar items with proper labels, making them easier to track.
Platforms are also important.
The platform hosts your content calendar, and the most crucial thing is that it works for you. However, content marketing teams face a different set of challenges. When you work with a team to generate content, you can have a small or large group of people modifying a piece of content before it goes public. As a result, it’s vital that everyone can view the status of each post.
And this isn’t simply useful for content marketing and SEO teams. It’s also a good way to share fresh information with each team member in your company.
Include Promotional items and activities
Promotional items and activities are the second most crucial component of your content calendar.
Promotional items are exactly what they imply: they are how you intend to market your content. When are you going to post it on Facebook? Do you have a podcast interview or summit coming up? Will you send a newsletter to your email subscribers? Those are marketing actions for your content calendar.
Promotional activities do not have to be scheduled separately from editorial content.
However, it’s a good idea to label or color-code them differently so you can easily distinguish them.
Document Ideas for the Future
This is a list of potential future content ideas that you are not currently working on. You can utilize a “brain dump” of these ideas to avoid losing them (or allowing them to distract you from content that is nearly ready to go).
Choose a Content Calendar Tool.
There are tools available to help you create, manage, and collaborate on your content schedule.
The tools you choose will depend on how much content you produce and the size of your team.
Here are some excellent tools for creating a calendar:
- Notion: a one-stop shop for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
2. Google Sheets: this is most likely the most common alternative for most individuals and small organizations. Free and useful for collaboration, but it may require effort to set up.
3. Google Calendar: If you’re a one-person operation, Google Calendar may suffice.
4. Loomly: contains interactive guidance for producing blog entries, automatic social media posts, and other features.
5. WordPress Editorial Calendar plugin: easy, drag-and-drop, and free. However, it is dependent on when you have posts planned in WordPress — which may not be suitable for everyone.
6.Basecamp, Trello, Slack, and Asana: While these three were created as project management and communication tools rather than content calendars, they may all be used for task management and with a bit of creativity they can be used as content calendars.
Review Your Existing Content Strategy
Next, examine the content you already have on your blog and social media channels. Determine what works and what doesn’t depending on how people interact with it. This will help you decide which content topics, formats, and categories to prioritize in your calendar.
Determine which types of content you should make more of and which you should avoid in the future. Keep track of your discoveries to help guide your content creation process. Look for possibilities to repurpose or adapt your existing content as well.
For example, if a blog post gained a lot of traction but now contains outdated material, consider revising the information to bring it up to date.
Consider Frequency and Timing
Another critical stage is to choose how frequently you will publish your content. Determine whether you want to update your blog with new information every day or at least once a week. If you’re unclear about the best frequency for you, go to your competitors to see what works for them. How frequently do they publish new blog posts? How many social media posts do they publish each day?
In addition, plan out appropriate posting times for both your blog articles and social media content. This will assist you in optimizing your publishing schedule in order to increase visibility and interaction. Also, utilize existing analytics reports to see which days of the week works best with your audience. And, if you plan your calendar around these times, you can even schedule your content to go out automatically at the right time.
Organisation is Key
A content calendar, in the correct format and approach, may make a significant impact in planning your content marketing activities. It allows you to be consistent while also making sure you don’t miss out on important times and opportunities. Furthermore, it directs your content generation efforts to line with your content marketing objectives, paving the road for long-term success.
