Content calendars are paramount for a winning marketing strategy. They allow you to use themes and intentional patterns in your content, build social media posts that broadcast that content to your audience, and can ultimately lead to new, marketable content in the form of webinars or eBooks.
We’ve talked about content calendars before, and even provided a basic framework to get you started on your calendar journey, but there’s so much to say about them, that we wanted to get into more of the nuances. Let’s look at some other content calendar suggestions and tips that will give your planning even more of an edge.
What Questions Are Being Asked?
You know your audience better than anyone, and as such, you know what they don’t know. When you meet with prospects during demos and preliminary calls, you’ll almost certainly hear the same kinds of questions arise. These shouldn’t be disregarded! Those questions can be powerful marketing tools.
Write them down! Find connections between those questions and other common questions. You might find that you soon have a theme emerging, which can give your calendar the direction it needs.
Build Your Calendar With Intent
Now that you have a direction, you want to build an outline. The purpose of this should be to see how all your questions flow into each other, and how you can answer those questions in a sequence that makes sense to your readers.
That’s where your content comes from! You can create blog posts, videos, and other media dedicated to answering these questions, so that not only do you have those resources on hand for prospects you might be courting, but any other potential prospects are much more likely to find you if they Google those questions and find that you have the answers. This will build your organic traffic, and build trust with anyone already in your sales funnel.
Go Week By Week
You have your outline, and you have your topics, so it’s time to plan your weeks of content (usually a month in advance). Decide what form your content is going to take. Is it a video? Blog? Infographic? You can’t go wrong, as long as you’re able to be thorough in covering the topic. Educate your readers and watchers and flex your know how!
Once you have your primary topic for the week, you can start building your calendar around that. You can take snippets from your article or infographic, and break it out into several smaller images designed to direct people to the larger resource. If you’re making social media posts in an effort to drive demo requests, use that topic as a framework! Make an eye-catching animation to snag the eye of anyone scanning your feeds. Finding your primary topic for that week can save you a lot of time when it comes to generating posts. It’s much easier than trying to come up with all of it off the top of your head.
Build To Something New
So you have your weeks planned out, and your Monthly Content Calendar is looking lovely and full. A job well done, right? Well, not quite. There’s still more to be done!
All that content you put together still has a destiny! The reason you went through and found those connections between those initial questions is because now–once it’s all written and fleshed out–you can connect all these pieces into a new, comprehensive resource.
From these elements, you can build a new webinar, an eBook, or create a video lesson plan. These individual marketing elements just became a bigger, more influential tool that you can use. With that new resource, you’re able to offer it to new prospects as an incentive for providing contact information as we’ve mentioned in our article about Gated Content. You can go back once it’s complete and promote it in the individual blog posts you publish, creating connectivity between your resources, and making you more visible to search engines. Create a landing page for your new comprehensive resource, and watch those prospects roll in!
