Content Calendar:

The Key to Effective and Efficient Content Marketing

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One of the hardest parts of pulling off content marketing is developing some kind of structure to the types of content you are producing. It takes a framework to make sure you can A.) consistently put out valuable content and B.) do it efficiently enough that you can still meet all the other demands on your time.

Obviously there’s more to achieving a well-oiled content machine than placing seven columns on a piece of paper with the days of the week written across the top. A calendar by itself isn’t particularly helpful. The magic is in what you put on that calendar. When approached correctly, your calendar can be the engine that drives your content marketing.

Here’s what we’ll be covering in this guide:

The Point of Content Marketing (The Why)

Channels (The Where)

Formats (The How)

Topics (The What)

Scheduling (The When)

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A few decades ago, you could have a successful marketing campaign simply by throwing enough money around. Get enough expensive television spots and newspaper ads, and you could bring in the customers.

Today people use so many channels to consume news and entertainment that it’s incredibly difficult to get your message heard by everyone in one fell swoop. You need to focus on a more specific target market AND you have to convince that market that you are a likable authority in this niche.

The most direct, scalable approach to this is to consistently produce engaging content: blog posts, videos, podcasts, newsletters, etc.

1. The Point of Content Marketing

(The Why)

Shorten your sales cycleContent marketing can significantly speed up several steps in the sales cycle.

Lead generation - When marketing is working well, a portion of your leads are going to seek you out. All you need to do is qualify them. This is true of all forms of marketing, and content marketing is no exception.

Establish credibility - Positioning yourself as an expert in this particular area (because you are) helps people believe that you are not a fly-by-night operation. Anyone can file for a business permit and throw a website up, but a history of consistently talking about your subject area to a group of loyal followers is harder to fake.

Develop trust - Beyond believing you have the ability to deliver a high-quality solution, prospects needs to believe that your expertise is going to be at full strength on their projects. Consistently demonstrating results for all of your clients through content marketing is a straightforward way to nurture this type of trust.

Stay top of mind - It takes more than one great blog post to draw people in. You need to be consistently producing value.

Build loyaltyYour customers are always thinking, “What have you done for me lately?” Content marketing provides a platform to stay in front of your customers and remind them that you are 1.) knowledgeable 2.) thinking about how to solve their problems and 3.) giving them valuable content they actually use.

Arm referral partners and advocatesWhen one of your loyal fans wants to tell a friend about you, how does that look? Is your fan fumbling for words and struggling to encapsulate your key message in a way that resonates with your target audience? Just because someone loves you doesn’t mean your biggest admirer has the necessary skill set and information to sell you.

Content marketing gives your fans some ammunition. They can not only convey their passion for your business, but can also follow it up by sharing a link to a video, a workbook or an outstanding article.

Leverage great storiesWhen you come up with a great story in your business—a case study, a local event or a piece demonstrating thought-leadership in your industry—how many people see that story? If you’re anything like most organizations, that story shows up in one or two places, gets a press release and is then forgotten.

Content marketing pushes you to take that story and reshape it to be told across all of the channels where your brand has a presence.

The right way to format your calendar is whatever way is easiest for you to use. If chicken scratch in a spiral notebook is what makes sense to you and gets you motivated to create content, do that. The two versions that make the most sense to me are a spreadsheet and a grid view.

The spreadsheet is a good choice if you are planning out less frequent activity over a longer period of time. If you are doing one or two content pieces a week and you want to view the next quarter’s activity on one page, a spreadsheet makes it easy to see everything organized in one place.

If you are doing activity on a daily basis, the calendar grid can make it much easier to see how all the pieces fit together, when new posts need to be ready and how the stories fit together with local news and other items on your calendar.

What your content marketing can do for you

What a finished calendar looks like

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As you come up with great content, you’ll be pushing it out among several channels. You may not use every channel on this list—and you may have other channels that aren’t listed here. The important thing to remember is you want to decide on a frequency at which you’ll be adding content that you can stick to.

If you provide valuable content consistently, you’ll develop a loyal audience in each of these seven outlets.

Regardless of what other channels you decide to adopt, your blog must be part of your content marketing plan. This is the area on your website where you can quickly and easily add announcements and new content. By default, blogging platforms are built for publishing and engagement, and many platforms also do a good job of formatting the code to be search-engine friendly.

Much of your online activity on other sites (notably your social networks such as Facebook and Twitter) is going to be driving traffic back to your blog.

Blog Email list

Whether you publish a regular email newsletter or just send sporadic messages as needed, your email list is one of the most powerful digital assets you own. These people have opted in to receive messages from you. As long as you are providing true value to your email list, these people will stay subscribed and be receptive when you include an email that presents your product or service.

A podcast gives you access to a unique audience that likes to consume content in the car and on the treadmill. Unlike a visual consumer, who often has his mouse hovering over the back button on his browser waiting for the slightest reason to bounce away from your content, these listeners have usually blocked out at least the length of their evening commute or morning run to consume content.

There’s a misconception that podcasts are difficult to create, and that perceived barrier to entry means a lot less noise for you to cut through to reach your audience. If you can shift the administrative and logistic tasks of formatting and uploading the audio files, actually recording a podcast can take significantly less time than providing the same content in writing.

Podcast

A press release is a notice you send to media publications to provide a suggestion for a story they could run. They will likely need to do a little more research, and they absolutely write the piece themselves, but you provide the highlights. It is very easy to do a bad press release, and it’s a waste of time to do so because it’s just going to be immediately thrown away.

A good press release looks for a unique, newsworthy angle to the story. How does this news affect the community? What are you doing that’s never been done before? Why are you excited about it—besides the idea of making money?

Press releases

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are platforms where you can promote content. Like any other channel, there are a few ways to do it well and a lot of ways to do it poorly. First and foremost, make sure you are providing value to your social connections. Since you’re going to be producing valuable content, pushing that content on your social channels is appropriate.

Just make sure you are also participating on these platforms socially. Listen and react to what other people are doing. It isn’t solely a channel for you to broadcast your message.

Social

If you can find opportunities to get in front of someone else’s audience (assuming there is significant overlap with your target market) it is a fantastic opportunity. These opportunities might include a column in a serial publication where you share your opinion in your area of expertise, give an interview to someone or write a guest post on someone else’s blog.

Guest author

One of the most effective ways to establish expertise in your industry is to get up in front of people and speak. You can start small by running a workshop or a lunch-and-learn. Eventually you can work up to appearing on panels or giving presentations at industry conferences. In broad terms, speaking is extremely scalable. You can (and should) repeat your presentations and adapt them to almost any size audience.

Speaking

2. Channels(The Where)

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A big part of your social media activity should be based on interaction with other people, but you will also be adding your own original content to the mix from time to time. Here are some ideas to get you thinking.

Pull quotes - If you have a particular sentence or two from something you’ve written that is powerful or encapsulates a point well, it would probably make a good status update shared over social media.

Illustrated pull quotes - Visual content is particularly popular over social media and more frequently shared, so put that pull quote over a compelling image or jazz it up with a little design.

Statistics and trivia - Bite-sized nuggets of information fit very nicely into the social format, and it is typically very easy to prepare and schedule a lot of these in advance.

Links to other sites - It isn’t all about you. You can get on the radar of people who can help you in your industry and provide value to your customers by sharing links to great online resources for your industry.

Memes - A popular practice on the Internet is to take a particular picture and add a humorous or thought-provoking caption. You can pick one of these viral images, and create your own caption. (If this is all new to you, get started at http://www.quickmeme.com/.)

Questions - Just ask people a question for their opinion or preferences. This works best if you already have a handful of actively engaged followers on whatever platform you try.

Blog content

The backbone of your content is going to be powerful flagship pieces that provide a comprehensive view on a particular topic. If you make maps for a living, you’ll probably want to create a piece of cornerstone content about cartography software that is an authoritative resource for a beginner who wants to learn about cartography software.

You’ll create more content about some of the finer points of cartography software later, and those pieces will all contain links back to this overarching view of the topic.

Cornerstone content

The tutorial should be another staple of your blogging regimen. The best way to demonstrate your expertise on a subject is to explain to someone else how to do it. The more you can simplify a complex idea into sequential steps an average person can wrap their brain around, the better you understand that idea. Is that actually true? Maybe. Is that how people perceive it? Without question.

Tutorial (How to...)

What if you want to create blog posts about topics about which you only have rudimentary knowledge? Find experts. Reach out to people with experience or credentials that qualify them to share their expertise and ask questions to fill in the gaps in your own understanding of the topic. Turn the result into a Q & A post.

Get an interview

No matter what industry you work in, people make false assumptions about what you do. A common misconception: they assume certain steps in your process should be free or easy. Set them straight with a post where you go through one or more myths that your target audience believes and explain why they’re not true.

Debunk a myth

There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this. Do not make up some inflammatory viewpoint you don’t actually feel strongly about just to draw some attention. Instead, identify polarizing topics where you truly believe one perspective has your enthusiastic support. Write a post that respectfully brings up the topic and why you feel the way you do. Don’t insult the opposition, but be firm and clear about your thoughts on the matter.

Take a controversial stance

A case study is so useful because you paint a picture for your prospective customers of what they should expect when they work with you. You will certainly share case studies that had a positive end result, but you can also make your case study truly impactful if you share challenges that came up during the process—even mistakes that you made—and how you resolved them.

Case study of one of your victories

3. Formats(The How)

Social broadcast

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If you can find a relatively quiet spot with good lighting, you can use your webcam or even a good mobile phone to shoot an informal video where you just chat about a topic for a few minutes. Bonus points for editing the video and editing in music and images, but that’s not required.

Video

This is a long game, but if you have access to a sufficient number of your target audience members (online or offline), you can send out a survey and compile the findings into an industry report.

Survey + industry report

You know more about the tools and approaches used in your industry because you do it every day. Share your expertise and grade or rank some of the best software and techniques to help your audience understand just how good you are at what you do.

Curated rankings/scores

Create a custom map in Google Maps of locations that are important to your audience. Embed that map in a web page and provide a little commentary on each location.

Google map mashup

The Internet loves a good list. In addition to being easy to read, a blog post that breaks an idea down into its constituent parts is also easy to write. There’s some overlap here as almost any style of blog post can be formatted as a list.

Comprehensive list

No one likes to realize after the fact that they made a bad decision. Maybe that’s why people gravitate to a post that gives them warning signs before they go down the wrong path. Share the red flags that would indicate someone is working with a service provider or using a product that is not going to give them the result they are looking for. It goes without saying that you can then advise them to call you for the right solution.

Red flag

You aren’t limited to only talking about the great content you’ve created yourself. You can also demonstrate your expertise by showing that you stay on top of what other people in your field are creating. A roundup lets you share all the great content that other people are sharing around a certain idea. Add a few sentences of commentary on each piece about why it’s great, and you’ve provided a valuable service to your readers.

Roundup

Leverage the name recognition of authors by writing a review of books on your industry or business in general. Talking about where you agree and disagree will help people more quickly understand how you position yourself in your industry.

Book review

Once you start to develop a following, you can kill several birds with one stone: create content, engage your audience and do a little market research by throwing a question out there to your followers. Make sure your question is on a topic that is important to your community and closely moderate the responses for anyone getting a little too passionate in their responses.

Crowd-sourced question

The mega-infographics made popular by the SEO industry have fallen out of favor, but you can still get a good response with a focused infographic that takes one piece of data and represents it visually. Picture the graphs that accompany articles in smart magazines, and you’re on the right track.

Infographic

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One of the advantages of a content calendar is that it helps you stay focused on the topics that are going to help move your business in the direction you’ve outlined in your marketing strategy. Rather than sitting down at the computer wondering what to write about in the blog post that’s supposed to be published in the next hour, you decide ahead of time what you’ll be covering. Whenever you sit down to start creating your actual content, you’ll already know the topic.

Questions from customersOne of the best sources for content is your customers. They’re nice enough to tell you exactly what question you should be answering with your content if you are willing to listen. Ask your sales team, customer service department and anyone else who has direct interactions with your customers to share what questions they get asked over and over again.

Keep asking for more questions until you’ve compiled a list of at least 50 questions. (It won’t take you long to reach that number.) Each question is a blog post, podcast, article, or other content piece.

Get bonus SEO points by using the exact question as the title for your content. The words and phrasing of the question are clues to how your customer thinks—and how they would type the question into a search engine.

New products/servicesA compelling reason to build up an audience with content marketing is so you have a large pool of people to talk to when you roll out a new product or service. Make sure your content is built around the benefits your customers will get instead of the features of the product. Be specific.

AwardsFor almost every business, modesty is overrated. Whenever you receive some recognition, don’t be afraid to toot your own horn. What did you do to win the award, and how is it indicative of the quality a new customer should expect if they start working with you today.

SponsorshipsYou should sponsor organizations because you believe in their mission and want to help them succeed. That being said, you should also share these sponsorships with your audience. It makes them feel good to know that when they buy your goods and services, a portion of their money goes to support worthwhile organizations. You can also see increased business as supporters of the organizations you sponsor want to support and increase that engagement. Don’t forget you’re also giving the organization extra exposure by talking about the sponsorship.

Local eventsWhen you interact with people face to face in a professional capacity, you are promoting to them directly. There’s also a secondary promotional echo if you create content around the event itself. Even the members of your audience who can’t (or don’t want to) interact with you at events will view you as more authentic and personal if you talk about the people with whom you did make a personal connection.

Link loveYou don’t need a formal agreement to support other businesses and organizations. If you come across a cool business that is not a direct competitor, but has similar values and a similar audience to yours, talk them up to your audience and send some attention their way. If it’s a business worth talking about, your audience will appreciate learning about them. They might even return the favor.

4. Topics(The What)

Long tail searchAs the search traffic to your site increases over time, you’ll start to notice occasional visitors who stumble across your site while looking up a search term that you weren’t intending to target. Ask yourself what need these people are trying to satisfy with this search. Craft a message that speaks directly to them and put that on the page where they are entering your site.

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You are now armed with the pieces you need to put together your content calendar. Begin planning monthly meetings with your content strategy team to build out your calendar for the following month. Depending on how much content you create and how frequently your industry changes, you may need to meet more or less often, but a month is a good place to start as you get your feet wet.

Define your scheduleThink about the channels you are using (blog, Facebook, newsletter, etc.) and how frequently you are pushing content across each channel. From this you can list the “slots” you need to fill in your calendar.

These slots are just for your broadcast content. Even if you only publish original content to your Twitter account once a day, you still need to be prepared to interact with your audience reactively when they instigate an interaction with you.

Fill the scheduleStart matching topics (The What) and formats (The How) together to create headlines for your future content pieces. The headlines may eventually change, but it’s helpful at this point to create a title you can use as a reference.

I recommend jotting down combinations of topics and formats in a general list first, and listing more than you could possible use in the next 30 days. Once you have a long list of headlines, you can pull the best and plug those into the slots on your schedule where they make the most sense.

If you are having trouble building out your list, start randomly selecting format and topic combinations. Some of the mixes might not make sense, but don’t abandon every pair that doesn’t make sense right off the bat. The most unlikely combinations can make for the most interesting, popular content pieces.

ConclusionThe most fundamental part of the content calendar approach is to create the necessary time to plan your calendar in advance. Make it a recurring event in your personal schedule if necessary, and make sure your content strategy team has the available time to think about your next 30 days of content without distraction.

The decisions that come out of this meeting will dictate how a lot of your promotional time and money will be focused in the coming weeks. It’s worth making sure your team is giving the discussion their undivided attention.

6. Bonus: Promotion (The Now What?)

Now that you’ve mastered consistently putting up focused content that is in line with your big picture marketing objectives, what’s next? The answer is to get your content in front of as large an audience as possible.

The key to successful, profitable content marketing is not shouting into the darkness. Before you can connect with your potential customers, you have to get your message in front of them.

For exclusive video content about what to do next, head to http://www.silversquareinc.com/nowwhat

5. Scheduling(The When)