How to create a content calendar

By Content Marketing, Copywriting services, ,

Nine in ten B2B marketers (91%) use content marketing, so do around 86% of B2C marketers*. Recent studies also show that search drives more site referral traffic than social media. With this in mind, it’s imperative that organisations produce a consistent flow of high-quality content to draw in site visitors and inform and persuade them to take actions. It all starts with a content calendar…

Before kicking off any marketing campaign, it’s key to plan. Creating the content and sharing it on social media is the fun part but putting in the hard yards creating a content calendar up front is absolutely core to a successful content marketing strategy.

Let’s look at how to create a comprehensive content calendar.

1)  Set up a Content Calendar Template

I use Excel to create my content calendars. Excel is shareable in Google Docs, meaning the editorial team and other stakeholders can make any edits or comments to the calendar, wherever they are.

Now set up columns according to the content you are set to produce, broken down into:

  • Content Production
  • Outreach
  • Measurement and Reporting

2) Content Production

Let’s look at the content production segment. Per piece of content, this should include:

 

  • Proposed title: You want something catchy here. Experiment with a few titles
  • Audience: Who is this aimed at? How will your content help them?
  • Personas: If you use audience personas, these will help you get the tone and messaging right for a particular target audience type
  • Business objective(s): What are you trying to achieve? Too many marketers publish content without a clear focus on why they are writing it and what action they want readers to take.
  • Lead format: What form is this content going to take? E.g. a blog post about some recent research findings supported with an infographic, or a podcast or video
  • Keywords: What do you want to rank for or be found with? Do your research. For more, read our post on amazing free tools for copywriters and bloggers
  • Landing page: What URL will you use? Have you factored in your keywords here?
  • Call-to-action: Be clear on what you want your readers to do, such as ‘Download your free report’ or ‘Get in touch’
  • Emotions/Reasons to share: This is really important, why should people care about your content? Make them feel inspired to share by driving an emotion, there’s nothing worse than ambivalence!
  • Existing assets: What do you have to hand at the moment that could be revisited, updated or repurposed? What images will you use or source to support this?
  • Assets to be created: What needs to be made or curated to support this content? For example, a social card created with Canva?
  • Budget: How much will your content cost to create?
  • Delivery date: What are the internal deadlines for creation and internal approval?
  • Go-live date: When will this content go live? Be sure to look at your website and social media data to understand when your audience is most active. Also, look at the political agenda to check there are no news items that will overshadow interest in your content
  • Stakeholders: Who are involved in the process? Are there any external approvals required?

 3) Outreach

Once you’ve established what you want to create, then it’s time to think about where you will share or post the content:

  • Influencers: Will you partner with an influencer to co-create an exclusive piece of content? Check out our podcast on influencer relations best practice for more
  • Media: Will you send your content as a piece of media content? Or perhaps use it as the basis for further guest blogging content, such as on Medium or LinkedIn Pulse
  • Social media: What are your suggested social media posts on each channel? Which channels is this relevant for and what time will you post it (use your audience data)
  • Hashtags and emojis: What hashtags will you use in your social media (max two per tweet), and what emojis should feature in your social posts?
  • Paid Media: Will you set aside budget to promote your content? (e.g. boosted posts on Facebook, or LinkedIn and Twitter ads)
  • Risks: This is one that’s often overlooked: What potential backlash could your content produce? Ask people who are totally detached from the process for their perception of your content and associated social media posts
  • Guidelines: Are there any special instructions for social media teams?
  • Customer service: If you are promoting a product, make sure your customer service team is aware and staffed accordingly to handle demand?

4) Measurement and Reporting

There is no point doing any content creation if you’re not going to measure its impact and use those insights to continually improve your content. This should include:

  • Tracking code: Use a Google tracking code or similar, such as bit.ly, to track behaviour
  • Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): What are you looking to measure and what are the industry benchmarks you should measure against? Think beyond hits and think about inbound enquiries, bounce rates, time-on-site, downloads and more…
  • Learnings: What were your takeaways and feedback from your audience? What will you do differently next time?

Did we miss anything? Feel free to leave a comment below or engage with us on Twitter. If your organisation is struggling with its content marketing, or you work for a PR agency and need support to help a client with theirs, please get in touch.