Most business owners would agree that creating excellent marketing content is key to long-term success, and yet many organizations struggle to produce valuable content on a consistent basis. The struggle is real. When you’re running a business, your to-do list is often dominated by urgent needs: quotas to fill, deadlines to meet, fires to put out. In his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, productivity expert Stephen Covey wrote, “Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent and not enough time on what is important.” Even though producing consistent marketing content is important, it frequently takes a backseat to more urgent demands. If you’re ready to step up your marketing game, creating a content calendar may be the game-changer that takes your content strategy to the next level.
Why Do You Need a Content Calendar?
One of these days we’re going to update our stale lead magnets.
One of these days we’re going to post consistently to social media and start expanding our audience.
One of these days our blog is going to become a valuable resource and trusted authority that draws in new customers.
If you’re like most busy business owners, “one of these days” never quite comes around, because every day is packed. Most organizations have great intentions when it comes to producing marketing content, yet it’s easy for them to fall short of their ambitions and goals. An unclear content plan may leave their efforts inconsistent in quantity and quality, leading to a series of random acts of marketing: Team members craft blog posts here and there, the intern designs social media graphics when he has an hour to spare, an owner has a fit of inspiration and drafts half an ebook before getting pulled away to manage a crisis. Somehow the urgent always drowns out the important.
You’ve probably heard the adage, “Plans fail when we fail to plan.” Without a plan for consistently producing marketing content, our best intentions never come to pass. A content calendar makes content creation infinitely easier and more efficient. Investing time to plan on the front end saves significant time in the end: Your team knows what to produce, when it’s due, and who’s responsible for every job. A calendar sets up your team with a plan. A plan empowers you to produce quality content on a consistent schedule. A schedule turns “one of these days” into today.
Step 1: Identify Your Target Persona
Before you build a content calendar, you need to know who your target customers are and what messages resonate with them. To identify your target persona or personas, begin by pinpointing their surface-level demographics (age, gender, education, role in their company, etc.), and then dig deeper by answering questions like these:
- Who benefits from the goods or services we provide?
- Who buys, uses, or approves the purchase of our product or service? (Keep in mind that these may be different people.)
- What pain points do our customers have as individuals and within their organization?
- How does our work alleviate that pain and make their lives better?
- What are our customers’ goals?
- Where do our buyers spend time online?
- What authorities do our customers trust?
Describing your target persona helps you create content that speaks to their specific wants and needs, and helps you identify the best delivery channels for that content.
Step 2: Ideation
Once you clearly understand your target persona(s), you can begin the ideation process, brainstorming topics and content that will appeal to your particular audience and fit your brand identity. In deciding what to produce, consider your audience and your subject matter together, rather than as separate entities. When you produce vague, generic content for “everyone,” you’re actually wasting energy creating content that resonates with no one. Keeping your specific audience in mind helps you ideate content that effectively speaks to your potential buyers.
When you ideate content with your team, you can encourage creativity with a variety of strategies like:
- Brain dumps
- Role-playing
- Mind maps
- “What if” scenarios
No idea is a bad idea at this stage. Embrace creativity and engagement to produce diverse ideas that you eventually shape into a specific plan.
As you brainstorm, keep in mind the three stages potential buyers experience along their journey to purchasing: awareness, consideration, and decision.
- In the awareness stage, customers are evaluating all possible solutions they could pursue to address their problem.
- During the consideration phase, they have decided on a general solution, and they are now evaluating the specific options they could invest in.
- In the decision phase, customers have homed in on two or three options, and they are ready to buy.
You want to create content that speaks to customers who are in each stage of this journey, and to meet them in the conversations they’re already having along the way. It’s not enough to simply implement SEO content strategy with no regard for your customers’ daily lives and conversations. Effective marketing involves listening to the chatter surrounding your industry, then jumping into existing conversations alongside your would-be customers, offering valuable perspectives and information.
Step 3: Content Mapping
Now it’s time to map out your content. First, decide on a big-picture plan, choosing themes and topics for each quarter and month. From there, you can ideate specific items of content to flesh out each theme. For every content item, it’s important to identify:
- The intended persona
- Where you’ll deliver this content
- The goal of your content (i.e. establishing yourself as a thought leader vs. generating a lead)
Types of content may include non-digital and digital:
Non-Digital:
- Radio
- Television
- Direct mail
- Phone calls
Digital:
- Blogs
- Webpages
- Other SEO-driven content
- Social media
- Newsletters
- PPC marketing
For each item you produce, your goal is to offer relevant content that engages customers’ needs, answers their questions, and meets them in their existing conversations. The goal is to provide valuable content that benefits the consumer, building trust and a relationship.
Step 4: Make Your Content Calendar
Making a calendar is the point at which your great ideas become actual plans. As you build out your calendar, remember to be realistic about how much content your team can consistently produce alongside their existing responsibilities. An unrealistic calendar will only lead to frustration and missed deadlines.
To build out your calendar:
- Choose themes/topics by quarter and month.
- Pair your themes and topics with SEO terms.
- Decide on specific items of content to fill out each month.
- Specify a delivery channel for each item.
Step 5: Chart Your Action Plan
You can hold the World’s Most Creative Ideation Meeting, and even design a fancy color-coded calendar, but if you fail to implement an execution strategy, all that creativity will go to waste. An effective action plan includes these steps:
- Assign responsibilities: Who will produce each piece of content?
- Set deadlines: When is each item due?
- Settle on distribution channels: Where will you deliver each item?
It helps to drill down even deeper, breaking each piece of content into separate steps: preparation, creation, editing, design, and distribution. Depending on the size of your team, you may assign each step to different people, and the more organized you are, the more efficient your content production process will be. If you hire an SEO content agency to help produce your content, they will play a key role in filling certain steps in your action plan.
Step 6: Evaluate and Enjoy
Now that you’ve got a plan, a calendar, and clearly defined roles, it’s time to enjoy watching your marketing efforts multiply. Along the way, you can assess how well your strategy is going and make tweaks as needed. Are blog posts performing better than Facebook ads? Have some topics fallen flat? Are your customers engaging with certain discussions that deserve more attention?
Creating and executing a content calendar is a huge step forward. It’s how you escape the tyranny of the urgent and maintain focus on what is important. It’s how you scale your business while preserving your sanity and your schedule. It’s how your company sustains growth that stands the test of time.