If content is king, consistent content is the crown jewel. Without a plan, however, promoting your business can feel overwhelming. Dedicating time to creating a content marketing calendar can reduce stress and make sure content is reaching your audience consistently and effectively.
As we prepare for a new year, now is the time to start focusing on your goals for 2023 and strategizing an action plan. (Read about our 6-step process to give you a starting point.) Once you have outlined your overarching goals for the year, you need to determine how best to communicate your company’s message to accomplish these goals.
Organize Your Marketing Plan
A marketing calendar is a tool to help schedule your content strategy. A comprehensive calendar identifies the following:
- What type of content do you want to create? Do you plan to share social media posts, create blogs, film short videos or send newsletters?
Tip: Audiences respond to different formats. Try to have a mix.
- Who will write your content? Is someone within your organization able to consistently write content or will you need to outsource?
Tip: Calculate the tradeoff in time versus the cost of hiring outside help. When you hire experts, they not only allow you to concentrate on other business, but they usually are faster!
- How often do you plan to share your message? For instance, you may have a goal to post twice a week to social media and share a newsletter monthly.
Tip: Be realistic! Putting together any type of collateral takes time.
- When will you share your content? A content marketing calendar is also an actual calendar! You can note the day you plan to distribute your content.
Tip: Be sure to update this as you go with the actual dates of completion and any notes to help in the future.
The next step? Creating your content. Content should be a mix of business promotion, helpful information for your audience and just for fun posts! Look for our post next month for tips on creating your content.
Marketing is vital to a successful business. However, not everyone has time each day to spend on the task to make it effective. Taking a few hours to set-up a content marketing calendar will not only organize your communications but also give you the flexibility to create and schedule the content when you do have time to focus on the marketing piece of your business.
This post is courtesy of MMC Account Manager Melissa Holder