Clear-cut content in 2023? Hello, content calendar!
Content may be king but our customers are the emperors, and it’s essential to keep them happy. A well-thought-out content marketing strategy and a corresponding content calendar are key to achieving this goal. By the end of this blog, you’ll see just how crucial content planning is for your success.
Time to take your content marketing to the next level and give your customers the royal treatment they deserve.
What is content marketing?
Content marketing is a powerful online marketing approach that involves creating and distributing highly valuable, relevant, and consistent content to a targeted audience through the most effective channels. This approach has a significant advantage: it creates better-informed and more loyal customers.
At first glance, content creation and distribution may seem straightforward, but there’s more to it than meets the eye. To succeed at content marketing, it’s crucial to understand that it’s not a one-and-done approach but a long-term vision. That’s why the quick formula for success is content marketing + content calendar = a match made in heaven. By combining these two elements, you can ensure that your content marketing efforts are consistent, relevant, and effective, leading to a loyal and engaged customer base.
What is a content calendar?
To put it simply, a content calendar is a plan that allows you to track all your content. It’s an essential tool and the foundation of your content marketing strategy, serving as your action plan to create and publish content that converts.
The type of content you create for your content marketing strategy will depend on your target audience and goals. By understanding your audience and what they’re looking for, you can create the perfect content mix that aligns with your overall strategy. While blogs, emails, white papers, and e-books are among the most well-known types of content, there are other options to consider, such as webinars, podcasts, or reels. You can even create a social media content calendar specifically for platforms like Instagram, or plan content for distribution through various other channels online.
The key is to identify what types of content will resonate with your audience and help you achieve your marketing objectives, then plan and execute your content calendar accordingly.
Why use a content calendar?
Does the quote “I’ll post when I have time” sound familiar to you? It’s a common mindset among companies and entrepreneurs who treat content creation as something they’ll get around to when they have some free time. However, the reality is that creating quality content requires a proactive approach and a dedicated time commitment.
This is where a content calendar becomes crucial. It’s an integral part of your content marketing strategy that helps you plan and organize your content in a way that ensures its timely execution. Without a content calendar, your chances of effectively executing your content strategy are greatly diminished. While we’re not here to force you to use a content calendar, we highly recommend it as a powerful tool to help you achieve your marketing goals.
What are the benefits of a content planner?
We already know what it is and why you should use it, but how does a content calendar improve your (professional) life? Let us list the benefits for you.
You keep the overview
Because that’s essentially what a calendar does. You keep track of everything in one place and see the situation at a glance.
You keep up with holidays and events
With a content calendar, you can plan your posts well in advance, like Easter or the start of the new school year, allowing you to create timely and relevant content that resonates with your target audience. You can avoid last-minute scrambling and ensure that your content is up-to-date with current events, giving your audience the impression that you are always active and accessible. It’s all about being strategic and staying ahead of the game.
You post more regularly and consistently
If you read our blogs more often, you know that the word ‘consistent’ always makes an appearance. Regularly popping up on the timeline or in your target group’s mailbox is very important to stay top-of-mind.
You bring more structure to your plan
You can avoid repetitive content and ensure that you’re sharing a variety of content types that align with your goals and target audience. You can plan out themes and topics for each week or month, ensuring that each piece of content serves a unique purpose and adds value to your audience.
You no longer have any last-minute stress
Using a content calendar can be a game-changer for your content marketing strategy. It helps you work more efficiently and reduces stress, allowing you to focus on creating high-quality content that resonates with your target audience.
Essential elements in your content planner
Target group
Who are you creating the content for? It is important to know because you have to adjust your content types, CTAs and channels. Customer personas help you to make your target group tangible. You indicate their needs, goals, and pain points. You also map out their online behavior. This way, you can be sure that your content appeals to your target group and approaches them via the proper channels.
Goal
It’s important to define clear goals for your content marketing strategy and incorporate them into your content calendar. Whether you’re looking to share expertise, create brand awareness, gain new followers, or achieve other objectives, your content plan should reflect these goals.
Content type
What type of content are you going to post? That can be anything, for example, an e-book, reels, videos, or a blog. Be sure to indicate this in your content plan so that you maintain a diverse content mix.
Channel
It’s crucial to focus on the platforms that your potential customers use. To determine which platforms to prioritize, refer to your customer personas. Analyze which social media channels or other online platforms they frequent the most.
Subject
What are you going to post about? This should be in line with your content strategy and the core of your business.
We recommend brainstorming on this with your team. That’s often how the most – and best – ideas arise. Possible topics are, for example, highlighting a particular day, an announcement of new employees or a blog post about a super handy content calendar.
Times and deadlines
Without specific times and deadlines, your content planning becomes ineffective. You need to set deadlines and schedules for when each piece of content needs to be published to ensure consistency and meet your goals. Without a timeline, your content calendar is just a list of ideas without any structure or direction.
CTA
The CTA is probably the most important element of the entire content calendar. What do you want the reader to do after seeing and reading your post, newsletter, or e-book? This ranges from getting in touch with you to clicking through to a specific webpage.
URL
Adding UTM tags to the URL allows you to track the performance of a specific link or campaign in Google Analytics. This way, you can gain insights into which content is performing well and adjust your strategy accordingly.
UTM tags are small pieces of text that you add to the original URL. There are 5 different types of tags:
- UTM_medium: this tag tells you whether your visitor clicked on your link in a post, in the bio, or via a referral.
- UTM_source: this tag indicates through which channel the visitor arrived at your URL. For example: “Facebook” or “email”.
- UTM_campaign: in this tag, you put information about the campaign. For example, we are tagging a post on social media about this blog with “contentcalender+template”.
- UTM_term: This tag can contain some extra information about a specific campaign. For example, “discount” or “existing customers”.
- UTM_content: This tag you use for A/B testing. For example, you can test two different images, a green and a yellow one. You give the URLs a tag corresponding to the image: “green image” and “yellow image”. Afterward, you can track which image scored better.
Tips & tricks
A few more tips and tricks to perfect your content plan.
Start on time
Content creation is not something you do in a hurry. So, start planning and filling your content calendar well in advance.
Current events
Always save some space to respond to current events. Nothing interesting happened this week, or at least not for your industry or company? We don’t see a problem with not sharing once in a while, there’s no need to force it.
Person in charge
Are you working with several team members on a content calendar? Make sure to add a section with the person in charge of that specific piece of content.
Shortened URL
On some social media platforms, you get a maximum number of characters for your post. We’re not pointing fingers, but we’re looking at you, Twitter and LinkedIn. When you paste a long link in your post, you will exceed the limit in no time. Use a tool like Bitly to keep your URL short and sweet.
Ready to grow bolder together?
Don’t hesitate!