Creating effective and powerful content (online material) – is a key part of doing business today. Consumers and other businesses alike expect you to have a current, informative and professional online presence that showcases what your company does and demonstrates your thought leadership.
Your content enables you to communicate your knowledge and insight, and show engagement with your industry. But it can also lead to new business – whether directly, by impressing new customers, or through generating movement across your online presence. So how do you structure your online activity?
Creating a content calendar
To harness content as a marketing strategy, you need to plan and prepare your content with clear objectives and resources. Online engagement relies on regular content of a consistently high standard, tailored to your audience.
The best way to ensure this is through a content calendar, which you can use to plan all online activity – including blogs, articles, email marketing, social media and online PR. In fact, your content calendar is a great place to centralise your marketing and communications strategy, and create the backbone of your brands’ and teams’ activities.
Aside from making your content creation process easier and more efficient, having a content calendar also allows you to target spikes in traffic and social sharing by identifying optimising key dates and events.
What’s in a content calendar?
Your content calendar should determine which content gets published, when it gets published and what kind of communities to reach out to.
In your calendar, you should mark:
• important dates within your company
• relevant dates within your industry
• relevant dates for your customers
• holidays and observance dates
Recognising these dates ahead of time enables you to create captivating copy and prepare breakout marketing strategies for events that are particularly valuable for your business.
Creating the content
Once you’ve built a calendar and the easy part is done, you’ll need to actually create your content. You can make this simpler by identifying in advance what and who you’ll need for each piece of content. For example, this might include your:
• Graphic designer
• Picture editor
• Copywriter
• Project manager
• Legal team
When writing your content, always make your audience the centre of focus. Yes, you have a message to communicate, but how can you package it in a way that’s relevant for your readers? Think about who your key demographic is, how much time they’ll spend reading your post, and what tone of voice best reflects your company. We’ve created some tips for writing better online content to help you.
Why your business needs a content calendar
