Have You Created your Content Marketing Calendar Yet?
Content marketing is without a doubt the buzzword lately, and more than that, it is an incredibly 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 great at this you’re definitely going to need a content marketing calendar.
Precisely as a result of ease with which you can publish content in various forms all over the Web in the blink of an eye, having an organized plan of attack and strategy is more important than ever before. Let’s take a look at some of the hallmarks of an effective content marketing calendar, and how you can implement one.
Who should do this?
Even if you are a large company with several departments making use of the calendar, you’ll need to have a person dedicated to making sure the overall plan is advancing, and people are being held accountable. This presupposes that you’re using 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 hampers 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 should you use for a content marketing calendar?
This can be a simple spreadsheet customized for the task. This is usually sufficient. There are many other forms of collaborative software if you have a large organization or want more automation.
Software like Basecamp, Teamwork and others provide useful platforms for running projects, and can help you keep track of complex campaigns easily. There is a cost and learning curve associated with this, however.
Generally 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. Upgrading to more sophisticated systems can always happen later on if need be.