With the importance of creating content, leaving it to chance creates risk of delays, lack of consistency and failure to present a strong branding image because there is no plan on how to do that. Even a rough outline of a calendar of events for posting content to your site and social media sites can help. Having a plan will keep you and your staff on task for the weekly requirements of posting and creating content in order to keep your followers engaged and your search engine optimization efforts strong.
When you prepare your content calendar for the month in advance, take time to research for the best content to create. Looking for cyclical patterns containing certain keyword phrases that might be the most popular for that month will help you capitalize on trends such as holidays, seasons of the year, quarterly business cycles or other time sensitive events that people will be interested in hearing more about. This research will also help you know what type of content to avoid. Obviously, no one is going to be searching for “Back to School” needs in November, they will be more interested in learning about holiday topics. When you go a little deeper you might discover trends that are more specific to your products or services offerings.
Adding when to start content pieces to the content calendar is important to give yourself or your staff time to research and develop the best content. If you want a white paper to market on your social media sites in time for tax season, you might want to add “Create Tax Season White Paper” a month or two before the date you want to post it, then included “Post Tax Season White Paper” on the deadline date that you think would be the best to release and market it. This kind of strategic planning will assure that content demanding the highest quality has the sufficient amount of time to reach the level of excellence you would like for it to have. Other content may not need as much advance planning, but special reports, eBooks, videos or other more complex content should be given consideration in planning the month’s activities.
Finally, include measuring results into the calendar to stay up to date on how popular content pieces become. If you notice a particular content type helped you create a lower bounce rate, more traffic, additional engagement and sales, then you will know that is the type of content to include in the next month’s calendar. On the other hand, you might decide some types of content is not doing well enough to continue to put the time and effort into.
