Let’s cut to the chase, shall we? You’re a busy person. Last week when you missed the deadline for that creative and brought great shame upon us all, you vowed never to forgive yourself, so help you God. Well, we feel you. So forget what all those other guys said. Here’s the only way to create an awesomesauce content calendar with realisable goals, reasonable deadlines AND see them all the way through. Okay? Okay.
Wait, back it up! What is this ‘Content Calendar’ you speak of?
Pretty much what you think it is; a systematic agenda that details the list of tasks, their intricacies, and subsequent deadlines. It helps create a plan for future advertising and marketing activity by visualising the data to be enforced over a specific period of time (like a month or a year). Of course, some of this data might be altered should unforeseeable circumstances come your way, for which you would have to make due accommodations; an occupational hazard at best.
However, creating a functional content calendar that contributes to a lucrative project outcome is easier said than done. The key is to shine the spotlight on the actual content entailed in your calendar. Why is that so important, you ask? Well, quality content is paramount if you don’t want your website to be just another face in the crowd.
Designs, videos, interactive media, images, insofar as their role in selling your products is concerned, are less effectual in comparison and are thereby relegated to the back burner. Via provoking, relevant and keyword optimised content, you can highlight buzzworthy USPs, enhance your branding, boost your website on the SERP, engage prospects and customers, and build a highly effective content strategy.
So yeah! This is how to do that and stuff.
STEP #1
A little R & D never hurt anybody
And by ‘a little’, we mean ‘a lot’. Content is headlining your website’s performance, as such you have to equip it accordingly to blow the audience away. The right way to begin would be through extensive marketing research. Identify your key demographic; the people for whom you do what it is you do. Most companies have a diverse demographic range and rarely cater to just a single customer bracket.
You might beg to differ. Even if you don’t, here’s an example to illustrate the point anyway; Let’s say there exists company ABC that produces sparkly pink votive marigold-scented candles. The possible buyers for said product would probably be teen girls aged 13-19 and women aged 20-35. For such a specific product, there sure are a whole tonne of different people to accommodate, wouldn’t you say?
And with different people come different kinds of content. Company ABC now has to prepare content for ages 13-28, that would include Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest posts, and for ages 29-35 that would include content suited to home decor websites, lifestyle blogs, etc.
In collaboration with the sales, customer service and marketing departments within company ABC, a team effort is required to accurately pinpoint these diverse customer types. Equally important is to evaluate how to effectively allocate content weight between these different types. This means distributing content between existing buyers, potential buyers, and other assorted minorities, depending upon their perceived or tested value to your business.
Don’t get carried away too much, though. It is vital to assess team capacities and understand the amount of quality content that could be produced within a reasonable time frame.
STEP #2
Plagiarise like you mean it!
What’s that? It took you a while to read the above and now you have way less time than what you started out with? We’ll make it up to you. Given below is a basic template for a calendar that would suit a majority of purposes. Feel free to steal it while we’re looking the other way. Of course, tailor-made tweaks to cater to your explicit needs will need doing. But we have faith in you.
The above was created in Google Sheets and follows a crisp, linear layout that makes it easy to read and execute. With the main menu titles; Topic, Date of Publication, Day of Publication, Details, Type, Author, Platform, Current Status and Notes, the calendar highlights salient points in the content strategy and avoids convoluting it beyond what is necessary.
STEP #3
Keep an eye on performance
Now that you’ve conceptualised your content for the coming month, it’s time to put it through its paces. You’ll have to track certain metrics through Google Analytics to evaluate your content’s performance. This enables you to develop an understanding of how effective your content marketing strategy is by analysing visitor engagement A.K.A. the number of clicks.
This helps analyse other parameters like;
~ The number of unique visitors to your website
~ Where do these visitors live
~ Where does the most traffic flow in from (social media, externals links, etc.)
~ Which tactics influence the most traffic (images, quizzes, GIFs, contests)
~ Which content is responsible for the most conversions (i.e. leads into customers)
~ Which content displays the least visitor engagement and drives traffic away
Understanding the above metrics also enables you to execute the perfect plan 2.0 should your original content strategy prove ineffective.
And there you have it; the ultimate guide to creating a content calendar to end all content calendars! Godspeed!
