How often do you plan out your content calendar? If you don’t have one, you should start creating one today. This post will give you 20 reasons to create a content calendar.
A content calendar is a schedule or timeline that helps you plan out your content strategy. By having a content calendar, you’ll be able to stay organised and focused on your goals.
You can also use a content calendar to organise your social media posts, schedule content in advance or posts in advance, write blog articles, emails, etc.
Famous advice given to newbie bloggers is, “just start”! This advice is excellent for blogging for fun or as a casual hobby.
But if your blog is for business or you want to use it to earn an income, put some thought into your blogging.
This article says as much as 63% of businesses don’t have documented strategies, so they resort to developing topics on the fly and have a spontaneous approach.
Another article notes that according to the Content Marketing Institute, 60% of social media marketers with a documented social strategy rate themselves as highly effective versus 32% of marketers with only a verbal strategy.
A content calendar is a standard tool for all experienced bloggers and content creators. Since their social media account is crucial to their brand’s social media presence, some companies hire a social media manager to help them identify the visual content type needed for their social media calendar template.
What is a Content Calendar?
According to Wikipedia, a content calendar is an editorial calendar or publishing schedule. Bloggers, publishers, businesses, and groups use it to control the content across different media, e.g., newspapers, magazines, blogs, email newsletters, and social media outlets.
This article defines it as a written content schedule of when and where you plan to publish upcoming content. It typically includes upcoming pieces, status updates, planned promotional activity, partnerships, and updates to existing content.
63% of businesses don’t have a documented strategy, so they resort to a spontaneous approach and develop the topics they will cover on the fly. Click To TweetClick Here to Schedule a Meeting
Benefits of Using a Content Calendar
Here are the 20 benefits of using a content calendar.
1. Keeps You Organised and on Track
They say, “he who fails plan, plans to fail”. A detailed calendar is vital to keeping your blogging organised and strategic (and to keep you sane). A good marketing plan includes strategy, and an excellent marketing strategy includes content. It keeps you focused and your content in line with your overall strategy.
2. Excellent for Brainstorming
One common objection when encouraging clients to blog is what topic to discuss to meet their target audience’s needs. It is another area why a content calendar is necessary. It is an excellent tool for brainstorming ideas to create a blog post or other content that will resonate with your target audience.
3. Helps to Maintain Consistency
One common experience among people and organisations that start blogging without a strategic content plan is the lack of consistency. Once they create content for a few months, they stop because they lack ideas or stray from the original focus. Your editorial calendar helps you to maintain consistency in creating and publishing content.
4. Helps Keep Your Audience Engaged
Once your audience knows your schedule for posting new content, it helps keep them engaged because they know when to expect new content. For instance, subscribers to my blog know that up until last year, I published a weekly marketing digest every Friday. It helps to keep them engaged with my content.
Note: This year, based on my new content calendar, I will publish my usual blog articles (like this one) on Tuesdays and my weekly marketing digest on Thursdays!
5. Crucial for Staying in the Know
As entrepreneurs or business owners, staying abreast of your business and industry’s latest happenings is crucial. Using your calendar helps you to stay abreast of the latest news on the web and social media.
6. Helps Reduce Everyday Stress
The life of an entrepreneur or business owner is stressful enough without the additional responsibility of blogging or crafting a social post for each social media platform. But using a content calendar for your social media campaign helps you or your marketing team/social media team put some order into your chaotic day, reducing your everyday stress.
7. Plan Each Post Out for Specific Social Networks
A social media content calendar is an ideal tool for social media marketing because it helps you plan each post for a specific social media platform. Thus, your fans and followers on various social networks have a balanced mix of informative, educative and entertaining content to keep them engaged. A social media calendar tool also ensures that you don’t fall into the trap of posting the same type of content on all your social media channels. Using a content calendar template created in Google Sheets will help you change each piece of content to suit the respective social network if you post the same content. This is essential for your social media strategy.
8. Prepare for National Observance Days and Holidays
If social media marketing is a critical component of your marketing strategy, you know that preparing content for specific events, such as national observances and holidays, is essential. Your social media calendar tool, together with your social media management tool, will help you plan and prepare before the actual date it needs to publish. It will relieve you from posting any last-minute haphazard content.
9. Improve Your Efficiency
Many factors go into creating an excellent piece of content. Some of these factors include your call-to-action, publication date, content creation process, etc. Using your content calendar will help efficiently monitor the various factors that create that piece of content.
10. Publishing Regularly and On-time
Entrepreneurs and business owners are very busy people. Adding social media content creation and publishing takes its toll. So sometimes, it’s easy for you to let content creation slide through the cracks when other pressing areas of your business need attention. But with your content calendar publishing great content regularly and on time will always be on the front burner.
11. Gives You a Big Picture View
Content planning will give you an extensive overview of the content marketing process and strategy when used in a product launch. It helps you see the bigger picture of the broad themes you could cover daily, weekly, or monthly. It will enable you to either increase or decrease the number of valuable content you post on your website or social profile.
12. Plenty of Time to Find Ideas
As far as content marketing is concerned, one of the significant challenges is generating fresh content creation ideas. Therefore, savvy bloggers and marketers spend a ton of money on tools and other resources to find new content creation ideas. Using a content calendar will help you gain plenty of time to find new content ideas. When planning content, focus on creating lots of evergreen content that’s easy to share on your social channels. Evergreen content and similar relevant content types usually get a lot of engagement on social platforms.
13. Synchronisation with Other Sources
With content creation and marketing campaigns, genuine success is not a one-person show. It takes teamwork! Depending on the chosen media, you may need the input of an editor, a graphics designer, a photographer, and a videographer. Working with different people and teams is challenging. But with your calendar, you will synchronise your efforts with the other team members to get the necessary and on-time input from all these different sources.
14. Beat the Stress of Rapid Deadlines and Short Turnaround Times by Planning!
A comprehensive yet flexible plan for managing upcoming content is a surefire way to beat stress and crunch times simultaneously – especially when tight deadlines are imposed because everyone knows exactly where they stand within their roles without assuming responsibility during last-minute changes.
15. Achieve the Right Focus
In my experience, I realise that many companies don’t have a documented content strategy. They resort to some impromptu techniques for content creation and come up with topics they will cover on the fly! And sooner rather than later, they lose focus.
It takes a lot of time and resources to consistently produce well-researched and valuable pieces of content, and it’s virtually impossible without a strategy. The foundation of that strategy is often your editorial calendar.
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16. Reinforce Your Brand Vision
Content marketing requires continuous delivery of large amounts of content, preferably within a content marketing strategy to reinforce your brand vision. Thus an editorial calendar is vital to ensure that your brand vision is kept front and centre during the content creation, optimisation and marketing process.
17. Take Your Audience on a Journey
Your marketing strategy is a long-term, forward-looking approach and an overall game plan for your business with the fundamental goal of taking your audience on a journey. Your editorial calendar guides you along that journey to ensure your audience reaches your desired destination.
18. Make Delegation All the More Effective
Companies and agencies that publish an enormous amount regularly and employ many in-house or external content creators must delegate specific tasks. Using an editorial calendar makes delegation even more helpful.
60% of social media marketers with a documented strategy rate themselves as highly effective, versus 32% with only a verbal strategy. Click To Tweet19. Filling Gaps
You must publish content in various formats for your content strategy to be effective. So if you find that the majority of the content in your editorial calendar is text-based, you can mix it up to include graphics, audio and video.
20. Multi-site Publishing
Do you publish on a particular platform or multiple sites? Do your marketing efforts comprise social media posts on various platforms like Facebook, Twitter, etc.? What are your campaign goals for multi-site publishing? You can do all these through your calendar.
How to Create a Content Calendar?
I recommend nothing fancy for newbie content creators to avoid being overwhelmed by various tasks. A simple desktop planner maps out the broad topics your content will cover, what days you will publish, and the person responsible for creating the content. It must also highlight the deadline for posting the different types of content. You can use simple tools like Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Drive. These will help you create, store and manage your blog content.
But experienced content creators or entire teams take advantage of the plethora of software available for creating and managing content.
Conclusion
In conclusion, creating and sharing social content is critical to your digital marketing efforts. Therefore, a content/social calendar will help you stay organised and focused on your content marketing efforts.
So, these are 20 benefits of using a content calendar. Contact us today if you need help scheduling posts per day, improving your posting frequency or creating valuable high quality content to satisfy your audience’s needs. I’ll be glad to help.
Related Article(s)
- My Top 10 Articles of 2021
- 12 Common Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid Immediately
- Content Marketing Tactics to Increase Your Audience Engagement
- The Best Advice about Content Marketing You Have Ever Heard
- Understanding Social Media Marketing
- 35 Common Misconceptions about Social Media Marketing
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