Content calendar: A must have for all companies!

Content is everything when it comes to successful and long-lasting marketing. Weak content won’t take the company anywhere. Companies should save their precious time and form a content calendar to keep track of customer engagement and impressions generated in the market by their content.

What is actually a content calendar?

It is a clear guide to content creation which will be shared with the target market of your product or service. It is a combination of social media posts, videos, pictures and blog posts. It has a set date and time of each content posting making it much easier and manageable for the marketing team to float solid content in the market. Content calendars also mention the channel that will be used to distribute each type of post. Most famous channels include Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube, LinkedIn and even the company website. A Content calendar is the best way for planning and plotting content distribution in an efficient manner.

Advantages of content calendars

Some of the clear advantages include the planning that can be done for the future to keep a keen check on seasonal changes in trends. It saves time and is more organized. You can attract ideas generated by fresh minds by circulating posts on social media asking for customer feedback and suggestions. It helps greatly in deciding the channel of distribution and type of content required to educate your target audience about your product and services. If you are a company which interacts very often with its customers, you definitely need a content calendar to keep a track of your communication activities and review it time to time for further improvements. Some companies even share their content calendar with managerial level employees so that they know what the company is up to in a given fiscal year. All other departments can also align their business activities according to the calendar shared. It is a very basic yet an important tool for strategic planning.

Important things to be included in the calendar

To avoid all sort of confusion and to keep everyone on the same page, content calendars should include the following important points:

• Topic of the content you plan to share
• Important links of where the content will be written, should be shared with everyone in the team, it can be a Google doc link as well
• Dates, start and end dates of any specific content post
• Details of people writing, editing and posting the content
• You should also mention the government holidays or events that may have an impact on your company

Tips for an effectual content calendar

• Whether you are creating a normal weekly post or running a full fledge marketing campaign, you need to know your goals clearly. It will help you illustrate your content calendar in a more realistic way. If you want to generate traffic for a certain post, you need to be specific about the keywords used. Likewise, knowing your goals clear is the first step.
• Choose a suitable template for your calendar. It can be semi-annually, monthly or even weekly depending on the level of customer engagement is required depending on the type of product or the company’s nature of business.
• Distribute your content wisely through the right channel. You might not be able to generate enough customer engagement despite having a strong post if the channel chosen is wrong. You will definitely want to post your content on the platform where your target audience spends most of their time surfing.
• Match your calendar with what is happening in the market and include all latest trends to compete well in the market.
• Keep updating your content and recycle your old content in a new way matching with the latest industry trends.
• Decide how often you are going to publish your content keeping the customer engagement in mind.
• Review the calendar and keep a keen check on the performance of your content calendar. There are various analytics tools available like Google Analytics to determine the engagement on each post. This way the company can decide what better they can do next time to increase customer engagement on any post.

Having a well-defined calendar will not waste your marketing efforts and will give a strategic direction to your planning and forecasting.