What are content calendars and how can they be used?

Let’s face it, cultivating creative content for your webpage and social channels isn’t as easy as it may seem. While your digital advertisements, high-quality graphics, videos and memes may be enticing to some degree, with the influx in brands and competition, there’s a likely chance that you won’t get noticed. However, the best way that you can combat this business hurtle is by building yourself a standard content calendar. Whether you’re a content specialist or a business owner who’s looking for ways to revisit your content strategy, using a content calendar is one of the best ways for you to keep organized, reflect your brand and provide engaging subject matter that’s both coordinated and formed around important dates, upcoming holidays and seasonal sales and promotions. How else do you expect to keep up with the pace?

What is a content calendar?

We define a content calendar as a shareable resource that allows the content specialist, business owner, or digital marketing team to plan all content activity and to visualize the content that is up for distribution. Usually created using a calendar-based format, the content calendar has several business benefits:

• Access to the resources: Everyone who’s involved in the digital marketing content strategy process will have access to what’s being published when it’s being published and where it’s being published.
• Avoids duplications: Because everyone is aligned with access to the content calendar, duplicate content is easily avoidable. 
• Provides a well-round, visual representation: Whether you plan a week, a month, or a season ahead, a content calendar creates a clear vision of how your content with be distributed. 
• Plan content milestones: Key events and important dates should always be a focus in your digital marketing content strategy. So be sure to use a content calendar to check off all the seasonal celebrations. 
• Spot content gaps: Planning allows you to gain a sense of what needs to be planned and gives you more time leading up to deadlines. 
• Plan ahead: One of the biggest benefits of creating a content calendar is the ability to organize far in advance, allowing you to pre-schedule your content. 

How do you build a content calendar?

Content calendars are an essential part of your digital marketing content strategy, so here is how you can go about creating your own.

• Repurpose past videos, images, and blogs and formulate them to appeal to the current calendar you’re working on.
• Do some research and leverage the data that you found to create infographics or industry stories. 
• Tap into the expertise of your colleagues and create a video or audio interview to share. 
• Utilize whitepapers and reports and add them to your calendar as automated content. 

Now that you know the type of content that can be repurposed and created, we will show you how to formulate this content into something that can be planned and published. 

First, download an online calendar or create one using Microsoft Excel and ensure that you’ve highlighted all the important dates that month, including industry anniversaries, holidays and social media celebrations. Then, it’s essential for you to take note of the season or month you’re planning for. For example, if it’s October, you should be looking at your Halloween content plan but also preparing to market for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Remember to give yourself enough time when planning out your content calendar to ensure that when your content is published, it will be at an appropriate time. Once your calendar has been filled full of content, start creating it and pre-scheduling it. Once it’s published, you can choose to promote it across all your social channels to track analytics about how your content is getting noticed, at what time people are engaging and which days are working well. After you make note of this data you can tweak the upcoming content in your calendar and utilize what you’ve learned to published more engaging content in the future. 

Sound too complicated? You can hire content specialists that will handle all the workload for you and even create the calendar for your approval! 

Do you plan to create a content calendar and integrate it into your digital marketing content strategy?