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Is your content calendar simply a Google Sheets blog post calendar? If you want your content marketing to have a meaningful impact on your organization’s bottom line, it’s time to expand your content calendar.
Here are 4 ways to make your content calendar a huge success, based on the 9-minute webinine I recently introduced to my friends at Airtable (love them). You can see Record on demand here .
Table of Contents
1. Stop Random Content Behaviors
Generating random content behaviors is the number one reason content marketing fails. Everyone is creating content, we feel like we yes to create content. We create content for no reason and without any real thought about who this content is for and what the goal is.
Instead of constantly reinventing the wheel, I want you to create less content, but make each piece of content you create more effective. .
What does this mean? You need to give your audience a chance to find your content in their preferred format and channel and deliver it in a steady stream over a period of time. You can’t just post an article and expect potential clients to contact you.
Think about that. The most effective marketing and advertising is experienced over a period of time. It takes about 7 impressions for a display ad and about 5 email drips to warm up to a lead. That’s also why you see the same ads over and over again.
The content rules are the same.
We had to stop the random behavior of content and instead have a rich, nuanced plan to create less content but better content and deliver it more often to an audience. Your target.
But how do you do that?
2. Think like a TV network and create a show
We need to start thinking like television networks and create content programming.
Content What is express?
These content shows become stable, predictable initiatives that our audiences can count on and recognize. In fact, these shows are what our audience is really looking forward to
Every TV network knows how to do this well (I wrote about this recently winning content strategies that TV networks use ). For example, AMC has dozens of different shows airing on cable TV (and at least 150 are on their website). A portion of the audience accesses their programming online and on demand, and there are 24 hours of television programming aired each day. It happens on a daily, weekly, monthly and yearly basis in a predictable and consistent manner.
Take cues from the networks and engage your audience to tune in consistently by creating content programs targeted to specific audiences and specific circumstances.
There are three types of content that you can create for your brand.
1. The show is worth watching
These shows are massive, ongoing content initiatives that consistently feature the same themes and formats. They should target at least two audiences, otherwise not worth the time or effort to produce. This is usually a podcast, video series, webinar series, white paper, report, etc. You can do this at least twice per month. These will also be included in your calendar first.
For example, I just finished part 1 of Talk Trigger Show . Each episode is dedicated to a case study of a business with extremely successful word of mouth marketing.
2. One-time programs
These programs are quarterly or annual specials that attack a key customer theme or pain point. While they’re less frequently paced than fun shows, they’re still sizable chunks of content. Think white papers, research papers, contests, user-generated content campaigns, etc. These don’t have to have the same degree of consistency, but they should still align with the brand, voice, and voice. and your voice.
For example, our team recently created a “one-time program” report, 25 Top Colleges Best Sites. These one-off shows may change slightly in design and layout each year, but they should be consistent enough that audiences know exactly what to expect.
3. Programming on a recurring schedule
These programs are content initiatives that continually refine your calendar, and they don’t have to be fully connected or 100 percent consistent in theme. Just like in the case of blog posts, they can have an author, subject, or other format, depending on the content, but they always connect back to the content strategy and have at least one audience. clear in mind. Think of them as a local nightly news program for any major television network. Our blog posts and podcasts are our regularly scheduled show — in the past 11, we’ve published 4 to 5 posts per week.
3. Atomize Your Content
If you want to make sure your content succeeds, you need to atomize your content .
What is content atomization?
Content atomization is a term first coined by Todd Defen from SHIFT Communications, and that means taking a powerful content marketing platform or theme and doing it in many logical, strategic ways.
In Chat Trigger Example which I mentioned above, every week, I release is a 6-minute episode where I explain a word of mouth marketing case study. We repurpose those 6-minute videos into many other smaller pieces of content. Each episode includes two different versions of the video: one original and one optimized for LinkedIn. To take it a step further, each video episode will then be turned into a podcast and a written blog post. There are also teasers on Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories and Twitter.
Each 6-minute video turns into 12 other pieces of content, with significantly less effort and better results than producing 12 single pieces of content from scratch.
Don’t keep reinventing the wheel. Just create an additional version of the wheel you already own. Take your key pieces of content and bundle edited versions to fill your content calendar.
4. Apply Dynamic, Live Content Calendar
You can’t zoom your content calendar using Google Sheets, Excel, or Notepad. Easiest way to do this? Create your calendar in Airtable .
- Airtable allows you to produce more content by centralizing all the important information like date, owner, content, campaign
- You can customize personal opinion to just see what friend must see
- Airtable also automatically creates calendars, content galleries, charts, and more
Airtable gives you the building blocks to organize, manage, and create your calendar your way.
Access your FREE Downloadable Templates from Airtable now
You will have to create a free user account to access the template, but don’t worry, it only takes a second, and it’s worth it! Trust me.
