Why You Absolutely Need a Content Marketing Calendar
One of the hallmarks of businesses that rock content marketing is that they have a content marketing plan along with a content marketing calendar. Content marketing has become a many-headed hydra, all of which require care and attention.
Precisely due to the ease with which you can publish content in various forms all over the Web in the blink of an eye, having a coherent plan of attack and strategy is more important than ever before. Let's examine some of the hallmarks of an effective content marketing calendar, and how you can implement one.
How many and who's going to do it?
Even if you are a large company with a few departments using the calendar, you'll want to have a person dedicated to making sure the overall plan is advancing, and people are being held accountable. This presupposes that you have a single content marketing calendar. We believe this is best as even though there may be different people or teams working on different aspects of content creation, it is vital that there is a common vision and goals at play here. Having more than one calendar is asking for it, and really hampers efforts at promotion. Resist the calls for independence here.
The reasons for this are numerous. Primarily though, you want to be able to execute an overall strategy, and having it segmented across several calendars is amazingly counter-productive, as some departments drop the ball and others thrive, accountability and promotion will be the casualties here.
What form should the content marketing calendar take?
Very often the simplest solution is best, and for those just starting, or even for the more experienced, a simple spreadsheet is often quite sufficient for the task. Obviously you will want to customize it for your company's particulars, but this is easily done. Not only that, there are many that have gone before you in this endeavor, and a Google Image search will give you plenty of examples to look at.
There are also software solutions that do the job nicely, which may be the ticket for you if you have a large organization or simply wish to automate more of the task completion reporting and project management. Tools like Basecamp and Teamwork come quickly to mind, but there are dozens of quality programs to pick from, so set aside some time to look them over. Be forewarned of the costs and learning curves to deal with this type of solution.
Usually a simple solution is best, and we would encourage this to start. Upgrading to more sophisticated systems can always happen down the road if needed.
