With so many roles, projects involved, and moving pieces across the marketing, sales, and product development teams, an up to date and clearly defined content calendar is imperative.
What exactly is a content calendar?
- A content calendar serves as a framework for all ideas, activities, and plans throughout an organization.
- It is a living document of content activities, resources, and updates to be published on a company’s websites and/or across all social media sites.
- It is a written schedule of what, when, where, and how to produce and post content for collaboration among team members.
How valuable is a content calendar for your team?
- Publish content on agreed-upon hours, days, and time zones on a regular basis
- Keeps you organized and on track throughout busy workdays
- Prevent your content from stagnating, getting repetitive, or being overly random
- Uphold your brand image and strengthen your online authority
- Enhance brand awareness and audience engagement
What can be found within a content calendar?
A content calendar serves as an organization’s locker room of ideas, concepts, strategies, etc. that push toward achieving various business objectives. It can be as detailed as one would like to include the following:
- List of topics, titles, and posts
- Theme for a specific campaign
- Content type and/or format – blogs, web copy, infographics, images, videos, etc.
- Assigned writer, editor, and publisher
- Channels the content will be posted on
- Schedule for posting – which hour of the day, what day of the week, how often to publish and share posts
Incorporating all these elements will help to create a purposeful, functional, and effective content calendar that will help the content team stay productive, focused, and on track. At the end of the day, the goal is to turn these raw data into actionable campaigns to set up your brand for long-term growth and success.
How to build a content calendar in five easy steps:
- Conceptualize envisioned content
Research and gather ideas on content type and format that is the best representation of the brand persona in the industry niche an organization belongs to. - Plan in advance
Schedule blogs, vlogs, and other information to fill the content calendar for at least a month ahead and up to six months in advance, if possible. - Do content evaluation
Make sure that the kind of content being published resonates with the brand’s unique voice and identity that will eventually lead to audience engagement, quality traffic, and high conversions. - Tweak accordingly
Consider the latest trends, tools, and technologies that can make for an awesome website content and digital presence. And if there’s something within the content calendar that is not working out as expected, never hesitate to polish it up and replace with something better. - Don’t forget your existing content
Check content inventory first because there must be something there that can be repurposed, can efficiently fill in the gaps in the content calendar, or can be remixed to reach specific business objectives.
Top Three Tips to Organize and Maintain a Fully Functioning Content Calendar
- Start off with the basics and slowly build it for optimum functionality. Prioritize what needs to be done first and then work your way through to the rest to add essential meat and bones to your content calendar.
- Set monthly or quarterly goals to accomplish. Whether it is publishing different types of content to represent your brand or to gain a foothold on different platforms, all of these bring your content marketing strategy to new heights and achieve business goals.
- Implement the 75/25 rule. It might seem counterproductive but leaving 25 percent of your schedule blank will buy everyone on the team time when sh*t happens. Flexibility doesn’t mean foregoing accountability – it’s just one way of setting realistic expectations.
Do you need more insights on how a content calendar should look like, what should be included in it, and why you should handle it the way it should be? ClinkIT Digital can help create a customized content calendar for you or plan a comprehensive content marketing strategy for your team. Contact us today.
