When developing a social media marketing campaign, consistency is key. Publishing regularly and aligning posts with product launches and trends helps you establish a strong brand presence in the digital landscape and can significantly elevate your brand’s visibility across all media. In such a situation, a content calendar is what binds all the elements together and helps you create a structured social media plan that brings business results.
A social media content calendar helps you stay consistent, plan ahead strategically, and collaborate more easily with your team members. Because of how important a content calendar is for your digital marketing endeavours, in this article, we share why a social media content calendar is important, and how to create one that aligns with your organization’s business goals.
How Can a Social Media Content Calendar Help You With Consistent Growth
In most cases, consistency is fundamental for growth on all social media platforms. Audiences, regardless of the platform, engage with brands that show up regularly in their feed, publish useful social media posts, and maintain a clear identity across all social media channels. Yet, being consistent in such a situation is not an easy task- especially when you and your team are managing social media campaigns, content creation, and preparing for product launches. This is where the social media content calendar shines.
A content calendar can help you centralize your ideas, schedule posts, and align all social media activities with your broader business goals. After all, being present on social media is not about publishing posts at random, but about following a strict strategy that helps you build trust with your audience and eventually contribute to achieving your business aims.
Furthermore, a content calendar can help you outline your long-term goals and stick to them. This means that you can share a calendar view in the span of months and even a year, so everyone in your team knows what is coming up and what type of content to prepare. This is a great benefit, especially in the event of a seasonal campaign, a live event, or a new product launch. Such an approach, combined with useful social media marketing tools, can help you improve workflow and achieve a better campaign execution.
How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar That Converts
A social media content calendar can bring results only when it is connected with your main social media campaign. Without a clear correlation and connection between both, the calendar remains only a collection of random publications that bring no real business value. To avoid such a scenario, you are to create a solid social media plan that ties all types of content to business objectives.
So, to be able to create a social media content calendar that converts, you should focus on the following.
Create Clear Business Goals
You should be precise in defining your digital marketing goals – what is the aim of your online presence, and how does it improve your business growth and goals? This means that you should think about such aims:
- Brand awareness: Do you establish your presence to reach new markets and new customer segments? If this is the case, what type of content would achieve this goal?
- Conversions: Are you launching an online campaign to drive traffic towards landing pages? Then your content calendar should contain publications that aim at that goal.
- Engagement: Do you launch a social media marketing campaign to get in touch with your audience? Aiming at likes, comments, shares, responses? Then, again, your social media content calendar
Audience Research and Insights
A content calendar that converts starts with understanding your audience. When working on a social media marketing campaign and the content calendar, you should conduct comprehensive research and find out everything you can about your potential customers – who they are, what they need, how they interact with he world, what their pain points are, how your products and services can help them solve their problems, etc. Such insights can help you come up with precise types of publications that align with your digital marketing goals and help you achieve them.
Social Media Content Calendar Mix Insights
Not all types of posts are built the same. Depending on context, aim, and type of audience, different publications can be useful in different situations. This is why a balanced content strategy keeps in mind this concept. This all means that your social media planner should include:
- Educational publications: Tips, tutorials, industry insights.
- Promotional publications: Announcements, discount messages, product launches.
- Interactive content: Polls, Q&A, contests, topic discussions, and similar.
- BTS content: Humanize your brand by showcasing the everyday activities of your team.
- User-generated content: Share, comment, and engage in other ways with social media content regarding your business that comes from the audience and paying customers. This can greatly enhance trust and appeal towards your brand.
Read also: What is a Content Map and How it Helps Your Business
Social Media Content Plan Execution
Consistency on any social media platform doesn’t happen by accident – it is a result of careful preparation, clear workflow, periodic revisions, analysis, and incorporating insights into new publication ideas. When working on your social media content calendar, you should make sure that every step in the process is aligned with your social media strategy. To be able to execute a good content strategy and incorporate it into a content calendar, you should follow such rules of thumb:
Create the Right Type of Content
The process begins with content creation that needs to be aligned with the characteristics of your target audience and business goals. To achieve this, follow these suggestions:
- Design images that are tailored to the different types of audience on each social media platform.
- Create captions that align with your brand voice, but also with the way your potential customers are comfortable interacting.
- Coordinate different types of publications with an event in mind – product launches, seasonal sales, and other types of social occurrences.
Revise Publications and Schedule Them
Before your content goes live, it is a good idea to revise it and check for opportunities to make it even more engaging and informative. For this reason, it is a good idea to get in touch with your social media team, so they can give feedback and check for inconsistencies in any of the publication’s elements – visuals, text, links, CTAs, and others. In most cases, various social media marketing tools can help you tremendously with such activities, as they are designed with efficiency and ease in mind – don’t overlook them!
Publish and Analyze Performance
Once the content is approved, it is time to schedule it in your content calendar. Assign each of your social media posts to a specific date and time and use social media tools to automate scheduling and publications. Automation saves time and maintains frequent publications, while also ensuring that your social media campaigns remain active at all times.
Now that publishing is being taken care of, you can focus on monitoring posts’ performance and engagement – do they reach your target audience, how do users respond to them, do they engage with them, and do they go further within the customer journey funnel? Monitor, engage in conversation, and when needed, modify publications and content so they better fit your target audience’s needs and requirements.
Aim at Consistent Growth
One of the greatest benefits of a content calendar is the ability to create momentum over time. Remember that in the context of social media marketing, consistency is key to success. As time progresses, you will have enough information to measure success and adjust your social media campaign to better contribute to achieving your business goals. However, to get the most out of your content calendar, you should also do the following:
1. Constantly search for top-performing publications. By tracking the performance of your social media posts, you will have the chance to filter out the ones that received the most reactions, comments, and contributed to the most link clicks and purchases. Whether these are infographics, behind-the-scenes posts, an advertisement for your products, or anything else, outline these types of publications and make sure to add similar ones in the future, so you leverage this success.
2. Notice gaps and misses in your campaigns. A social media content calendar can help you recognize when certain content types are missing or when there are long gaps between publications. Monitoring such issues can help you outline different problems, for example, your marketing team is focusing too much effort on promotions, while it neglects interactive publications, or maybe, some key dates are not fully supported with relevant publications.
3. Coordinate between different platforms. A social media content calendar can help you manage publications and strategies across different media. Such a tool can help you provide insights and performance reports on any social media channel – Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and others. This means that a content calendar makes it way easier to repurpose content, compensate gaps, and align different social media campaigns towards different channels for optimal business impact.
4. Align the content calendar with your long-term business strategies. As mentioned, a content calendar is not only about posting random publications at a certain time during the week. It is about providing support for your long-term business objectives and contributing to your overall business growth.
Conclusion
A social media calendar is more than just a schedule for your publications – it is a handy tool that can help you remain consistent and achieve your business goals by exposing your brand on social media platforms. By connecting these publications with your broad business needs, you make sure that your marketing team and social media teams stay aligned and your calendar showcases how all marketing and business aims can be achieved throughout time.