Developing a Content Marketing Calendar

Your team’s content marketing calendar is like an editorial calendar for a magazine, which sets out what topics will be covered when. Your content marketing calendar should include a month-by-month content schedule and go out as far as one year. Appointing one person to manage the editing and upkeep of the calendar can help avoid confusion about what was supposed to happen when (and who is responsible).

Brainstorming Content

Consider the following when brainstorming your content for the coming year:

Business Quarters
Selling Cycles
Seasons
Holidays
Events
Product Launches
Deadlines
Company Goals
Metrics for Tracking Content Success

Monthly Calendar Creation

If you set your calendar up as a spreadsheet, each content project has its own row, ordered by the publication date. Due date and publication date should be filled in chronologically. The remaining columns should be filled out following these recommendations:

Title/Description
Keyword Targeted (Even infographics and videos can rank for keywords)
Search Volume/Number of searches per month
Competition Score from HubSpot, SEOMoz, or Google AdWords. It is important to see the difficulty level of each keyword in terms of ranking.
Status (In process, completed, published)
Type of Content (Blog post, article, tweet, white paper, etc.)
Author/Producer/Designer
Target Audience
Distribution Channels
Promotion
Social Updates if different from promotion
Metadata Tags
Success Metrics
Image Sources

Using an editorial calendar for content marketing will help keep your content organized in a way that makes sense and is easier to track over time.

3 Content Styles to Keep in Mind While Blogging

Make sure when you create content that you include several content styles such as:

Original, in-depth content
Curated content (reviewing content someone else made)
User-generated content

It is ideal to have a balance of these types of content as it makes your job easier. By developing twice as many curated pieces as in-depth original pieces, you can pump out batches of content more quickly. And if you can get users to share lots of user-generated content, your load will get even lighter.

Photo credit: Joe Lanman / Foter / CC BY