Why Creating a Content Calendar Is Crucial For Business Success?

Apart from its shared analogy to that of an actual calendar, a content calendar is an existing document that sketches out your content marketing strategy in the form of a schedule for impending content.

A typical content calendar is much similar to your own personal calendar, except it is lined up with content such as social media posts, tweets, status updates, advertising activities, and pending updates to present material.

Content calendars, whether created collectively for all your social media channels or crafted individually for each medium, help you as a marketer and content creator to cross out your content anxieties of the old and new, and help you achieve a smooth and rewarding marketing experience.

Content calendars, apart from the aforementioned reasons are also just plain awesome because:

1. Your content stays more organized than your closet

Without being particularly sure about your personal closets, you can skip the worry on a cluttered content plan. Content calendars help you remain streamlined with content deliveries, enable you to finish well before deadlines, and leave ample time for any content screw-ups or re-dos!

2. You’re doing your own part and not anyone else’s

Many times, improvised marketing plans can cause havoc amongst co-workers- you’ve probably done someone else’s job for them (more than once) to accomplish your advertising goals for the day or week.

Content calendars make sure you’re doing your bit, and others their own.

Along with a schedule, content calendars also specify whose job it actually is to get the content ready. You can’t really fit all this detail on a living calendar on your desk, can you?

3. You know where the money’s been spent

Regardless of whether you market for yourself or for a firm, you’re on a budget. Just as you keep track of personal spending, content calendars are there to help you keep track of your advertising budgets.

They’re not detailed Excel spreadsheets of where you’re spilling your cash, but content calendars give you an idea of your financial plan against your spending capacity.

4. You can see the brickwork of your marketing mansion

If you plan to waltz around in your mansion of efficient marketing, content calendars map out all the bricks you’ve laid down to build the estate. Enabling you to remain future-sighted, content calendars give you a recap and a teaser for all the content marketing ideas you’ve utilized and can come up with to stay on top of the game!

If you’re telling yourself, “This post looks great!” or “This content will get me massive outreach!”, then now is the time to consider your content marketing channels.

In today’s day and age, channels don’t refer to television anymore. For your content marketing needs, you can be an advertising pro if you know what mediums of media are best suited for your content!

Now that we’ve established you and everyone else into content marketing need a content calendar, let’s look at a checklist that will help you get started!

1. Are your objectives clear?

We mark our calendars with the intent of organization with a certain goal in mind. The same goes for your content marketing goals. Whether these objectives span out for the week or month, it is important to have your goal in mind for this period of time.

If you’re crafting a content calendar around an Instagram post, ask yourself “How much engagement do I want through it?” then continue to craft related Stories posts, comment replies and follow-up posts all sketched on your content calendar at relevant times.

For the Gram, the best times and days to post currently are:

• Tuesdays 11 A.M.–2 P.M. and Monday through Friday 11 A.M.
• Tuesdays

You better start marking the Tuesdays in your content calendars right away!

2. Does your calendar have a template?

Pick a ready outline off the web, or use your creative genius to design one that works best for you, but give that calendar a template!

With enough creative liberty for you to color coordinate your marketing channels according to their posts, or set a certain jingle as reminders, content calendars also double as an organizing enthusiast’s paradise.

When designing your template, make sure you’re including the basics. What are the basics? Well:

• Media Channel (Instagram, Facebook, etc.)
• Subject
• Content Form (Status, Ad-boost, Video, etc.)
• Time & Date
• Responsible Person
• Double Check prompt (Make sure it went through as planned)

3. Do you know your channels?

As a content marketer, you are (and should be) well aware of which channels your audiences spend time on the most, and thus they become a top priority.

Don’t get caught up in the web of multi-channeling, especially without a content calendar that keeps your content organized across all platforms.

Knowing your channels and plotting according to them across your content calendar help distribute your material efficiently and helps elevate its impact.

Visual content like photos and videos do well on Instagram and TikTok, long, detailed videos thrive on YouTube – and if you’re an avid writer, then save your articles for your website(s) and/or blogs!

A pro user of a content calendar, however, would not solely focus the entirety of its purpose on social media, given it’s an easier medium to organize content for. Make sure that all content marketing material is laid out in-depth- online and offline!

4. Year-Month- Week or vice versa?

The period to achieve your content marketing objectives has to start somewhere, and the format in which you lay out your materials is also a key point!

It is relatively easier to start off by marking milestones across the year, then narrowing their follow-ups across weeks to finally detailing their distribution in the span of weeks and days.

If you’re going the other way round, make sure your pyramid scheme of expanding to broader periods covers the intricacies of your milestones!

5. Does the content have actual value driven “content”?

Sure, you’ve got your main content aligned perfectly with your milestones across your content calendar- but is there enough content to support it?

“What can I follow up to this?” is something you continuously ask yourself when boosting a particular content material. Sure, you’ve got your video ready for YouTube, edited to perfection, and looking like high-quality content- but is there something building to its anticipation and closing?

If per se, your content is marketing something around a YouTube video, excite your audiences with Instagram visuals, status updates, and clever tweets that build your content hype! All these details leading up to the finale (your main content) are the things that occupy the days and weeks within your content calendar!

Here’s a small content build-up list to help you get started:

• Status updates – Add a Facebook check-in of your office, Instagram Story showing a BTS to the main content
• Hashtags – Create custom hashtags related to your content to market it and simultaneously build hype amongst your audiences and beyond
• TikTok video trends – A fairly new addition to the social media marketing game, you can easily create a challenge or trend on TikTok that leads up to the relevance of your content
• Newsletters and emails- As with any business-oriented marketing strategy, always maintain newsletters and emails that contain upcoming and current information to keep your audiences informed
• Articles and blogs – Come up with creative writing methods to engage your audiences in the process of introducing your much-awaited content

6. Content performance in terms of metrics?

Sure, you’ve mastered the art of efficient calendar plotting but are you checking up on how well it’s actually doing?

Like any review, set reminders across your calendar to check the success of your posts, the mistakes and what can be improved upon, and whether the money put in is doing its job.

You’ve set your content marketing plan for the whole year in motion perhaps, but you need to make necessary pit stops along the way to fill air into the flat tires. Flat tires can be:

• Spelling errors, writing mistakes
• Low engagement- Fewer likes, comments, shares
• Inefficient Ad boosts
• Mailing errors
• Technical faults (audio issues, poor quality uploads, format errors, etc.)

A thorough grasp on the content calendar checklist, and implementing it on your content marketing strategy is you stepping up a ladder on the podium of marketing supremacy!

Not only is your content organized across all your media channels, but your life starts to organize itself better as well!

Since you know that ‘that very important YouTube video’ is meant to be uploaded at 9 pm, you CAN make the time to put all that chair laundry into the washing machine that’s been lying there for a week!