Ever wanted to create a content calendar? Here are some tips to guide you
A content calendar will help you plan, create and organize the content you intend to issue each month, and can be vital in ensuring your content team stays on track.
Whether you’re a small or medium business owner, content plays a major role in showcasing your business and brand. High-quality content helps you establish yourself as an expert in your field and you can deliver great value to your readers or viewers.
Benefits of using a content calendar:
Every business has different needs when it comes to creating content. Some businesses publish blogs, others post to YouTube. Some do both! Either way, it’s beneficial to know what you want to post when.
Content calendars are particularly helpful when it comes to:
- Planning your daily, weekly and monthly content posting
- Remembering key dates meetings, seminars, training etc. that you wish to promote
- Allowing enough time to create content (no more last-minute blog writing or vlogging!)
Steps to creating a great content calendar
Firstly, before you begin, we will let you in on this… making a content calendar doesn’t happen in just a few simple steps or a few minutes. Instead, you’ll need to put energy and lots of time into creating your calendar tailored to your business.
Everything will go a lot smoother once the initial set up phase is completed, because it’s just a matter of updating your schedule instead of creating it from scratch.
Content calendar tools
There are various tools to help you manage and use your content calendar. These tools include but are not limited to:
- Google sheets
- MS Excel
- Google calendar
- Trello
Gather your ideas
As a proactive business owner, you already have many plans and goals as well as a continued vision for the success of your business. The important part of the beginning is to gather everything together in a thorough brainstorm. In this way, you can lay out every idea on the table and have them ready to add to your calendar.
Brainstorm your content ideas:
- What are the needs of my customers?
- What do my customers find problematic in my business?
- Do I understand and action of my brand’s voice?
- Do the people working in my business know what the company and brand stand for?
- Are there any case studies in the past that I could repurpose into smaller articles to post?
- What existing content do I have?
- How can I make my existing and new content better?
Plan for the future
The purpose of a content calendar is to plan ahead with everything. For this reason, it’s logic to plan a calendar that covers your events for 6 to 12 months. This will simplify your tasks during the months to come, as you’ll be able to tackle meetings, posting, promotions, marketing, and lots more way ahead of time.
Does your content work with your brand?
Does your content align with your core message or is it simply drifting off topic? People don’t like being confused, this poses a risk of losing them long before they even become a warm lead or paying customer. When you don’t stay with your niche and brand, you could also lose current paying customers.
Will your audience be enticed to engage?
Does your content engage your audience? If you can get it right to engage your audience through your content, you can then be certain that you’re doing something right. This will add positively to the sales and conversions in future. Remember that engaging your audience takes more than great content; it also takes “pushing” with a CTA of some sort. Your audience wants something interesting, otherwise, they won’t be bothered to watch, let alone read.
Is it optimized?
A very important thing to bear in mind is whether your content is optimized for search engines (SEO) as well as social media. Optimization goes hand-in-hand with engaging your audience because once viewers find your content online, you should make sure that they are able to like and share it. Spreading the word about your brand, services, and, products is very important, thus you need to make it shareable.
Publish and monitor the progress
After you’ve planned your content for the year, you can publish it effortlessly… Or maybe not entirely effortlessly as this is only one of many steps. You still have to put time and effort into your content creation that is; despite that, you already have the dates and topics sorted out. The next step is to analyze the progress because this is the only way you’ll be able to find out how your audience is responding to your content. Because there are several tools you could use to help gather data, it’ll also help you find out which viewers are new leads and who is not.
Additional benefits of using a content calendar
Have a “bird’s-eye view on all your departments”
Sometimes it’s hard to get a handle on all your departments when you’re running multiple tasks and events each day. With your content calendar, you get your departments to “synchronize” because you’ll have a better hand on what’s happening in every department. You’ll know exactly where your content creation is in the pipeline.
Know what to publish throughout the year
Let’s face it, when you haven’t planned your content schedule for the whole year, it becomes harder to find topics for the months ahead. When you plan and schedule your topics for the year, it’ll make things so much better for posting and publishing work.
You’ll remember key dates
With your special dates on your calendar, you can also plan your content around these days.
Tips for great content to use throughout the year
- Make your content stand out and be creative – you want your audience to subscribe to you and not your competition
- Spark action – you need to keep your viewers motivated and coming back for more
- Remember content creation includes things like Facebook Lives and Instagram Stories.
- Answer your audiences’ questions if they have comments – this is positive for your engagement factor and it shows your audience that you actually care about their views and concerns
- Make sure your content is accurate – misinformation or inaccuracy could tarnish your reputation
- If your content is written, such as a blog, ensure that your writing is top-notch.
- Make your content attractive – always add video or pictures to your posts because people find this attractive as opposed to only words
With your content calendar in place, that doesn’t mean it’s set in stone. Since you cannot predict what the year, month, week, or day holds, you may find yourself having to adapt to a situation happening at the time, which you never anticipated when you originally created the calendar.
You can also go back and edit as needed; because that will help you to continue to manage your content.
The Takeaway
High-quality content is key for SEO ranking and providing value to your ideal customers.
Having a plan in place when creating content can simplify the process and provide much-needed structure to yourself and your staff. You can’t just post at random and expect people to be loyal fans of your brand.
It pays to be organised, because even though your
Invest the time to set up a solid content creation calendar, and it will relieve much of the pressure that comes from content creation.
A content calendar is also a great way to add to your business strategy as it helps you to meet your business goals. With increasing competition for people’s time and attention, don’t let important opportunities pass you by.
If you don’t have a content calendar in place, why not add it to your business strategy today!
