Keap Expert Gives 5 Benefits Your Business Gets From Using a Content Calendar – Part 2
This Keap expert article, continues where part 1 finished to give you a complete picture of how a content calendar can help your business.
- Automate Everything
With content creation out of the way, you can use any automation tool. As a Keap expert, I highly recommend Keap for any small business. It has so many features and using it to send out your content via email and text is just plain smart. You should also consider other tools to schedule when your social media should be posted and where it should be posted.
With a good content calendar, says this Keap expert, has thought out every detail beforehand. It makes it so much easier to consistently post good content. The thinking is already done. As a small business owner, you’re likely acting as the HR manager, the face of the business, the IT guy, and the marketing guru every single day. Taking this responsibility out of your head is a big plus.
I use CoSchedule. Another good one is Hootsuite to automate posted your content across several platforms. These tools comes with built-in monitoring that gives you visibility to what's happening across platforms. Social Pilot, ContentStudio and BuzzSumo are others to consider for automating your content planner.
- Stay Consistent
You could be posting the most engaging and wow-worthy social media posts and content. But posting irregularly with great content lacks the impact your online marketing needs to be effective. Content marketing is most impactful when there is reliable engagement from a local business’s audience. Irregular posts create an out-of-sight, out-of-mind feeling for your audience, which ultimately crashes the effectiveness of content, even if it is good. A content calendar can change this.
- Track the Data
While it may not always be the first priority, using a content calendar allows you to easily track your data. Content should continuously improve on itself, and when you can clearly see what resonates with your audience, you can easily make tweaks to your strategy. Information and numbers remove the guesswork from content marketing and social media while you see results in your business.
What Does A Content Calendar Include?
Now that you know the what, let’s jump into the how of creating a content calendar. Here’s a general guideline for figuring out what works the best for your business.
First things first, give your content a once over and audit everything. You can see your audience, what campaigns and posts are your best performers, and where there are gaps in your content strategy.
Your next step is to define goals from the information you gathered. Do you want to produce new leads? Direct readers to your website? Grow your number of Facebook followers? Setting out with a goal to work backward from will help you brainstorm better content more efficiently and quickly.
Next, you are going to create a template for your content calendar. Google Sheets is a free and straightforward tool to use. You’re going to decide on blog posts, social media platforms, and other forms of engagement that work well for your local business.
Don’t like the idea of using Google Sheets? HubSpot offers a free downloadable template for excel that will make planning your content planner smooth and breezy. Trello is a content planning platform that offers a free option to help you content plan like the boss you are.
It can be easier to develop a content calendar for one to two months to work out any bugs and keep on improving. With the important dates penciled in, fill in the gaps with a mixture of content that creates consistency for your small business.
Feeling a bit stretched thin to fill in all the gaps? Schedule in evergreen and prior content that is still relevant to your business. Unleash your creativity and invest some time into building your virtual storefront.
Facebook’s (now Meta) resources section has free and accessible resources that lay out all the aspects of planning and setting up a great content calendar in spectacular details. Go check it out!
By utilizing some of the strategies and resources mentioned in this article you will save time, money, and effort by developing a content calendar that works for your local business. This will be a game-changer for local business owners who are doing content marketing in-house.
So, what are you waiting for? Instead of just shooting from the hip each week on social media - It's time to implement a content calendar to ensure you’re reaching and engaging with as much of your audience as you can.
