Powerful, timely content doesn’t happen by accident.

Most good campaigns (even those that seem like ‘random’ one-offs) have a strong marketing strategy behind them. If you’re serious about getting your business or organisation engaged in social media and content marketing, then it’s important to put the right strategies in place before you start.

Having a well thought through content calendar is an important first step. Not only will it help you strategically map out your objectives for the year to come, it will also help you present your ideas to management and boards professionally, and in a context that decision makers can understand.

In this blog, I’ll work through some key tips for creating a content calendar. I’ll also address:

? Why having a content calendar is important
? Aligning your content calendar with organisational objectives
? What to include in your content calendar

What is a content calendar and why should you use one?

In essence, a content calendar is an important way of recording and organising your intended print, web, multi-media or social media content for the months ahead. A good content calendar will function as a marketing road map, which will help you produce content to meet business goals, target the right audience, and connect meaningfully with your stakeholders. A well-planned content calendar will allow also help you to:

? Coordinate publications against key events and milestones
? Manage production and promotion resources
? Build on and cross-promote existing or future content

Content calendars can be as simple as a spreadsheet, or WordPress plugin, or as sophisticated as a fully dedicated software package. Whichever you choose, the basic idea remains the same: content calendars help you breakdown your content marketing activities into manageable and achievable chunks.

Content calendars are an essential part of content marketing because they help busy marketing professionals stay on track. Regardless of how big or small your organisation is, content calendars are an excellent way to streamline your marketing and social marketing activities. Here are just three reasons why content calendars are a good idea:

1. Align content with business objectives
2. Develop the right content strategy for your organisation
3. Minimise costs with best practice content creation strategies

Many organisations find it difficult to produce timely, good quality content. Having a content calendar in place allows you to think ahead and plan out known opportunities in advance so that you can prepare content in house or have a copywriter prepare content for you.

Used wisely, a good content calendar will help you plan, create and publish content that is topical and timely for your audience.

Getting Started

If you’re thinking about creating a content calendar, one of the first things you should think about is which events, deadlines and topics are coming up in your industry in the foreseeable future. It may sound like a daunting task, but selecting a 6 – 12 month time frame and mapping out significant events is a great way of getting organised, fast.

Try mapping out the following things:
• Make a note of key industry events in your calendar
• Consider seasonal events like Christmas or public holidays and think about the type of content you can create for these
• Think about how you can create a variety of content around certain topics to avoid constantly talking about the same thing
• Delegate writing and or marketing tasks within your team – or if staff time is scarce, find a writer or public relations professional to help you out.
• Create deadlines to ensure that your content isn’t created and posted in a rush

Deciding what to track

Depending on the objectives of your business, your next step will be to decide which types of information you will record and which platforms that information should be posted to.
A word of advice here – try to keep your content calendar as simple as possible. Overly complicated spreadsheets are a major deterrent to productivity. As a rough guide though, you may consider tracking:

? Key industry/seasonal events.
? Important events for your own organisation.
? Themes/topics of interest
? Potential headlines
? Intended audiences
? Intended platform (e.g. email, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest)
? First draft deadline
? Final deadline
? Performance against KPIs.

Creating content

Once you have filled in your content calendar the next step is creating content. If you have marketing staff or professional writers on staff then now is a good time to schedule this content into their workloads. If you don’t have enough in-house resources at hand, engaging a professional writer or content marketing agency is a great way to get the job done.

Placement

Making content creation a regular part of your weekly activities is an excellent way to stay on track. You’ll also need to make decisions around which platforms and media outlets you want to place your content in. Here’s a list of content types that you might consider adding:

? Case studies
? Charts
? Organisational news and announcements
? E-books
? Industry events
? Infographics
? Photos
? Product launches
? Recurring posts, series, or themes
? Regular blog posts
? Seasonal content
? Social media updates
? Videos

Don’t underestimate the power of social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest. If you have the budget, you could also try advertising platforms like Outbrain

Templates

There are a number of excellent content calendar templates available to get you started with creating a content calendar. Here’s one that has been created using the creative commons licence thanks to Bluewire Media. Editorial-Calendar-Template

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