Creating A Content Calendar

Creating a content calendar for your social media, website, and other platforms from scratch is one of those tasks that seems super hard at the beginning, actually saves a lot of time in the long run, makes you look like you have it all together, and will help you build trust through consistency with your audience.

So where do you begin?

1. Think about your audience

Good content should always start in the same place: your audience/customer. That means knowing your audience inside and out.

While it’s important to create content that your current audience wants to see, it’s also important to create content for the customer/audience that you want. You can even go as far as creating a customer avatar or pretend profile.

If you’re ever in doubt about what to create, ask yourself if your customers would want to see it. If they wouldn’t, you probably don’t want to be investing in it. 

Case in point: Don’t show a classic car to an audience that shows up for dog posts. Unless it’s a dog in a classic car. Adorable, right?

2. Research what content resonates

In order to plan and create successful content, you need to know what success looks like. Start by looking at the content you’ve produced in the past and examine what worked.

Ask yourself:

• What content got the most likes?

• What content got the most comments?

• What content got the most shares?

• What content got the most views?

• What content got the highest engagement rate?

For a better understanding of what to measure try your Instagram analytics or your Facebook Insights. Those are the best places to start. If you want to dive even deeper, try an outside analytics platform like Iconosquare or Minter.

3. Audit existing content

Now that you know what works, look at what content you actually have.

Go through your existing library and identify types and categories. For example, you might currently be creating blog posts, videos, and photos. In terms of content categories, you might have Q&As, how-tos, 101s, product information, day in the life, backstage pass, etc.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What’s still useable?

• What can be updated?

• What can be repurposed?

• What can’t be reused?

All items that fall into the first three categories have the potential to become evergreen content (stuff you can use over and over and over again) that will form the basis of your content calendar.

4. Create an overview of major events

Once you’ve taken stock of your content assets, set them aside (for now).

Create a calendar—this can take the form of a doc, spreadsheet, or even an actual calendar—and map out important events throughout the year, particularly those that you want to create content around.

You can use this sample calendar here: CONTENT CALENDAR

Be sure to include:

• Holidays (big and small)

• Odd holidays (think #nationaldonutday)

• Product launches

• Campaigns

• Company events, incentives, or features

If you have been doing your business long enough to know that there tends to be a lull at the end of December, mark this on your calendar so that you can plan accordingly by reducing the amount of content published or saving top content for a higher traffic time.

5. Figure out calendar processes

You’ve got your evergreen content and you’ve got your bare-bones calendar—now it’s time to figure out the nitty gritty of your schedule.

First, decide how often you’re going to publish on each social network. (I recommend posting to IG at least once a day and a few times a day to FB)

Next, determine your content mix—that is, how much of each type and category of original content you’ll publish, as well as how much curated content you plan to share.

This should typically be expressed as a ratio. A good rule of thumb is the 80-20 rule: share 80 percent helpful and interesting content for every 20 percent of content where you’re trying to sell!

6. Plan and schedule content ahead of time!

Now that you’ve marked all the important dates—and I do mean ALL—on your content calendar and set up a process for content planning, it’s time for the fun part: new content.

First, list your biggest stuff first (big holidays, personal promotions, events) and start planning your content around those. 

Start with a brainstorm. Ask different people for their ideas and perspectives on the topics you’d like to cover. After your brainstorm session, take the raw ideas, choose your favorites, refine them, assign them (to yourself if you haven’t yet hired or found someone to help out!), and then add them to your content calendar.

If you have big upcoming events in your calendar that you want to plan content around, ensure that that’s reflected in the themes of your brainstorm sessions and, of course, that you leave adequate time for content tasks to be resourced. After all, you could have the best Christmas-themed LipSense campaign in mind, but no one will want to see it if you can’t finish it until January.

SUMMARY:

Plan your content, create your content, then schedule your content. Simple in theory, much harder in practice. But, with a little organization, you can maintain a social media content calendar that will help your team be more efficient and create better quality content—on time, every time.

Tauni & Brock