Have you started planning your content marketing strategy for the new year? With a content marketing calendar, you can start putting together a plan that really works, by posting the right content at the right time. In this blog post, I'm going to show you how to create your own content marketing calendar.
What is a content marketing calendar?
Why you need a content marketing calendar
Content marketing calendars have 2 main benefits:
- They help you get better results for your business, more leads and more conversions
- They help you save (a lot!) of time
By planning your content ahead of time, you can focus on creating content that helps you achieve your goals faster. Posting for the sake of posting simply doesn't work anymore; there is too much content battling for the same people's attention, so if you want to stand out and actually get ROI from your content, then you need to create the right content and share it at the right time with the right people. Of course, there can always be changes and surprises; for example, there could be some big news in your industry that you need to talk about on your social media account or perhaps some unforeseen event shocks the world, which could mean you have to change your tactics.
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But generally, it's quite easy to keep a clear schedule. And plus, it saves you time. When you know exactly what you're going to publish and when, you don't need to constantly scramble to come up with ideas last-minute. If there are any unforeseen circumstances in your schedule that would keep you from content creation, you can be rest assured since you've planned your content in advance.
Now, let's get into the 'hows' of content marketing calendars:
What are your business and content marketing goals?
Before planning any content for your marketing calendar, make a list of your content marketing goals. What do you want to achieve?
- More leads?
- More subscribers?
- More conversions
- More traffic?
- More engagement?
- More trust?
After all, you're creating all of this content with a purpose. Think of that purpose - and be very clear about it - so that you can come up with the ideal types of content topics that will actually help you reach your goals.
When you get to that stage where you're coming up with content ideas, for each idea, ask yourself this question:
"What will this do to help me achieve my goals?"
If it doesn't help you achieve any goal, then it's most likely worth scrapping off your list and coming up with a different idea.
Create audience personas
Who forms your audience? How much do you truly know about your target audience? Who are they, specifically?
Personalization, is extremely important in the current climate. If you want your audience to actually read/see/hear your content, then you need to give them a reason to: you have to give them content they want to see.
And in order to understand what they want to see, you need to understand who they are.
Sometimes, it helps to create some imaginary audience personas. Give them a name, a face, an occupation and so on:
For example, if you were a business consultant, you might target both entrepreneurs who built a business online and small business owners with a physical store. Create personas for each of these groups to help you understand who you're targeting, and so you can then create content for each of them.
This will help you decide what platforms you should use to reach each audience group and when to publish it.
Research your niche
You can also learn a lot by following your niche and understanding what content topics your audience prefers, what content formats they use the most(video, blog post, and so on), and what channels they're on.
Most importantly, focus on what content works best, whether it's social media or blogging. What blog posts get the readers, the most shares, the most comments?
What social media updates get people to take action?
Useful tools for research:
Buzzsumo, for researching the content in your niche: which posts get the most attention on social media, the most shares, etc.
Feedly, for subscribing to different online publications and keeping track of all the latest news and other content in your industry.
See Also: Using technology in your small business
Start Planning Your Content Calendar
Now that we got all the research out of the way, here's how to start planning your content marketing calendar.
What types of content will you publish?
For example:
Put together a list of all the different types of content you plan to create this year. It's always a good idea to diversify and offer different types of content.
Important dates
Next, put together another list, this one with important dates:
- Holidays
- New products or services launches
And any other important date you can think of that might impact your content. This way, you're very clear on what days you need to create specific content.
That said, you can plan out your overall content marketing strategy for the year, for example:
- If you create any content that needs to be published regularly, like blog posts, podcasts, vlogs, and so on - you don't need to think of all the headlines and subjects, but you can schedule out the days by which they need to be published and the days by which they need to be completed.
- Bigger projects that require more work so they don't happen as note, like webinars, online courses, and e-books, so you know ahead of time when you need to get started to finish them on time
- Promotional content related to new product and service releases
- Regular email marketing campaigns and newsletters.
Conclusion
To sum it all up, there are a few things that you need to remember from this post:
- Establish your overall business goals as well as your content marketing goals.
- Think of who you're targeting: create your audience personas and understand what their needs are.
- Research your niche: understand what works and what doesn't
- Plan your content calendar: put together a list of all the different types of content you want to create this year and start creating the timeline using the free content marketing calendar.