The New Year is almost here! If you’re making a resolution to be more organized when it comes to your content marketing efforts in 2016, then pay attention! Developing a content calendar is an effective tool for managing your content marketing efforts because they allow you to organize and create your content ahead of when you need to use it. This week we discuss 4 simple steps that will help you organize your content marketing in the New Year.
If you’re new to content marketing, may I suggest reading our post, “The Current State of Content Marketing”.
1. Outline Your Goals
Define a Strategy
When creating a content calendar in 2016, it is important to sit down and outline what you wish to achieve by using a content calendar. If you’ve already developed a content marketing strategy, then you’ve more than likely already outlined your goals; however, it is important to expand on this written plan and include the calendar and outcomes by date.
When creating a content calendar start off by asking yourself: “What's my aim for developing a content marketing plan? Why do I want to produce content and create a content marketing plan?” (Source: Hubspot, 2015). Knowing what you want to achieve before you start planning ensures that you will have an easier time determining what's best for your strategy (Source: Hubspot, 2015) while a written statement of your goals will ensure that you’re keeping in line with your original objectives.
Having a content marketing strategy can help you develop a content calendar faster and with ease. Don’t have a content marketing strategy in place? May I suggest reading our previous post, “How to Create a Digital Content Marketing Strategy”.
Outline Your Content Goals
Once you outline your main goal, it's time to figure out how you’re going to create and utilize that content. Some questions you should be thinking about when creating a calendar strategy include (Source: Entrepreneur, 2015):
- How will you use content to improve processes/strategies?
- How will you ensure your content will solve specific pain points?
- Will your content give you new insights on relevant data?
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Before you create your calendar you probably want to consider how often you’re going to publish and when. This should be determined by your sales and marketing goals (Source: Xoombi, 2015). For example, if you require more sales, you’ll probably want to have more content and offers that have your buyer in mind (Source: Xoombi, 2015). Looking at your current content can help you determine how frequently you should be posting. By analyzing your website and social media insights, you can detect if there are any patterns or peak times when your audience is most engaged with your content (Source: Entrepreneur, 20150). Looking at your current content can also help you determine what types of content will help you to achieve your goals. Did you find one form of content was more engaging than another? What type of content is your audience most interested in?
Let’s face it… everyone today has some sort of content marketing tactics in place. With so much content out on the internet, how do you make sure your content is reaching audiences? We discuss how to combat this problem in our post, “Top 3 Tactics used by Best-in- Class Digital Content Marketers”.
Define your Distribution Strategy
Defining how you will distribute your content is just as important as the content itself. If you aren’t properly distributing it, chances are that audiences aren't even going to find your content. As a result, all of your efforts will be wasted. While the idea of distributing your content may seem straightforward, the process of effective distribution is actually quite complicated (Source: Percolate, 2015).
Thanks to the internet, there are a lot more distribution channels than a decade ago. With so many options available to you, it can be hard to determine the best channels to schedule in your content calendar (Source: Percolate, 2015). Looking at your current content can help you determine which channels your audience is interacting with you on the most (Source: Percolate, 2015). Looking at this information can help you adapt your calendar to your audience, and build stronger messages that align your sales and marketing goals (Source: Percolate, 2015).
A content management system is a great tool to enhance your distribution strategy. With the assitance of sales enablement software, you can develop a strong presence across all channels. In turn, this allows you to seize a greater market share while widening your reach. The use of sales enablement tools can also be an effective way to control brand messaging and ensure that all materials are consistent across all of your platforms.
Did you know the channel you use can impact the way that audiences interpret your message? Find out how in our post, “The Influence of Channels on Digital Content Management & Communications”.
2. Develop Distribution Tactics and Topics
Create Your Topics
Now that you’ve outlined what you want to achieve and how you’re going to achieve it, it is time to start thinking about the content that you want to create. This can feel like a daunting task, however, if you start by creating a list of topics you’ll be surprised at how much easier this process can be. The best way to start the brainstorming process is by making a list of themes that you feel are most important to your company (Source: Duct Tape Marketing, 2015). When developing your key themes you should take into consideration the values, ideas, and topics that you want your marketing team to be talking about (Source: Percolate, 2015).
Once you’ve compiled a list of themes, you can develop a list of topics surrounding each theme. Depending on your distribution strategy, you may even want to cover subtopics. Subtopics are important as they act as a link to “products, seasons, campaign themes, SEO keywords, geographic markets, or creative approaches” (Source: Percolate, 2015). For example, for the month of January, you wish to focus on the topic of cell phones. In the first week of January you cover the topic of cell phone usage in Canada and break off into a smaller conversation about your subtopic, cellular providers in Canada.
If you haven’t already done so, the next step you should take is to determine keywords. Once you have your list of topics, using the Google Keyword Planner should help find the most relevant themes that have the most volume (Source: Duct Tape Marketing, 2015). Having a list of these keywords already created before you start to put together your marketing materials will be helpful and ensure that your content is on track with respect to your chosen themes.
Did you know that we process visual images differently than text? Find out how in our post, “The Science Behind Visually Appealing Digital Content”.
Major Events
Creating a content calendar is not only a great way to organize and prepare your content, it's a great reminder for events and topics that are timely in nature. While special events don’t consume a majority of your content calendar, they do help to spike traffic (Source: Hubspot, 2015). For most companies, this means working popular holidays into their marketing efforts (Source: Hubspot, 2015).
If you have major events on your calendar, like tradeshows, conferences, or user events, start with these items and develop supporting tactics that you’ll need to make the event successful. By focusing on major events and creating campaigns around them, your content will be better focused and more effective (Source: Xoombi, 2015).
Creating an effective Omni-channel strategy is a lot harder than you might have imagined. Find out how sales enablement can change that in our post,“5 Ways Sales Enablement Can Create a Seamless Omni-Channel Strategy”.
(Source: Ernest Barbaric, 2015)
3. Create & Determine Campaigns
Now comes the fun part… the planning stage! This is your opportunity to plan your campaigns in advance including what they will be centered on, when, and where they will take place. This also gives you the ability to coordinate your content with some of your larger marketing campaigns that may be in effect. For example, if you’re launching an eBook about cell phone usage in Canada, you should have a blog post about the topic, potentially linking your audience to your eBook (Source: Xoombi, 2015). If created correctly, a content calendar is a great tool in helping you organize your campaigns across multiple channels in a way that appears seamless to your audience.
When scheduling your content calendar you should keep in mind the buyer’s decision journey. Producing content that is relevant to the buyer at every stage of their decision journey will help them reach a decision faster. Understanding how your prospects move through their decision journey and the types of content they prefer to see at each stage will help you. To do so you should “understand how people move from asking ‘what is’ and ‘why is this important’ to questions like ‘How do I do it’, ‘who does it’, and ‘how much does it cost?’ ” (Source: Content Marketing Institute, 2015). Your content should be balanced to represent buyers at all stages, as many companies tend to focus the majority of resources on the late-stage prospects (Source: Content Marketing Institute, 2015).
Interested in learning more about the decision journey? May I suggest reading our post, “The Sales Process: Buyer Decision Journey Stages”.
4. Measure & Evaluate
Once you’ve created your content marketing calendar and executed your strategy, the last step is to measure and evaluate your efforts. One way to do so is through the sales team. Receiving information from sales about the leads they’ve received helps marketing to understand what are the best and worst lead practices (Source: Hubspot, 2012). This is known as closed-loop marketing. As defined by Hubspot, “closed-loop marketing is marketing that relies on data and insights from closed-loop reporting (Source: Hubspot, 2012).
Closed- loop marketing is an effective way to measure and reference your content’s performance (Source: Percolate, 2015). Your marketing team then has more insight into what changes you need to make. Whether to optimize your production, or even your distribution steps and tactics (Source: Percolate, 2015). Moreover, tracking your content marketing ROI is an important measurement tool as it makes a strong business case and helps you commit to measurable progress (Source: Content Marketing Institute, 2015). With any strategy, it is always a good idea to periodically analyze your efforts and evaluate what is working or not.
Tracking ROI from your content marketing efforts is made easy with sales enablement. Through sales enablement tools, you can track all of your customer-facing efforts and analyze the effectiveness of each. Through sales analytic software, marketing can access data that sales reps have collected out in the field. All of this makes it easier to understand where your sales leads are going and helps marketing to create stronger content in the future.
Want to learn how to better track your metrics? May I suggest reading our post, “How to Choose the Right Metrics for your Sales Process”.
Whether you want to take your content marketing to the next level in 2016, or are looking to start content marketing for the first time, creating a content calendar is a great way to organize and manage your materials. Following these 4 easy steps will make you a content marketing master in no time!
[RELATED CONTENT] If you found this post to be helpful for your content marketing, I think you'll really enjoy the case study we put together which illustrates the sales enablement solution that we put in place for GSK. We helped them to overcome their content challenges and improve the effectiveness of their digital sales content.
