Content Creation Strategy

If you keep asking yourself this question, “What should I post next on my social media, my website, and my other digital platforms,” it simply means you don’t have a concrete content strategy.

Remember, you need a plan.

And it doesn’t even have to be perfect to guide you towards your goals. With a concrete plan like a content calendar, you can monitor your progress and make adjustments based on your goals and resources.

If you have some errors or unrealistic expectations, you can easily tweak them to achieve your goals. For example, you realize that churning 15 in-depth eBooks and blog posts per month is too much for your small business.

The benefits of having a content planner or calendar:

Planning is important, but having a content calendar isn’t just about planning. It’s also an important part of ensuring your content is effective and accomplishing the goals you set out for it.

A well-planned calendar can help you:

-Keep everything organized

-Ease of planning content

-Works for the campaign

-Maintains consistency

-Content is up-to-date and relevant

-Keeps the audience engaged

-Supports social media strategy

-Supports collaboration between departments

-Tracks your performance

Step-by-step guide to creating a content calendar

Now that you know the benefits of having a content calendar, continue reading below to learn how to create one.

1. Establish goals and key performance indicators.

When you have established goals, you can then decide which KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is the most important for your business.

For example, you should focus on growing your followers or subscribers and customer engagement (likes, comments, and shares). That’s if one of your primary objectives is to strengthen brand authority and awareness.

2. Identify your target audience.

Your existing customer base can shed light on your target audience’s demographics. You can also conduct market research, industry trends, client interviews, and competitive analysis to identify your potential customers.

3. Create a template for your content calendar.

You can use free tools, paid tools, or even a simple spreadsheet to create your content calendar. Make sure the template has a share option to allow team members to brainstorm by adding comments, sharing their ideas, and editing tasks.

As a general rule, create a calendar year to mark all important events (holidays, product launching, training, seminars, etc.). This step will help you identify the seasonal content you will need in the future.

While a content calendar can guide your content marketing strategy, make sure it’s flexible. This is so that you can easily add timely content like viral videos, news, and trends relevant to your audience.

4. Add your own content.

Once you mark down important holidays and events, start to fill the dates with relevant content ideas. It could be theme posts, PRs, videos, infographics, news from reliable sources, serial posts, guest blogs, brand-centric articles, etc.

When adding your own content, make sure also to include evergreen or timeless pieces. That’s because they are constantly searched online and remain relevant for a long time.

Another tip: Repurpose old content by adding its link to your newer content pieces. You can also publish them on different channels or change their format.

For instance, you can turn a blog post into a cheat sheet, a micro-video, or infographics.

5. Set time limits and publishing frequency.

The ideal publishing frequency depends on your time and resources. But you need to make enough content to generate substantial traffic to your site.

As previously mentioned, your content calendar is not set in stone. There should always be a certain degree of flexibility that allows you to respond to urgent requests or external events.

Sometimes, you may need to postpone a post to focus on a more pressing issue. For example, suppose you’re going to be making a big announcement and don’t want to overwhelm your audience with too many posts in one day. In that case, you can save it for later.

Pro tip: Once you’ve set up your content calendar, you need to review and monitor it regularly or at least every week. You must devote some time to examining and measuring the performance of your content.

This is so you can replicate your “successful” pieces (they have high customer engagement rates like shares and likes) and avoid or improve the content that fails to deliver.