Content is critical in all aspects of your digital marketing. Without quality content published regularly, you can’t effectively tell your brand story. The best way to ensure that you get coverage of all topics related to your business and relevant to your audiences is to create a dedicated and relevant plan for publishing. In this blog, we’ll dive into the benefits of a content calendar and discuss how to create an effective calendar for your business.
Benefits of a Content Calendar
Effective use of a content calendar allows you to plan ahead for your content creation needs. By mapping out your content strategy in advance, you’ll know what content needs to be created, including blog posts, social media posts, emails and additional pieces of premium content needed for each campaign.
In addition to campaign-specific content, you can ensure that you’re getting an appropriate mix of content spread at an adequate pace. There are few things more off-putting to an audience than being barraged by a sudden burst of content, especially if that burst of content is followed by a long silence. Additionally, regularly publishing original content to your website is an important factor for SEO.
Pace your content in a way that is ideal for both your audiences and for search engines. You’ll also need to be prepared to make adjustments along the way to reap the full benefits of a content calendar.
How to Create a Content Calendar
Building a powerful content calendar starts with a clear understanding of your audiences. Begin by developing buyer personas that align with your ideal customers based on your business objectives. With a clear understanding of your audiences, you can ideate topics that will catch their interest, generate traffic to your site and establish your brand’s expertise.
With topics in hand, you’re ready to begin building your content calendar. In addition to matching topics to post dates, be sure to include the content type, syndication channels, any related links that should be included in the content and the campaign connected to the content, if applicable.
Be sure to also include an area in your content calendar that indicates the status of content creation for each piece in your content calendar, allowing you and your team to keep track of the work that’s been done and what still needs to be assigned out.
Make sure that whatever cadence you choose for content publishing is realistic. Don’t commit to writing four blogs a week if you can’t keep that pace for a longer period. While most sites recommend making as many as multiple posts a day, quality is more important than quantity. The most successful content calendars are those that account for your team’s expertise and their capacity to create content.
Make sure that your calendar is shareable and can be easily seen and edited by all team members and stakeholders. If you’re using a marketing automation platform, you can centrally plan and manage your content calendar within the platform, including direct publishing to social media channels, email marketing deployment and a regular cadence for your blog.
For more information on how to create a content calendar, or to find out more about how marketing automation can help streamline your content creation, contact us or get a demo today.
