HELLO
HELLO
The digital world is moving faster than ever, which makes it much easier to lose your way in content marketing. There are competing company priorities, shifting product launch timelines, a social media holiday for everything – phew! Before you know it, you’ve lost out on valuable opportunities to market your products and services to key audiences.
One way to stay organized, focus your marketing efforts and satiate the seemingly limitless appetite for content is a content calendar. Having an advanced plan of what you want to promote and when ensures that you take advantage of every possible opportunity.
We all face an endless sea of content options every day, from social media to white papers. With 88% of B2B buyers saying that online content plays a major-to-moderate role in their vendor selection, creating engaging content that stands out from the rest and drives sales is a top priority for any B2B brand. Here are some ways a content calendar, a simple internal tool, can make a world of difference in your organization’s marketing.
When your notebook is filled with ideas for social media posts or feature articles, there’s no guarantee that you’ll ever come back to them, or that the rest of your team will have the awareness and visibility to help move them forward. But when you lay those ideas out on a calendar, it becomes easier to envision campaigns coming together. A shared, comprehensive calendar acts as a useful self-serve tool, offering an easier path to collaboration within your team and across departments.
A calendar can also help your organization remain disciplined to prioritize the initiatives that have the greatest potential. It’s all too easy to overcommit when opportunities and requests inevitably crop up, limiting your ability to execute on core objectives to maximum effect. A calendar can give you a more holistic look ahead at your overall marketing programs to help you prioritize and support more united messaging across initiatives.
A content calendar that maps out things like holidays, industry events and buying cycles can allow you to plan for and take advantage of special time-specific marketing opportunities. Timing your content in accordance with relevant occasions can provide a hook for your message or help you to engage potential customers when they are more likely to be in the market for your product or service. Your major marketing initiatives will always have attention within your organization, but smaller opportunities can sneak up and leave your team scrambling to throw something together. Even worse, you could miss out on a marketing opportunity entirely. Having these dates on your content calendar sets your business up to deliver the right message at the right time.
Without the structure of a content calendar, it can sometimes be difficult to brainstorm ideas – especially timely ones. But when you sit down with your team to organize content for a month or a quarter on a calendar, you may find creative ideas coming to you faster than usual. Planning ahead can also help ensure your content is relevant and compelling, whereas improvising content efforts can make it easier to unintentionally repeat topics or share redundant content, leading to audience fatigue.
If the point of a content calendar is to ensure a better organized content strategy, then it’s important that your calendar is clearly labeled. You can even mark which platforms and marketing channels you’ll be using and who’s responsible.
While emails and social posts that promote a limited-time deal are great, not every piece of content should be tied to a specific day or month. From support and service to the benefits of your brand’s approach, there are many topics that will be relevant to educate and inform potential customers on year-round, so evergreen content is always useful. Use your calendar to establish a clear view of the promotions and initiatives that are time-sensitive, to help you understand the best opportunities to use your evergreen content.
Just as important as setting up a content calendar is using analytics to evaluate your results and update your plans regularly. If certain topics or types of content are doing well for your organization, you may consider adding more like that in the future. If the opposite is the case, having your content organized allows you to identify similar pieces and pivot more effectively.
Sure, you can include all kinds of information on your content calendar, including assignee, status, messaging angle, channel, deadline, etc. But sometimes, especially when you’re first starting to use a calendar tool, it’s best to keep things simple. Gradually and methodically add in more detail or functionality as you and your team grow more comfortable with the process.
It’s editable and already populated with notable dates for B2B marketers, including:
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