Since content marketing requires the continuous delivery of large volumes of content strategically, planning must be your best friend if you want to find success. After all, you don’t just want large followers, but you also want conversions, especially increased sales. The only way to make that happen is to post compelling content that drives your target audience to your landing page. And this is where your content calendar comes in to do wonders.
If you don’t use a social media planner, you get confused, feel overwhelmed, and become unsure of what you’re doing. Winging it may work for a while, but you will soon realise that you need scalable strategies. A content calendar provides a roadmap of what’s on your plate in the upcoming weeks and months. It can help you gain followers and increase your bottom line. So let’s dive in to see how you can make the best of your content calendar in five easy steps.
Table of Contents
Step 1: Choose an Upload Schedule that Works
How often will you upload your content? Bear in mind, there are different schedules you can choose for YouTube for your videos. Similarly, sharing articles, links, reels, or pictures on Facebook and Instagram can also vary. There’s no right answer for your social media planner because it depends on your industry, team, and your target audience.
For instance, a Youtube content creator cannot expect much pay-off from just posting a video a month. In this niche, subscribers want to have constant engagement with their favourite vloggers. Hence, you must upload at least three videos per week. In contrast, if you’re a brand selling products on IG, then you may get by with one video a week on YouTube but definitely more reels and posts on IG.
Then, assess what works realistically for you. If you’re a one-man show, you need time to curate quality content. When filling up your content calendar, you don’t want to overwhelm yourself with things you cannot handle. But if you have team members, you can handle a more intensive posting schedule. You can do M-W-F with ease. Do what works best for engaging with your audience as well as your schedule.
Step 2: Identify the Topics You Want to Focus On
This step shouldn’t come as a surprise because a content calendar is all about creating content. Thus, you must take time to figure out and list what type of content works best for your target audience. List down as many content topics you need and indicate which platform you intend to use it for. You may even need extra ones in case one idea doesn’t work.
Conduct a brainstorming session so you can get as many ideas for your videos, pictures, memes, infographics, etc. To help you find inspiration, you can also check out these sites:
- YouTube: sear to see what content is trending in your niche and create a better video
- Facebook Groups: read through posts to see what your customers’ pain points are.
- Quora: pursue questions related to your industry and use that as a jump-off point for content
- Ask your follower or clients: engage with them on social media comments to ask what they want or send out surveys seeking feedback
- AnswerThePublic: look for questions that you can answer through your content
With a schedule and list of topics at hand, you can now whip out the best content for your platforms. Make sure your materials are in line with what you’re selling and the platform where you intend to post the content. Note this all down in your social media planner.
Step 3: Indicate Promos, Offers, and New Stuff
You must also include new product launches, promotional sales, and your biggest offers in your social media planner. All these details will tell you that you need supporting content for those big plans. It is vital to have these dates because you’re going to work with content that aligns with the promotions you’re running at that particular time.
Bear in mind your content marketing strategy is not just for views, shares, likes, or to increase your followers. You want all your content assets to drive more inquiries and drum up sales for your business. By pairing up your social media planner with your promotions calendar, you create a cohesive unit that works better because there’s unity.
Step 4: Pick a Distribution Date for Content With All the Details
When you have clear goals, you can now tell what content material and topic should go live each week. For example, if you’re running a promotion on undergarments in the middle of the month, you want to post social media marketing materials that can drive more traffic for that particular offer. To help you out, make sure you indicate the following in your social media planner:
- The type of content
- Title of content
- What promotion it supports
- Where it’s being published
- Author or team working on the content
- Stage of completion
- Launch date
- Content assets used
Step 5: Choose Dates to Promote Certain Content
Last but certainly not least, your content calendar also needs dates where you promote pillar content. This may be found on your landing page or Youtube channel. For instance, if you post new videos every Wednesday, then you want to start aggressively promoting your new content a few days before it launches and shortly after it goes live. On the day before, remind your followers on other social profiles that your new video is launching. On the day of the launch, tell your audience that the video is out and encourage them to check it out, and give feedback.
These dates must be marked on your social media planner, so you can visualise what’s launching and what you’re promoting in various profiles. When you have everything organised, you won’t stumble around feeling confused because you have several content and promotional assets. Instead, you can feel at ease because you get a big-picture view of what you’re doing in your content calendar.
In the first place, these calendars exist to make your life as a content creator easy. Use one ASAP so you can fit your ideas into a solid plan. It will help your marketing strategy become more seamless and help you stay on track with uploading fresh content.
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