What is a content calendar?
Do you have a content calendar for your marketing team? Web pages, blogs, social media posts, advertisements, and more are all examples of content that your business posts online. Your team can manage all material using a content calendar, from planning and creating it to posting it and analysing the results. Learn more about what a content calendar is, what it should contain, and how to make one in this post.
An editorial calendar or marketing calendar is another name for a content calendar, which is a tool for managing where and when you publish information online. To organise your content creation, think of a content calendar template as a hybrid of a standard calendar, a scheduling tool, and a project management application.
Calendars for upcoming content are used by marketers to plan their publication schedules. Articles, blog entries, social media updates, events, website modifications, and other types of material may all be controlled.
Your content calendar should have the following details for each item:
- What you want to publish
- When you plan to publish it
- Exactly where you plan to post it
A content calendar can range from events on a basic Google Calendar to extensive projects on a fully-featured content calendar platform, depending on the scope and complexity of your company’s marketing initiatives.
Why it’s important to use a content calendar?
The Content Marketing Institute reports that 86% of B2C marketers and 91% of B2B marketers consider content marketing to be an important business strategy. Planning and monitoring the marketing material for your company is crucial, and an interactive content calendar provides this and much more.
There are many advantages to using a content calendar to organise your marketing content ideas. Here are a few of the most eminent examples.
All marketing initiatives are coordinated
It gets harder to keep track of everything the more stuff you publish online. A content calendar may help you organise all of your ongoing and future marketing initiatives and make sure that everyone on your team is speaking the same language.
Improves cooperation
According to Databox, just one person manages the content calendars for slightly more than half of all enterprises. Only 44% of firms share responsibility for content calendars, which is the preferred method when several people are working together on a cooperative project.
When team members are working from different places, a cloud-based content calendar improves communication and cooperation. Since everyone on the team has access to the same schedule and materials, they are always in contact and in sync. It’s simpler to collaborate on content planning when everyone is aware of what the other is working on and what’s upcoming.
Guarantees consistency
It gets harder to perceive the big picture the more activities you participate in. A content calendar organises all of your marketing efforts, past, present, and future, making it easier to understand how each action links to the others. With the help of this tool, you can organise your activities into a more regular schedule and make sure that they all contribute to the development of your brand.
Allows for long-term planning
What summer plans do you currently have? What about the holiday season in 2019? You may plan your marketing operations months or even a year in ahead with a fully functional content calendar, while also taking advantage of any short-term possibilities that arise.
Aids in managing posts on social media
92% of businesses utilise social media as a component of their marketing strategies, according to Statista. Using a content schedule is crucial for managing the more than six social media networks you need to post on. With the aid of the content calendar, you can easily manage where, what, and when you post online using a single, user-friendly interface. You can even schedule and automate your social media postings using some content calendars.
Monitoring performance
How effective are all of your online marketing efforts? What channels are the most efficient? Which campaigns had the best results?
You may get the answers to these and other crucial inquiries concerning your marketing efforts with the aid of a feature-rich content calendar. You can monitor not only what is happening but also how things are doing thanks to built-in reporting and analytics.
Ensures that nothing squeaks by the cracks
Finally, you make fewer errors by keeping track of all your marketing efforts on a content calendar. Nothing will be missed because everything is in plain sight and much of the scheduling is automated.
How to make a content calendar and keep it up to date
The more extensive and intricate your marketing strategy, the more you will need to employ a specialised content calendar tool, like Welcome. Smaller businesses may attempt to organise their content manually using a conventional web calendar, like Google Calendar. With dedicated content calendars, you can manage collaboration between people or departments, plan actions in advance, and produce insightful reports and analysis in addition to tracking individual marketing efforts.
Regardless of the kind of content calendar you select, there are four main activities you must complete: organising your material, outlining the necessary work, defining important dates, and figuring out your goals.
- Arrange content types.
- Take an inventory of every sort of content that your company publishes as a starting step. Then you can categorise each activity by the sort of material it produces, such as blog posts, social media updates, articles, videos, etc.
- List the tasks that need to be done one by one.
- The actions necessary to create each activity you’ve listed must next be described in detail. It’s not enough to simply note the publishing date; you also need to describe all the steps that led up to it, such as keyword research, finding or creating images, writing copy, and so on.
- Establish crucial deadlines.
- Setting deadlines for each step of the activities you have planned is crucial. You should then include these deadlines in your content calendar. Additionally, you want to specify which groups or divisions are in charge of finishing each phase.
- Establish content goals
- Set clear objectives for each piece of material you produce, and finally. Establish your goals so you can assess performance at the conclusion of the campaign.
Use this video below to understand more about content calendar.
