In this series on content marketing success, we've covered the importance of getting your sales team engaged, and shared the perfect framework for efficient content marketing meetings. The third step is all about organizing and scheduling content with the ultimate Content Calendar.
When it comes to social media marketing, blogging, and producing content, having a game plan makes all the difference. If you follow the first two steps, in this series, you'll have a ton of content and buy-in from key people along with weekly meetings to keep those ideas coming. However, without a schedule of when that content gets organized, posted, approved and promoted, you'll be wasting everyone's time.
Creating content "in the moment" or "posting as you go" is a recipe for false starts, high stress, and missed deadlines. That's the value of creating a content calendar.
So how do you create the ultimate content calendar?
A recent google search for the phrase "content calendar template" revealed 323 million results. There's no shortage of Google sheets, excel files, templates, articles, blogs and even software to help schedule, approve and promote your content.
The ultimate content calendar should be easy to follow with the right details, cadence and system to repeat and scale. So, we're going to make this easy and share three things your content calendar should include.
#1 Create Quarterly Themes
The ultimate content calendar should include a theme for each of the next 4 quarters. That theme could be a vertical market, a specific tech solution, or unique customer challenge. Here are some examples:
- School Security
- Mobile Credentials
- A Closer Look at Analytics
- Healthcare Security
- Tech Partner Products
- Video Surveillance Camera quality
- Cloud-based Access Control
You get the idea. With your content team, create the themes you will be writing about and divide it into the next four quarters. Then, build all your content around the theme during each quarter.
#2 Identify the content and cadence of your posts and promotions
In other words - create your routine. A routine for what you will create, how often you will create it and when it will be published. Keep your routine super simple. Social media could be daily, blog articles could be 1 each week, and educational resources could be one per month. Whatever you are creating, document it, and create a routine for it.
#3 Document what's been posted and when
Your content calendar should provide your team with what's been posted and when. This will save you hours of time trying to find out what article was previously published on your blog or what social media topics were posted three weeks ago.
The Ultimate Content Calendar for your Security Business should be simple and include all the above.
If you want to get started building and customizing your own calendar, download Vector Firm's Excel Template below.
