Content Calendar #1

I used to work for a company whose social media posts were created in the following manner:

Director: “Oi, Clyde, are we putting something on LinkedIn today?”

Clyde: “Er, yeah! Of course!”

Scene cuts to Clyde feverishly coming up with a half-arsed idea for some content to post on LinkedIn, hoping against hope that it aligned with the marketing strategy that existed purely in the head of the Director.

#truestory


Obviously you’re an organised person who would not leave their content creation until the last minute and you certainly wouldn’t post the first thing that popped into your head.

You probably have an abundance of ideas for content you would like to post and creating a content calendar is a great way to capture those ideas, fine-tune them and then post them, fully formed, at the appropriate time on the appropriate platform.

A content calendar need not be anything more complex than a spreadsheet. (At the bottom of this post is a link to a content calendar that you can use or create your own based on this one.)

Not only is it a great way of capturing your ideas, but it avoids you having to suddenly come up with a content idea. Take a bit of time every week to create the content that you’ll be posting next week. If you can, try producing the next two weeks of content for your marketing or even try for a month’s worth of content.

Put all the text for all your ideas into your content calendar, as well as the pictures etc. At the end of this content planning session you can be happy in the knowledge that you have your marketing planned for the next week/fortnight/month and you can get back to creating whatever it is you create.

If you’re feeling bold you can sign up to a service like Hootsuite (others are available) which will schedule all your posts for you, but still do the planning and content calendar first.

The content calendar template can be found here


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