Content marketing is critical to the success of your business. You need great content to generate leads. That’s not just one piece of content. That’s a lot of content you need to create, repurpose, and update.
The important question arises, how do you organize your content marketing efforts across platforms? Enter the content calendar. In this post, we’ll learn what a data-driven content calendar is. We’ll also look at how you can create one for your business.
What is a content calendar?
A content calendar is also called an editorial calendar. You track the content you publish in your content calendar, where you publish it, and when you publish it. For example, you may want to publish content on your blog, social media channels, guest posts, etc.
Your content calendar also provides consumer mobile number database guidance on when to update old content, repurpose content, and plan promotional activities.
All of these activities should align with the goals of your content marketing strategy. These, in turn, must be aligned with overall marketing goals. Ultimately, the goal of all of this content is to generate conversions .
Contrary to popular belief, a content calendar is not
The format depends on the amount of content you produce, the time frame, etc.
Here are some of the common formats:
- Calendar: You can organize your content calendar on a Google Sheet, whiteboard, etc.
- Spreadsheet: Use the features of Excel or Google Sheets to organize your content. You can sort by type, date, audience, topic, and buying stage. Share your editable spreadsheet with team members so they can see who is creating or editing content and at what time. Implement color coding and other techniques to highlight important information and grab the viewer’s attention.
- Work/Project Management Platform: It becomes difficult to manage spreadsheets efficiently. A robust project management 5 photography marketing ideas to capture your customers’ interest tool like Trello can help you streamline processes properly. You can run content marketing campaigns . Easily add calendars, charts, workflows, and set up automatic notifications.
A content marketing calendar can come in other forms. Just look at the screenshot below and you will see other content calendar formats used by some reputable companies.
The key is to choose the format that works for you and your team.
Why are content calendars important?
A content calendar helps you stay organized. This section explains three reasons why content calendars are crucial to your content marketing efforts.
Proper scheduling
Content calendars help you ensure that all alb directory your content-related activities are on time. When you’re disorganized, you tend to miss deadlines. The result? You don’t reach your content marketing goals. With a perfect calendar, you’ll never miss a task and never fall behind. Additionally, your outreach team will know when to schedule an outreach effort and follow-up email campaign for your content.
teamwork
A content calendar ensures smooth collaboration within your team. This requires that you share your calendar with everyone so that they can see deadlines and prioritize tasks for the day. You can have your editorial calendar in the cloud or in the form of a Google Sheet.
Clear prognosis
A content calendar gives other departments a clear picture of what will happen in the next few weeks. This can help them plan relevant events around the content.
You can use Google Calendar to view pre-scheduled content.
How to create your content calendar
Follow these tips to create the data-driven content calendar you need. When you start writing your content, don’t forget to use content style guides to help make your content marketing strategy a success.
1. Define your KPIs
Everything you write in your content calendar is designed to help you achieve your content marketing goals. But you won’t know what to write there until you’ve established your key performance indicators (KPIs). A KPI is a performance measurement. It evaluates the success (or failure) of your strategies in achieving a specific goal.
Let’s say your goal is to increase website traffic by 10%. For this goal, page views would be a good KPI because the more views a blog post has on the website, the more traffic the website has.