Build a Content Calendar for Content Marketing Success

Behind every successful content marketing strategy, there’s a content calendar. Read this post to understand the role of content calendar and download some useful content calendar tools.

Content calendar is a key tool for content marketers.

It helps them to devise a long-term content strategy, plan their blog posts and social content in advance, and align their content strategy with the business goals.

Planning a content calendar doesn’t have to seem like a monumental task. It involves:

  • Analyzing your client acquisition methods
  • Developing topics that cater to your potential clients
  • Devising a content development and marketing process to implement the strategies seamlessly.
  • Measuring the performance of your content marketing periodically

Now, let’s dive into the above points to understand them better.

Analyzing Your Client Acquisition Methods

Every company invests in a host of marketing campaigns to acquire new clients and business opportunities. However, some of those campaigns outperform others. Therefore, it is important to recognize the campaigns that perform particularly better than others.

By figuring this out, you can build your long-term content marketing strategy based on the areas that perform well and are likely to bring you positive results.

For example, if you have found that infrographics or explainer videos are helping your social media followers to engage with your brand more closely, you might want to plan more inforgraphics ahead of time since they are difficult to build as compared to the blog posts.

Similarly, if your blog posts drive more traction, helping you build a list of subscribers quickly, you should be focusing on building engaging content on your blog more frequently moving forward.

Developing Topics that Cater to Prospects Needs

After figuring out where you want to invest your resources, your goal is to build content around prospects’ interests. This might require you to conduct keyword research for your blog posts apart from brainstorming on topics for explainer videos or inforgraphics.

You should also review the statistics of your social media posts and see which ones have performed better than others.

Track down the posts and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are responsible for the success of those posts. It will give you immense insights on how to replicate similar tractions for the subsequent months.

Devising and Implementing Content Marketing Strategy

One you have all the performance metrics figured out, and planned your content requirements for subsequent months, it’s time to devise a plan on how you can implement the plans.

You might want to distribute your content building strategies among a couple co-authors. For example, if you have five categories on your blog, you can assign each author to a particular category. This way you make it easy for the team to achieve a collection milestone.

Measuring Performance of Your Content Marketing

When it comes to content marketing, your strategies may not always fall in place. Therefore, you need to keep analyzing the performance of your content marketing on a monthly basis and streamline it for better performance.

Moz has a great post on how you can measure, analyze, document the success of your content marketing strategy with just one content metric.

Some Content Calendar Tools

Depending on the magnitude of your content marketing, you may need a specific content calendar tool to manage your content marketing.

The most common content marketing tool is Google Spreadsheet.

Download this Content-Calendar-Template.

It helps you collaborate with multiple co-authors and content managers.

However, there are some free WordPress plugins available to help you with your manage your content marketing needs.

Hope this post helps you to build your own content calendar. If you have any thoughts, feel free to share your comments with us.

 

About Susanta Sahoo

I'm the founder and content marketing head at Top League. Our team can help you build great content that helps you rank high on Google and generate high-quality leads. Get in touch with us and let's discuss your project. I'm on LinkedIn & Twitter, just so you know.