Creating a content calendar and planning your digital marketing strategy can help your SEO (search engine optimization) rank and reach potential customers. Working with a content marketing agency to create an effective and exciting editorial calendar will make a difference. Even if you previously created a content strategy, now is the time to work with content marketing services to tweak and improve on that plan.
What Is A Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a document that an organization uses to plan out content they want to publish throughout the month or year. This includes blogs and social media. A calendar allows you to get the big picture of your content marketing efforts. Your business is telling a story. You are using all of your social media and online marketing tools to help this story unfold. You may also be planning a rollout of a new product or service and need to work backwards to set up this great event. An effective content calendar will keep you and your team on schedule.
How long should you plan? You can plan for two months at a time or even up to six months. A local digital marketing agency such as Horde Marketing, servicing Jasper County, Butts County, Henry County, Clayton County, Fulton County areas, can provide you with digital marketing services, as well as information technology services to help you create and schedule an effective marketing campaign.
Why Create A Content Marketing Calendar?
Planning your content marketing on a single calendar is essential to planning out the next month, quarter or even year. This is an organizing tool. Most of all, this is the framework for your blog, social media and overall online presence. You need to decide what sort of information you want to convey to potential clients and when you want to disperse it.
Know Your Customer First
Even before you begin the process, identify your target audience, your ideal customer. Who are they, what are their buying habits and what is the best method to reach them? This information, along with your mission statement should be consulted throughout your content planning sessions.
Branding
Besides knowing who your customer is, branding is something that should be considered before you begin strategizing. This includes graphics, colors and branded keywords.
Discuss Social Media Channels
One important discussion with your content marketing team will be about social media channels. Take that consumer information and figure out what channels will work best in attracting that clientele.
Instagram is all about the visual. Because this is considered a very happy medium, customers engaging with your posts are more apt to shop your products. If you are on Instagram, have you considered adding Instagram Stories to your discussion?
Twitter is a short and quick-witted way to connect with consumers. Because it is so frequently shared, this is an ideal format for sharing graphics or infographics.
Facebook allows you to really engage with your customers with the group feature. Consider having more than just a business page. With a Facebook group, you can really find out what your customers like and want.
YouTube is the second biggest search engine after Google. As video continues to grow, you may consider speaking to your content marketing agency about video ideas.
What To Put Into Calendar?
What should you include in this calendar? Take a big calendar and several colored pens for coding (or create a digital one online), and begin plotting. Start out by planning content and posts that answer frequently asked client questions. These can be taken from emails, social media or from in-person contact.
Next, mark out any sort of big industry days that you want to acknowledge. Brainstorm some ideas of how your business can share their branded take on this event. Brainstorming ideas is a great way to get ideas or topics down on your calendar to expand on throughout the year.
Do you have any upcoming roll-outs or seasonal new products? Mark that date and work backwards to when you can begin sharing some clues on social media.
What types of information do you want to share? Instructional or unboxing videos, infographics, educational white papers, blog posts, customer testimonials or success stories all translate well onto social media.
Determine when and where you will share them. Whenever possible, you should not share the exact same posts in each of your social channels. Instead, you can share complimentary posts. When you sit down with your content marketing agency team, you can create a digital marketing plan that will be exciting, fun and on brand. Just because you can use all of the social media platforms, doesn’t mean you should. Focus on the platforms that are best for your target audience.
Part of your content calendar planning is to ensure that you post to social media regularly and at key times. Determining when you actually post is based on where your client base is located and when they are most likely to engage with your content. Your team can help you use tools like Hootsuite to schedule your content at maximum time frames. One huge key to social media is consistency. If you publish a video every Monday, then you must plan for this release, or otherwise risk losing viewers.
Content should be divided equally between your business, your industry and fun. Decide if you will share some backstage insights on your organization. Figure what is special about your business, home base or team that you can share with your customers. This personal touch helps engage customers and solidifies their loyalty to your brand.
Blog Length
SEO (search engine optimization) like Google rewards sites that demonstrate expertise. Longer blog posts at 1,500 to 2,000 words can help improve your ranking. The blog content needs to be well-researched and add value to your customer. Higher ranking content includes quotes or citations from experts in your field, along with helpful links to other, equally professional sites. Blog posts within a website should each have their own main keyword that also relates to other site content. These additional posts take a deeper dive. All of your posts should all be linked together, in order for your customer to get a wealth of information and for search engines to know what pages are relevant to others within your website.
Organized With White Space
How do you keep viewers on your site longer? By making your content look organized. Some techniques include bullet points, numbered lists and short paragraphs. Aim for clean looking text with plenty of white space. This psychologically helps draw the viewer’s eyes to your words, infographics or photos and makes it easier for the reader to focus on your informative content. Think skimmable content.
Is Your Content Performing?
Make it a regular habit to evaluate which content is performing best. Examine your key analytics to determine which posts perform the best. Make necessary tweaks and adjustments based on response and engagement.
Don’t be afraid of reposting older, but valid content. Be sure to try introducing it at a different time or in a different way.
Horde Marketing Can Help Take Your Efforts to the Next Level
Be sure to check with Horde Marketing to improve your content marketing and watch your revenues increase. By implementing an effecting content marketing strategy and an approved content calendar, the team at Horde Marketing will focus on increasing your business goals while optimizing for conversions. Contact our team online or by phone (678-961-9435) to get started.