CONTENT CALENDAR: CREATE IT FOR YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA

In social media marketing, planning needs to be there at every step of your marketing strategy if you want to find the success you are looking for. It’s not about just getting tons of followers; it is about those videos posted on the social media platforms that generate sales. The only way to make those sales is to publish the videos that drive audiences to your landing pages. This is where your content calendar becomes an important part of your digital strategy.

If you don’t have a content calendar, you will be confused and unsure of what should be your next move. Having a content calendar is going to give you a roadmap of what is on your plate in the whole month and when you should be promoting what offers your product or services. The content calendar plays an important role in making sales. And isn’t that the reason why you create those eye-catching posts in the first place?

So let’s have a look at how you can create a content calendar for your social media platforms that makes your work so much easier.

Here are the 4 steps to create your content calendar:

1. Choose your upload schedule

How often are you going to upload posts?
There are a lot of different schedules you can choose for your platforms, and there isn’t necessarily one right answer. It just depends on the industry you are in and of course your team.
For example, you can’t expect to get much pay-off from uploading one video or text content a month. Remember, viewers want to have constant contact with their favorite brand and they will definitely want to see them as much as possible. Uploading 3 videos/text content per week is a good start though.

Also, if you are handling social media alone, make sure your post schedule is realistic. For example, if you need to do all of the work within your company like writing the content, making the creative, editing, and uploading a week, that might lead to biting off more than you can chew.
If you have a team of 5 people and you know that two of your team members can handle a posting schedule like this, then you must increase it to 3x per week posting schedule. You must know what schedule works best for your industry and your team and then decide what days your posts are going to live. It could be every Monday, or every Wednesday or EVERYDAY!

Decide and work on whatever works best for your audience and your schedule.

2. Choose the topics you will make your posts about

I am sure; you were not expecting to see this task on your content calendar to-do list. Sit down and figure out what content works best for your audience right now. Jot down as many content topics as you need to create your posts per month.

For example, if you are posting 1 post per week each month you need 4-5 content ideas. You can either come up with all of these ideas in one brainstorming session each month or come up with 20+ ideas at once so you are good to go for the coming 3 months of content ready.

The main question is where do you find content topics that your audience will be interested in?

 You can search in Quora for questions related to your industry and create posts that answer those questions.
 Send out surveys to your customers on what content your customers want from you and make posts on that customer feedback for questions that come up often
 Read through Facebook group posts related to your industry to see what your customers are struggling with and answer them through your posts
 Also, one of the best ways is to search YouTube to see what content is doing really well in your niche and figure out how you can make related posts.

3. Put your post content ideas into your calendar

Before that, you must have your launches, promotions, and offers in your calendar as it becomes easy to identify what content topic should go live each week. For example, if we are running a promotion on Digital Marketing Course in the middle of the month, we want to post a social media marketing related post, may it be in the form of a video or a text creative with images that week so we get more traffic to that offer.

Your content calendar isn’t just there for views and followers; you want to be using social media as an asset to getting more sales. By pairing your content calendar with your promotions calendar you are creating a cohesive calendar that fits together like butter and jelly.

4. Choose the dates you will promote your videos/creative

Last but not least, your content calendar must have the dates that you will be promoting your content. For example, if your schedule is to post creative/videos on Wednesdays, then you will want to be promoting that creative/video on Wednesdays and Thursdays each week.

The reason content calendars exist is to make our lives as content creators a lot easier. Use a content calendar to fit into your social media strategy and to make sure you stay on track with your uploading schedule. Join the digital marketing course to know more digital marketing tips and tricks to generate sales.

Read More: How Social Media is known as ‘heart of Digital Marketing’?