How to Develop a Content Calendar for your business
Below we will show you how to develop marketing content for your business all year long. Planning out your entire marketing strategy in one calendar makes it easier to stay organized, focus on deadlines and be more productive.
Step 1: Develop Annual Calendar
Start by creating a Basic Overview of content themes and cycles in your business.
One year of content creation cannot begin until you have a birds eye view of how your businesses year may play out. Start by looking at seasonal content making notes of things like holidays, sales events and even other times of year with importance to your industry.
Break down these events into categories:
- Holidays: Which holidays are most relevant to your business?
- National Days: Creating content for an entire year is not easy, National days are a great way to throw an occasional curveball into your marketing efforts.
- Peak & Off-Peak Buying/Busy seasons for customers: Are certain times of the year better for your business?
- Important Dates, Months, or Quarters in your industry: Are there any events within your industry that have an impact on your business.
- Milestone Dates: Are you launching a new product? Do you have an anniversary? This is basically any date that is important to your business.
Step 2: Brainstorm Content Ideas
Next, it's time to organize and prioritize all of your content ideas.
Creating content for an entire year will not be easy on it’s own! You’ll need a ton of ideas so grab your team and let’s get started on part 2:
- First, spend 10-20 minutes writing down every idea that pops into your head. In this step there is no such thing as a bad idea. JUST WRITE IT DOWN! It’s most important to get everything on paper.
- Next, take 10-20 minutes scoring those ideas among your team on a 3 point scale. 3’s are home run ideas, 2’s have potential but could use some work, and 1’s are flops. You’ll end up with more 1’s & 2’s than 3’s, but that’s normal.
- Finally, spend the next 10-20 minutes choosing which 3’s you’ll execute into your Content Calendar. These should be the cream of the crop. Don’t begin scheduling just yet save that for step 3.
Step 3: Schedule content to your calendar
Now, that you have a direction for your content it's time to schedule & Execute!
Before you begin scheduling your content reference the Annual Calendar from Step 1. Keep in mind the important dates and holiday’s, in an attempt to schedule relevant ideas in accordance to these target dates. Some dates maybe better suited for your ideas than others. When thinking about your campaigns, remember to schedule your content in 3 stages:
- Before the actual date: Let your target audience know about what’s coming ahead of time and how they benefit.
- During the day itself: Make your push utilizing multiple channels; blog post, social media, email, ect.
- After the date: Following up is one of the most overlooked aspects of marketing. Get feedback, reviews, or begin retargeting based on the response from the initial push.
Recommended Scheduling tips
Setting up your publishing schedule
Now that you have established the dates which your content will be pushed out, let’s explore the best time of day as well as how often you should be publishing your content. Every platform functions differently, and no day of the week is the same in terms of when people check their inbox or social media accounts.
Sending Emails
Frequency is more crucial to success than day and time. For B2C: Consider sending email bi-weekly to weekly (2-5 per month). For B2B: At least one email per month.
Posting to Facebook
Posting to Facebook no more than once per day is recommended in order to avoid being spammy. Curate or share a post every other day, between 1pm - 4pm is best.
Posting on Instagram
Most brands share on Instagram 1.5 times a day, but not more. 1-2 posts per day is recommended. Schedule post 1 between 8am - 9am and post 2 for 2am. (Seriously)
Tweets on Twitter
On Twitter most retweets happen within an hour after tweeting, so 7-15 tweets per day is recommended. Staggering tweets throughout the day will keep the conversations flowing.
Posting on LinkedIn
One post per day should be the most you share to LinkedIn. The best time for that daily post is between 10am - 11am, around the time employees take their first break.
Publishing Blog Posts
Tuesdays between the hours of 9–10am are the best days for publishing your blog posts because this is when they typically get the most social shares and page views.
