Four easy steps to creating a content calendar

Creating an effective content calendar can be hard work, requiring a lot of time and attention to detail, so here are our top four tips to help you get started and hone a strategy for the future.

Step 1) Combine all editorial calendars into one
By using a single content calendar, you can ensure that all of your team is always on the same page, effectively creating a more efficient work objective. It makes it much easier for everybody on your team to find the information that they need when all of that information is in one easy-to-access content calendar, as opposed to spread out across various calendars.

Step 2) Focus on getting more traffic
Traffic helps you get your product or service in front of a wider audience, which then gives you the opportunity to turn that audience into subscribers and potential future customers. Additionally, when that audience shares your content on social media, your work is publically validated, providing social proof of the quality of your work, and so gaining you more traffic, more shares and more subscribers.

Your calendar should therefore help you publish great content, and should gain your work the traffic that it has earned. To do this effectively, it’s a good idea to have an inbuilt social media plan within your content calendar, to help you use social media as efficiently as possible and to connect with your audience most effectively.

Step 3) Create, distribute and analyse results
People sift through the social media ‘clutter’ based on what they know is already popular. Therefore, if your content is popular, it is more likely to be further read, shared and subscribed to – thus gaining you more traffic. So, in order to gain your work maximum traffic, you need to be aware of what works; which is your most popular content? Using social media analytical data, you can figure out what is popular with your audience, and so alter your future content in your editorial calendar based on that information.

You can also republish your most popular content, to make sure that your hard work doesn’t go to waste; in re-sharing old content, you ensure that it doesn’t become background noise in cyberspace, forgotten about a few months after it’s published. We often republish video content for our clients to bring their profile forward again and direct viewers to relevant content.

Step 4) Refine and optimise future content
Using the data from social media analytics, you can base your future content on what has been successful in the past, and so create further successes for yourself and your team. In 2016, data is being used in ways never seen before, according to the Harvard Business Review, which says that when accumulated data reaches measurable heights, businesses can demonstrate ‘compelling visualisations or interactive applications’, or, in other words, businesses now have data with insights likely never before explored, which can be applied in a number newly advantageous ways. Hootsuite and Google Analytics have some great facilities for measuring and managing your on line marketing successes. You can also customise your Google Analytics Dashboard to show specific measurements on video content as well as other online platforms. Likewise, YouTube have some good analytical options to measure engagement with your target audience.

If you'd like to know more about how to fill your content calendar with engaging video or marketing ideas just give us a call and we will arrange a free discovery session to work out how to make your content calendar effective.