Nowadays, content marketing is crucial to any business and blog owners and managers.
Content marketing can generate thrice as many leads compared to any traditional marketing strategies, and it is 62% cheaper than any promotional approach. It just proves that if you know how to use the medium properly, you get to save a lot of money from advertising and even increase your profit.
The only dilemma is that it takes time and effort to be consistent, which is imperative in content marketing.
Actually, the majority of content marketers, at 60%, create and post at least one piece of content each day. From blog topic ideation to publication, to content development and management can take so much time and effort. You need to consider how to consistently post, how to regularly engage with your audience, and how to actively create engaging content which can be very overwhelming.
To be able to manage your content seamlessly, you need your own content calendar.
What Is a Content Calendar?
No matter the type of content you want to get across, no matter who you want to reach, inside or outside your organization, you must manage your content strategically to be powerful.
You also need to implement your content by being timely with the information or stories you deliver. Doing so will lead to a productive engagement with your target market. One of the practical tools commonly used by any marketer is a content calendar.
A content calendar, also known as an editorial calendar, is the most important, practical, and beneficial tool that any marketer can have. It is basically a pre-thought-out schedule of when and where you plan to post your strategic content to enhance your target market’s interest and experience.
Benefits of Content Calendar
Indeed, content calendars are the best way to plan and organize your upcoming stories and valuable posts. But how can you specifically benefit from using a content calendar?
The following are just some of the benefits of a content calendar:
- Planning your content ahead of schedule becomes more efficient
- You can produce more content by repurposing
- Collaborating with your team on content development is easier
- You can study your content calendar to determine the most effective content
Check out how each of these advantages listed can help you.
Planning Content Ahead of Schedule
Being on top of everything you run is definitely a must and a content calendar would help you with that, especially in managing everything accordingly. A well-done content calendar would ensure that all of your content-related tasks are delivered spontaneously throughout the team, and the contents are actually published as scheduled, without having to worry about missing a day.
However, if you would skip doing your content calendar or document a plan, the consequences are you might forget things or spend more on the wrong market, or neglect to update your other contents, or publish less until your page dies out. Know that in content marketing, content planning done ahead of time is all worth it.
Keep also in mind that social media content should be posted at a particular time of the day, and it would depend on your target audience. And know that there are things in life that are uncontrollable and might need our attention.
What more if you plan ahead of time and automate your content? Well, you can personally engage with your target audience and answer their queries without being worried about your content.
So stay organized and commit to creating your content calendar. This single step can be very cost-effective.
Producing More Content Through Repurposing
With a content calendar, you can also generate more content through repurposing. Content repurposing is one of the most effective and rewarding strategies in content marketing.
By keeping data of your previous posts in your content calendar, you can compare the most effective content. What you can do is that you can package a certain content in another format, for a different platform, or even create a whole new bunch of related but valuable content.
You can also answer missing information from the previous articles, podcast episodes, or video blogs t and turn your content into a useful PDF giveaway or infographic for a social media post. Indeed, by keeping track of your posts in the content calendar, you can level up your asset or reuse it somewhere else.
Remember that part of the content calendar tools is mind mapping. Organizing your content and weighing which one can be repurposed is for your other channels.
Collaborating With the Entire Team Is Faster
Content calendars that are strategically curated will surely catalyze the productivity of the team. Why? This is because these calendars are not built to fill in each staff schedule but it is surely built around them, built with a common goal in mind, and created based on the strengths of the whole team.
Also, you can assign tasks based on their specialty, which can make them productive and fast. Be easily updated with their progress and on what they currently need. This tool can also help them keep track of their content deadlines and be ahead of them. With a system to follow and calendar at hand, everything is manageable and faster.
The content calendar bolsters transparency and trust within your team as the progress of content development becomes accessible in real-time.
Identifying Effective Content Is Easier
For maximum mileage, content calendars can help you easily spot effective content especially, if you record your content’s performance in that calendar. Of course, your content calendar should give you an overview of what to elaborate on or build on and repurpose.
The key here is to audit your content by using metrics, keep track of it in your calendar, and analyze which content performs best. And from that data, you can plan dynamic and relevant content. This is also how you can determine your next pillar content.
Once you and your team have settled on a certain plan, surely you can free yourself and focus more on tackling and solving bigger problems.
Indeed, having a content calendar is necessary, beneficial, and practical. Furthermore, if it is executed the right way, it would surely help you save time, energy, and money, resulting in optimal business growth.
