Your content calendar or editorial calendar, whatever your preference, is a roadmap to what your brand stands for. What your brand feels in its soul is worth talking about. Sharing. What it believes in and what it has to say to customers, consumers and the world.
In addition to keeping your content running like clockwork, ensuring that you have a new blog scheduled every Tuesday and Thursday, and a new video on deck to go out every Friday, it also provides you with an overview of the topics you’ve covered recently, so that you can keep things fresh and not repeat the same thing too often. It can be a great way of leveraging a variety of new content strategies for top brands, keeping track of how all your digital channels are interconnected, and integrating content in a seamless way.
But, are you really getting the most out of your calendar?
Is it helping you to keep your content on track and stay ahead of the competition? If the answer is, “No,” or even, “I don’t know,” then we have three tips for how to use your content calendar more effectively
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1. Consolidate. In order to stay competitive, it’s important to release your content to multiple platforms regularly. You have a blog for how-tos and tutorials, a video channel for news, updates or demos, maybe even a podcast for long-form interviews and in-depth discussions, and more.
Many companies have separate teams working on their different forms of content, or even publishing in different channels. Often, this means separate content calendars for each platform. The problem with this splintered approach is that there is often separate calendars for special offers and promotions, and yet another for print ads and other content that’s not based online. The result is a giant unconnected mess, which makes it difficult to know which content is being posted where and when. Not only is this confusing, it completely defeats the purpose of having a content calendar to begin with.
The way to restore order to this mess is to consolidate all of your calendars into one.
- Make sure everyone keeps that calendar updated with the latest content info, dates, topics, etc.
- Delete any other calendars so that no one can get confused, update the wrong one or duplicate efforts
- Have separate tabs for each type of content or channel, as well as one tab with a complete schedule of everything that’s being created on all platforms.
In addition to providing a clearer roadmap for what content is being posted, it can also help you cross-promote and connect across platforms. If a particular promotion is scheduled for next week, a video could also be scheduled to make people aware of it. If a particularly compelling guest is scheduled for your podcast, a profile of that person and what they do could also be posted or promoted on your blog at the same time. This kind of coordinated effort can drive your blog readers to your podcast, making them more aware of your great content. By keeping all of your information tracked and together in one content calendar, you’re ensuring that everything will run more smoothly and efficiently.
2. Incorporate Social Media. So your blog, YouTube channel and podcast are all neatly organized on your one content calendar. But what about your Facebook page and Twitter profile? What you post there is content too, and keeping better track of it in relation to other content being created and published will help you to get the most out of it.
For instance, here pay attention to these little things:
- Did you share the link to your latest blog only once?
- Did you post your new blog link several times throughout the day, to increase its exposure and give different people logging on at different times and from different time zones a better chance of seeing it?
- What about things like memes and status updates that go exclusively on your social media channels?
- What are you posting and when?
- Did you accidentally share the same thing twice?
- Are you posting too much on a particular topic?
Adding your social media flow to your content calendar can help you keep track of these things, become more opportunistic and schedule your posts for maximum reach and maximum impact.
3. Repurpose Old Content. One of the most important things your content calendar can help you with is creating new content. Used correctly, it can be an endless source of new ideas.
Here are some examples:
- Say there was an important news story a few months ago that related to your brand, so you wrote a blog about it. Now a similar news story has just come up. You can take the blog post and repurose it into a video, or rewrite it to addresses the current topic.
- Or, you can use the content calendar to look for all the blogs you’ve posted on a particular topic over the last few years, gather them together, and turn them into a white paper.
- Another idea: Look at your top blogs over the last quarter. Which ones were killer, and are still relevant that it would pay to schedule it a second or third time to maximize its reach?
There are all sorts of ways to repurpose your content for a different platform, and your content calendar is your roadmap to helping you find that content and make the most and best use of it.
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Your content calendar can help you keep your messages organized and on task, so that you’re always at the top of your publishing game. Are YOU leveraging your calendar to get the maximum benefit across all your different content platforms?