What is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar (also referred to as a "editorial calendar") is a written tool that a business or writer uses to plan upcoming content. It details when and where you can publish new content. Upcoming pieces, status updates, planned promotional activity, partnerships, and content updates are all common components of content calendars.
So Why Are Content Calendars Important?
If the reason you create content is just to publish occasionally, then creating a content calendar is not important. If, however, you are a business or a writer who is intentional in growing your brand or business, then you need a content calendar.
So here are 20 benefits of using a content calendar.
1. Keeps You Organised and on Track
Content calendar makes your content organised. Imagine teaching a class without a timetable. The delivery of the lecture for that day will be sub par. By having a content calendar, you know what content to upload per time and this is beneficial to your business.
2. Makes Brainstorming Easy
Coming up with content on the go is hard. You may not be in the writing zone. This leads to procrastination. If you however decide to have Calendar, you can call up the content team to deliberate on what content to write about. And it is easier to put up content your audience need.
3. Delivery of Consistent Content
One challenge lots of writers or business have is writing consistently. Some of the inhibiting factor is lack of content ideas and writer's block. A content calendar makes it easier to put up a content as at when due.
4. Increases Engagement
Chioma Ifeanyi-Eze is one content creator I put at sea first on Face Book. I did this because she provides valuable content daily. She is intentional on the the content she puts up. This is because she plans her content. The result of her action is increase in content engagement on her post. Not only that, her brand reach grows daily.
5. Increase in Brand Awareness
You need to design a content calendar so you can increase the number of people you reach daily. When you put up useful content, people get to share your content. This translates to new people coming in touch with your content. For example, Czar Nnamani wrote a content that compares the developmental index between two cities under Mr Tinubu and Peter Obi. That singular content was shared over 1000 times. This amount will most likely bring over 500 new followers to his page.
6. It reduces stress
A business blogger or writer who puts up content without a plan ends up over stressed. Time spent without structured brain storming can cause brain fag. Planning one's content is a plus. It reduces chaos and makes the content to put up streamlined.
7. Balanced Mix of Post
A content calendar will make it easy to plan content for the different social media platform where you are active. It helps you put up a balanced mix of post on social from valuable post to funny post. It also helps you create content that works best on a specific platform.
8. Improves Pace of Content Delivery
Pre-knowledge of the content that is to put up fastens the pace of content delivery. All it takes is the topic. You can easily complete the article once they provide the topic you are to write on .
9. Makes it possible To Incorporate National Holidays in your Content Strategy
A good calendar notes National Holidays and other important days. Once you are aware of the holiday, you can think up the right content consistent with your brand. You can also run discount on planned promotions well in advance. You won't be caught napping.
10. Big picture overview of your upcoming stuff.
A good content calendar allows you to get an overview of what works and what doesn't work. With a content calendar, you can see the entire content strategy of your business months ahead. Should you go for theme centred content? How often should you publish? How often should you run promotions? Having a content calendar provides you with answers.
11. Regular Publishing
A content calendar prompt you to share content regularly. Consistency is the mother of invention.
For a business owner or writer, regular publishing keep the wheel of your business running. It makes it easy to publish your article on time.
12. It Makes Collaboration Easier
A calendar makes collaboration easier. You can get feedback from the design team, photographers, infographic guy seamlessly on a particular topic. The design guy can create design far ahead of the scheduled publishing date. And easily pass the information for feedback.
13. Makes it Easy to Audit and Upgrade Your Content.
You can easily do an audit of your content once you have a calendar and analytics of your blog or social content . Armed with the audit, you can update your calendar to include an upgrade to your content when necessary.
14. Time to Find New Content Ideas
A content calendar can have blank spaces. These blank spaces can capture content without a specific theme. A solid calendar planned in time gives room for new topic ideas. When crafting new content ideas for your blog, think in terms of evergreen content. Ever green content trumps trends. A mix should, however, be a part of your content strategy.
15. It Makes You Craft Focused Content
Focused content makes it easier for you to rank high on Google.Google assume your website is highly relevant and will recommend your content to people. Imagine a tailor writing about food on her tailoring website. Google won't reward the writer.
16. Helps You Emphasize Goals and Mission of Your Organization
Nike slogan is Just Do It. They push content that reemphasizes their brand promise. A well written calendar notes the brand promise, the mission statement and vision statement of the organization. This makes it easier to incorporate the above information in the content that the team creates.
17 It Enables you craft Campaigns in Story Form
Your customer is their own hero on their own journey. It's your job as a marketer or writer to guide them on that journey.
You can adopt the hero journey in your content planner to craft content that identifies your customer, states the problem, direct them to your brand that shows them the solution. You can then co-opt your call to action and boom, your customer succeeds and avoid failure. What the content planner does is it enables you to address each part of the hero journey in sequence.
18. It Makes Delegation Seamless.
Delegating a specific task to members of the content team is easy once a content calendar is available. Whether you are using a google sheet or Google doc or other tools like Basecamp and notion, the team members can easily identify assigned task and quickly attend to them.
19. Identify Gaps in Your Content
Visual content adoption is skyrocketing. If visual content is in terms of videos, your calendar will enable you to identify this, making it easier to update your content strategy. You can also decide to adopt more audio content and test to see if your audience connects with it.
20. Contributes to SEO positioning
A good calendar helps you build online authority and also rank better in search results. This amplifies the chances of increasing traffic to your website. This maximizes your chances of attaining new customers. It’s like purchasing a lot of tickets for a raffle.
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