The Power of a Content Calendar

Content calendars tend to get a bad rap for being boring and formulaic, but that’s often the fault of their creators, not the tool itself.

If you simply fill in a calendar with stale messaging, spiced up with a sprinkling of hashtags, you’re unlikely to see any results. However, when you approach the project with forethought and precision, you’ll reap some valuable benefits.

Welcome to your safety net

Mapping out your content plans ahead of time creates a safety net that frees up time so you can tackle more spontaneous tasks, (like engaging in conversations with clients on social media or producing new blog posts that address breaking industry news).

If you find yourself with bandwidth one day to create something new, simply save your pre-planned content. You’ll find it more relaxing (and productive) than trying to dream up and create something cool, timely, and strategic every day with that blinking curser staring you in the face.

Meaningful and measurable

Content calendars also allow you to measure the effectiveness of everything you create and publish. Instead of scrambling to generate timely topics, you can focus instead on testing how content performs and fine-tuning future iterations. For example, we’ve learned that posts about brainstorming get good traction and our target audience spends more time reading and sharing them than other posts on broader topics, so we plan and implement more of those in our calendar. 

All the elements for success

To create a vibrant content calendar, start with the following elements:

• Begin with your marketing goals for the year. What are you trying to achieve (e.g., product lunch, new business focus, new sales market, etc.)?
• Then determine your content strategy—how specifically will you use content to relay marketing messages in support of those goals?
• Next, plan to create content in different formats, (text, video, audio) in different lengths, for different channels, and approaching key concepts from different angles (i.e., sales, educational, user-testimonial, etc.) in support of your content strategy.
• Lastly, determine the “calendar” part—detailing when each piece of content will get published and how its success will be measured. 

When all your content is rooted in goals, every piece will serve a strategic purpose and create a slow drip of messaging, images, ideas, and articles that shifts perceptions and stimulates action, all year long.