As a content marketer, you know that creating quality content and consistency is important for your brand and business. But as a content marketer, you have so many ideas for the content and other things to do, so it’s important to create a marketing calendar that helps you consistently engage with your target audience. A content marketing calendar is a tool that helps you organise and plan your content strategy. It makes sure that you deliver high-quality content to the right audience. This blog helps you to understand how to create a marketing calendar and its benefits.
What is a content marketing calendar?
People also refer to a content marketing calendar as a social media calendar or editorial. This tool helps you strategically plan and schedule your content to align with your business. It works like a roadmap that ensures content creation, distribution, publishing, and timely alignment of your marketing efforts. A marketing calendar:
- Help you set the timeline for your content.
- Make sure that content will be published on the right date and time.
- An essential tool to analyse your marketing tool’s success.
Overall, a content marketing calendar is essential for business growth. This guarantees we deliver our content to the right audience at the right time. This will increase your business growth and brand value.
How to create a content marketing calendar
Creating an effective content marketing calendar is very important for marketing. A content calendar has different stages, and it’s important to know them. This section will help you understand the steps and information required to create an effective calendar.
1-Define your goals
Before you start creating a content marketing calendar, you need to determine whether the marketing calendar’s result is necessary. This means a specific, calculable goal that aligns with your marketing strategy. Once you define your goal, you can start creating the content for your marketing calendar.
For example, your goals might be:
Generating the new leads.
Increase the traffic on the website.
Increase the easement on social media.
2-Build Your Template
Once you define your goals for your marketing calendar, the next thing is creating a calendar template for your content. A template is a pre-designed format that lets you organise the content ideas or plans. The template contains the title, publishing date, time, target audience, and platform.
You should include the following information to create a content marketing calendar for your marketing strategy.
- The topic
- Website or social media name where content is going to be published.
- Date and time
- Person in charge.
- Links of content
- Owner or author
- Content type.
You can also create this on Google Sheets or Excel once you have created the template. These tools help you organise and streamline your content, improve the workflow, save time, and increase the performance of your marketing strategy. Overall, creating a template is important for the marketing calendar.
3-Choose your Plate from
Upon the completion of the marketing content template. Now, it is time to select the platform for publishing the content. This can be either a website or a social media platform. The choice of platform depends on your target audience and marketing strategy. You can choose Facebook, X (formerly known as Twitter), Instagram, Tumblr, or any other platform that aligns with your strategic goals. Selecting the appropriate platform ensures delivering the content to the intended audience, increasing the likelihood of engagement.
4-Start with the calendar year
You will strategise your content marketing calendar to align with the entire year. That means you must create content around the major events and holidays like New Year, Christmas, etc. Making a year calendar ensures that your content is delivered promptly and aligns with your marketing strategy. It also ensures your content has diverse and relevant topics to keep your audience engaged.
5-Add your original content
In this step, we can add new information or original content to the marketing calendar. Ensuring the content is fresh, engaging, and updated is important. Creating your content involves brainstorming, searching for new ideas, researching trending topics, and updating with news and developments. By adding fresh content, we can engage the audience and ensure the content is always relevant and aligns with our marketing strategy. Here are a few topics that help you find new ideas:
- Theme post.
- Serial port.
- New product press release or research.
- Expert article or blog of your niche.
- Customer reviews or stories.
6- Adding evergreen content
Content is always king, no matter when it was created. Evergreen content is always relevant to the audience over time. You can also repurpose your older content, like blogs or articles, to your audience by adding a link to the new content.
Adding timeless content to your content marketing calendar helps your audience engage and ensures they get relevant information. Evergreen content includes how-to guides, tutorials, and other educational content. Evergreen content is shared from time to time and provides valuable information to the audience.
Also Read: How to Develop Your Unique Writing Style
7-Update and review your content calendar
After creating the content for marketing, it is always necessary to update the content and review the plan. Updating the content to industry trends will keep your audience engaged and informed. That helps update the marketing strategy accordingly. This ensures that you stay on trend and adapt to any possible changes.
Best tools for creating a content marketing calendar
There are lots of software available in the market. And websites and plugins that help you to create a content calendar. Here are our favourite tools for creating a content calendar.
1-Trello
Trello is a tool that allows one to create and manage Kanban boards. A Kanban board is like a post-it board hanging on your wall. It helps you to visualise your progress in one place. Trello has a drop and drag feature that helps make this flexible. Here are some key features of Trello:
- Cards, list, and board.
- Drag and drop interface.
- Collaboration tools.
- Checklist and due dates.
2-Notion
The notion is one of the best tools for creating a content calendar. It is also one of the popular tools. User can tailor various templates based on their requirements and content strategy. Notion supports multiple types of media content, such as video, images, and other things. This ensures you can create more engaging templates for their content or marketing plans. Here are some key features of the notion:
- All in one workspace.
- Easy Customizable templates.
- Seamless Sharing and collaboration.
- Various types of media support.
3-Asana
Asana is one of the easy-to-use and powerful tools. It allows to assign and create tasks. You can also visualise your progress using different views. It also helps you integrate tools like Slack, Gmail, Zoom, etc. Here are some key features of Asana:
- Project and task management.
- Multiple views.
- Custom fields.
- Collaboration and integration.
Conclusion
In summary, creating a content marketing calendar involves several steps, such as defining your goals, adding evergreen content, adding original content, etc. By following all the steps that we discussed in the blog. You can create a marketing calendar that aligns with your marketing purpose. A content calendar helps you to organise the content and ensures that you deliver to the right audience at the right time.
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