Top Tips for Creating a Killer Content Calendar
Creating a detailed content calendar is key to achieving your strategic goals and producing consistent quality material for your audience. By achieving your content goals, you can improve your search engine marketing efforts, increase your engagement, and better market your business. Here are six simple tools to create an effective content calendar.
1. Brainstorm
Gather the entire content creation team and analyze your strategy. Determine what you want to achieve on each channel, whether website content, blogs, social media posts or webinars. Everyone should share ideas and visions. Any ideas that are not utilized now should be saved for the future and brought out for discussion at a later time.
2. Write it Out
Get out the big markers and create a poster-sized three-month calendar. Next, fill in important dates and holidays relevant to your business and region. This is also the time to include pertinent international observances that are universally marked with hashtags on social media, such as International IoT Day or Cupcake Day. This poster should be maintained and prominently displayed on a wall where the content team meets.
3. Color Code
Use different colored sticky notes for each contributor task. Sticky notes are handy as they can be moved around if there is a delay or a strategy change. You can even take this a step further by using different marker colors over the sticky notes, identifying different subtopics. By color coordinating, anyone on the team that looks at the main calendar can identify production patterns and subject topics.
4. Select the Right Writers
Don’t just randomly assign topics to writers. Choose writers who are both topic experts, as well as independent workers. They must be organized and able meet deadlines. They should possess writing and editing skills and the ability to take direction if the writing does not meet publication standards.
5. Manage
This taskmaster should keep in touch with individual writers and check on the progress of content. They will confirm that everything is on schedule, authorization to publish, and photo availability. They should also have the skills to coordinate an adjustment to the schedule. Ideally, they should also have some basic editing skills and the talent to prepare the blog prior to publication.
6. Follow Up
Google Analytics is an easy way to determine if your content is meeting your goals. Evaluate your content regularly and don’t be afraid to make adjustments to the calendar to improve statistics.
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