Create Better Content with a Content Calendar

In today’s digital marketing arena, there are an infinite number of ways to market your property and grow your brand. With so many tools, potential audiences, and platforms at your fingertips, the possibilities are overwhelming. Are you planning out your email content and social media ahead of time, or hitting “post” on the fly? When you invest time into building a content calendar for your website, social media accounts, and emails, you’ll alleviate so much last-minute stress and create higher-quality content that reaches the right audience.

Planning

Creating a content calendar may feel like a big undertaking, but you can rest assured that you will reap the benefits of better, more organized content after the initial time commitment. Preparing your content—a month or even a few weeks ahead of time—helps ease that daily pressure of what to post on all your platforms. Laying it out day-by-day on a spreadsheet or interactive calendar gives you a clear vision, defined workload, and makes the act of sharing content less labor-intensive. Set a realistic posting schedule for each week, identify the goal of each post, and pinpoint which social media platform will achieve it best. The social media mavens at HootSuite suggest that each content-calendar entry should include:

• The exact date and time the post is going live
• The social media platform and account where the post will be published
• The post’s copy and creative assets (i.e. photos or videos)
• Links and tags to be included in the post
• Any additional relevant information (e.g. is this an Instagram Feed post or a Story?)

Produce Higher-Quality Content

When you start treating your digital marketing content as an outlet that can grow your business, rather than just another task on your to-do list, you can get more thoughtful and ambitious with your content strategies.

Once you have a schedule in place, your creativity can begin to flow. You don’t have to be a graphic designer to create a great social media graphic. Websites like Canva offer thousands of professional templates and images to choose from, so you can start bringing your ideas to life in no time. Laying out blog articles and social media posts ahead of time reduces the risk of spelling errors and major mistakes. Build time into your process for copyediting, researching, and fact checking to ensure your published post is a reliable, factual resource for your readers.

Stay current on the latest social media trends and memes—you don’t want to miss out on those cultural internet moments! A content calendar allows you to capitalize on those opportunities and properly plan them in a way that best suits your property and audience.   

Consistency is Key

Consistently show up in your followers’ social media feeds and email inboxes. Once you establish that priceless brand recognition, audience engagement will follow. Schedule ahead of time with your calendar and show up each week with relevant content. Develop posts that answer questions, engage your readers, and delight your audience.

Choose the Right Scheduling Tools For You

No matter your budget, there’s a content calendar option and a social media scheduler for you. Applications like Asana, Google Sheets, Coshedule, Trello, and Monday.com allow you to build out your plans in a calendar, input captions, and attach photos and video. You’ll know exactly what you’re going to post before it’s copied-and-pasted onto your various marketing platforms.

Resources like Hootsuite and Hubspot take it a step further. They integrate with sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn and can publish posts for you.

Simplify your tasks and lessen your workload with a content calendar. Compile your photos, videos, captions, in one convenient place. And most importantly, make spreading the good word about your business easier than ever before.