Content marketing is without a doubt the buzzword lately, and more than that, it’s an extremely effective way to gain search rankings, brand your company, energize social media and much, much more. With the wide array of content publishing options at our fingertips today, one thing becomes abundantly clear: to be excellent at this you’re clearly going to need a content marketing calendar.
Keeping an eye on all the many venues in which you publish, tracking production, holding people accountable, and definitely not least, being able to execute a coherent strategy makes going forward without a content marketing calendar downright foolhardy. So let’s take a peek at how you can develop a workable content marketing calendar and strategy.
How many and who’s going to do it?
Even if you are a large company with a few departments making use of the calendar, you’ll need to have a person dedicated to ensuring the overall plan is advancing, and people are held accountable. This presupposes that you have a single content marketing calendar. We believe this is best as even while there may be different people or teams working on different aspects of content creation, it is vital that there is a common vision and goals at play here. Having more than one calendar is asking for it, and really hinders efforts at promotion. Resist the calls for independence here.
This is to lessen the chances for assignments and deadlines falling too far behind, and jeopardizing marketing promotions that are inextricably intertwined.
What form should the content marketing calendar take?
Very often the simplest solution is best, and for those just starting out, or even for the more experienced hands, a simple spreadsheet is usually sufficient for the task. Of course you will want to customize it for your company’s particulars, but this is easily done. Not only that, there are many that have gone before you in this endeavor, and a simple Google Image search will give you loads of examples to check out.
There are also software solutions that will do the job nicely, which might be the ticket for you if you have a large organization or just wish to automate more of the task completion reporting and project management. Tools like Basecamp and Teamwork come quickly to mind, but there are dozens of quality programs to choose from, so set aside some time to look them over. Be forewarned that there are costs and learning curves involved with this type of solution.
Most of the time a simple solution works best, and we would encourage this to get started, especially of you haven’t before attempted to task your content marketing. Moving up to more sophisticated systems can always happen in the future if need be.
