8 Tips to Create a Strategic Content Calendar
Pushing out content consistently is also as important as pushing out quality content, hence the importance of creating a content calendar. Being strategic about the kind of content that you create requires you to first put on your thinking cap. Think long and hard about the main objectives for creating content for your brand. Also, think about why you have chosen the selected platform to share your content. Ideally, your choice is made with the hope that your chosen content marketing platform will help your organization to achieve its critical goals.
Thereafter, you will be able to create additional structured and strategic content that will align with the overall organizational objectives. With this, you can start to integrate a strategic content calendar that will become very effective indeed. If you would like assistance in creating a robust strategic content calendar for your business it would be a great idea to get in touch with a content marketing agency. Otherwise, here are 8 great tips to successfully create a long-term and effective strategic content calendar.
1. Know your target audience
This is the first rule for your content calendar to be as effective as possible. As explained earlier, brands need to have a clear picture of their target audience. This will help them identify the best platforms with which to reach them. It will also help them to create quality targeted content on each platform.
2. Know the best platforms to reach your target audience
There are many platforms and channels brands can use to share their content. Find the ones that best fit your target audience and create content that will draw their attention there. Doing this makes it super easy for you to get your team together to create content that will help drive the business’ main objectives. Imagine if you don’t know if your target audience is using Facebook a lot or reading emails a lot or using mobile apps a lot.
First, you’d make a fuss about which of the platforms you’d start with. Then you also have to bother about how frequently you will have to post on each platform so you don’t miss out on an opportunity to connect with them. Now, compare that to knowing that your target audience is on Instagram, creating more authentic and specific content for Instagram, and using detailed analytics to help you understand when to post.
3. Create and post quality content relevant to the platform that your target audience will use
Creating content is not just about plastering your brand’s logo all over the content to draw attention to the brand. No! It should be about creating authentic and relatable content that your target audience will be able to take a second look at and maybe even willingly decide to share it with their own friends. If you’re sharing the content to your audience via email, you should know that a link to your video content would be better than the entire video.
4. Don’t over saturate the platform with content
If you have been able to carry out the first three points explained above, you will have gained confidence in your ability to create unique content and confidence in your ability to use the actual platform itself. However, do not be tempted to overdo it. Don’t be tempted to post too much either of the same type of content or too much content in general. You can push people away by doing this. Have a frequency and keep to it. It’s really not all about the number of posts but the quality of each post (in terms of how that post can help the organization to achieve its main business objectives).
5. Check the performance of each piece of content published
If the goal of the business is to build more brand connections through engagement, you need to look through the content you have published over a period of time (maybe a month or so). Pick out the best-performing ones and the least performing ones. Try to dig deep into the possible causes for both. Then go back to the drawing board (content calendar) and make necessary adjustments to the next batch of content you intend to push out.
By doing this review consistently you can keep improving on the kind of content you push out. This can be more effective if you plan content for a month or two, review it and create a more strategic content calendar for the next month or two based on your experience from the first batch you pushed out.
6. Have a goal
As mentioned earlier, it is easier for you to create a more strategic content calendar when you know what you are aiming for. If you want more brand connection then the kind of content you will create will be different from the content aimed at creating brand awareness. Being specific about your goals can help you create more specific content that will push the brand in that direction. It also makes it easier to measure the performance of the content you are pushing out. Over a period of time, you can go back to review these published content to see which ones are getting you closer to your goal. If not, you can replan your content calendar.
7. Use your brand’s buyer persona
Get a good grasp of who your target audience is. Once this is understood you can create various buyer personas from this knowledge. Then try to imagine walking in the shoes of these buyer personas. This will enable you to really understand what possible questions your audience may have in mind or what kind of information would be relevant enough for them to take the kind of actions you want them to take. Examples of such actions include making a purchase, subscribing to your newsletter, following your social media pages and so on.
8. Use FAQs to create topics for content
Knowing the content that your target audience might be interested in doesn’t happen overnight. Brands need to be open-minded to explore different content that fits their goals and their target audience. So, the easiest place to start is with the frequently asked questions. Gather these questions together and create beautiful and relatable content out of it. And then share.