There’s lots of talk about creating editorial calendars, content calendars, content plans or whatever you want to call them. Yes, we all know we need them and what they do, but what do they give us?
In other words: what are the benefits of a content plan?
According to EMarketer, content marketing is critical for marketers in 2011. This data shows 73% of US companies use content they create in social media campaigns. These aren’t just numbers pulled out of thin air – the study including folks from Hubspot and Junta42.
With these statistics, it’s essential to create quality content. To consistently create content and promote it, make sure you have a good content calendar. To understand what these plans give us, here’s 5 top benefits to planning your content marketing with a plan:
Top 5 Benefits of Planning Effective Content
- Organization: Great googly moogly; this is a reason in itself to have an editorial calendar for your content marketing operations. With the chaos of keeping up with everything happening in online marketing, search, social and whatever else is new this week, organization of this chaos is a HUGE plus.When you have a good content calendar in place, you have everything organized, in front of you and another part of your brain gets some rest. Yes, you may need to tackle the mess on your desk, but at least your content marketing has some organization.
- A Plan: A content plan gives you just that…a plan. In my plans, I have a column for purpose; how is this blog post, email or tweet going to benefit my business? Will it increase my visibility or maybe create relationships for future business?Here it is and I will talk about this to the day I die: “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. No, I didn’t come up with this quote, but I damn sure use it everyday.Now you can’t plan for everything, but at least your content marketing will have reason behind it. This doesn’t mean it will help you stick to…say a diet; that’s up to you and if that bowl of ice cream is worth it at 11pm.
- Ideas for Future Posts: I recently added another column to my content calendar: future post ideas. It’s different than the repurpose content areas column, though. I actually get ideas for other posts just by looking at what I have already scheduled.This is like getting ideas AWAY from the computer or doing something totally unrelated to writing – you never know where writing inspiration will strike you.
- Optimization Ideas: With the keyword phrase column in my content calendar, I try to include up to 2-3 phrases for visibility. Now, here’s the thing, it’s not just about search alone; these words are part of social strategies too.Think about it: with Google and Bing integrating social signals into search results, doesn’t it make sense to look at optimizing content for social sharing, links AND search engine results?
- Ability to Change: One of the columns I don’t see many clients include in their content marketing planning is the important dates and times column.What’s this? Basically, it’s a reminder of things happening, which could impact your content schedule.What if there’s a big product launch, conference or event happening? Wouldn’t you want to change-up the plan and put out content relevant to what’s happening at that time? Of course you would.
These are just some of the benefits of a content calendar for your content marketing operations. There are more benefits to planning out your content, but it’s late, I’m tired and I think I will give you more ideas in another post.
What would you add to this list?
Photo credit: Yandle
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