how to build your brand’s content calendar

Think of the internet as a huge binary wasteland where scraps of information get dumped every millisecond. The big problem is how can your brand stay on top of the rubble? The answer is pretty simple: a good content strategy. A good content strategy takes information that is relevant to your audience and combines it with your brand’s strengths. Once this balance is achieved, it’s only just a matter of mapping it out on a content calendar.

A content calendar is an shareable internal resource that teams use to map out all your online activity. This allows you to fully visualize the distribution of your content throughout the month. It comes in a tabular form similar to that of a calendar.

The benefits of having a content calendar is it allows you to align internally since you can share it across multiple departments. Aside from this, you get to identify content milestones.  This means, you can plan content around important dates such as event launches, and even holidays. A content calendar also helps you spot gaps where you can identify what needs to be planned ahead of time. And more importantly, you can have your content ready in time before actual posting. This way, you’re armed with content as the days pass by.

The key to a successful content calendar is consistency. While creativity is an essential part of building a successful content calendar, bouts of brilliant ideas are too inconsistent and unreliable. Here are three steps you can follow to create a winning Content Calendar.

Utilize Content Assets

Liquidate your current assets and create more content with less effort. Instead of starting from scratch, check anything that can potentially hold important information. Check decks, data from research, whitepapers, and old blog posts. Even the expertise of your colleagues can be used. Repurposing content takes away the overwhelming strain of having to come up with creative ideas.

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Atomize your content. Content atomization is the practice of taking big chunks of information and dividing it into smaller pieces of content. If you have an infographic from a past report, you can use the data to create various blog posts, and social media posts.

Create You Content

After liquidating all of your content assets, you can carry on and create your content. This proves to be the hardest step in creating your content calendar. Think of your content the way Jay Baer would. Jay Baer is an content marketing genius who believed that you should think of content the way TV Networks would by creating “content shows.”  In retrospect, Baer thinks that TV Shows are consistent initiatives that audiences can recognize. Thus your content should mimic the same. These “content shows” should be something your audience looks forward to.

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Think about your audience when creating your content. Is this something your audience would look forward to seeing? If yes, then you’re on the right track.

Plot Your Content

Once the content is fresh out of the ideation factory, it’s time to plan and schedule. Keep in mind that your content should always be TIMELY and relevant. Remember to only feed your audience information that will resonate with them. Plan, schedule, and publish content and revisit it after a few weeks to see if it was effective.

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Want to reach more people online? That’s easy, know when your audience is online and post your content on peak online hours to increase your reach! You can do this through an in-depth survey or by simply looking at Facebook Insights to see the peak hours of your audience!

Creating your own content calendar is easy but coming up with a content strategy is a different thing.

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