If your company wants to do content marketing in the most effective and strategic manner, the development of your content calendar is an important first step.

While it may seem complicated, developing a content calendar is relatively easy, provided that you have already evaluated your goals for your content marketing campaign.

Benefits of Developing a Content Calendar

In addition to helping you get organized, a content calendar offers some major benefits for your content marketing campaign. These include:

• Ensures that marketing content is available around key company dates
• Guarantees that your marketing stays consistent despite revenue highs and lows
• Determines where there are holes in your content strategy
• Uses a strategic plan to determine what works and what doesn’t when it comes to targeting potential customers

Determine Your Schedule

The first step to determining your content calendar is to decide how often to publish new content. This frequency may vary based on your industry. For example, many B2B verticals require monthly or quarterly content publishing as the sales cycles tend to be longer for prospects. Content that is released on a regular schedule will help to keep prospects engaged over time.

If your company sells products, perhaps there are key dates that arise annually that require the creation of content, such as holiday sales promotions. Make sure that these important dates are addressed on your content calendar. For ongoing content, you should probably aim to publish on a weekly or monthly schedule.

Maintaining Your Content Calendar

Using a cloud-based application to maintain your content calendar is an easy way to share the content plan with your team and allow individuals to make changes as needed. If you would like to have a content calendar built, utilizing our content calendar building services as a part of the Growth plan, can get you up and running quickly.

It is also important to ensure that your content calendar includes any planned meetings that need to take place. For better control over the costs and time spent on the campaign, estimating hours to be spent by marketing employees on content marketing related tasks can also be included as a part of the content calendar.

Incorporating Strategy into Your Content Calendar

Before selecting specific pieces of content to focus on, it is important to figure out your exact content strategy. Here are a few questions to consider:

• What are your business goals for the year?
• Is your current content strategy allowing your company to maximize your revenue from all potential customers in your target market?
• Are there forecasted peaks or lows in your company revenue that you could address with content marketing?

You should also take time to review analytics data in order to determine the best strategies for your campaign. If you already have content available, content re-purposing can ensure that marketing materials that have worked previously are utilized again.

The purpose of a content calendar is to make content marketing easier, not to add another CRM to maintain. If you would like assistance in developing a content calendar that meets your company’s needs, click here to review our services now.

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