Content is King – you hear it everywhere. But where do you start? I’ll give you some quick ideas and best practices to get you on your way. Hopefully, your marketing team has an aligned set of priorities and goals with the business and sales team – if not take time to look at their goals. The first-place businesses get off track is misaligned priorities.
Once priorities are validated, I highly recommended building out two sets of calendars. The first is a high-level annual calendar. The purpose here is to make sure that you are keeping focus on your top priorities as well as thinking about key events throughout the year. If you want to launch a new product at a major event, that needs to be part of this planning. Also, you don’t want to focus on a product or service that may be at the end of its seasonal focus (holiday lights in December – it’s too late!). Here’s an example of how you can view this exercise:
The next calendar level is more specific and focuses on daily and weekly needs every month. Why should you do this? If you are just winging it, you will eventually get to a point where you are too busy and miss a few dates or worse, develop really poor content. Keeping a plan in front of you allows you to build out some content in advance and then execute as needed. Here’s an example of what a month would look like:
The final recommendation that I will make is to start your planning with at least 2 months’ worth of ideas. Having done this many times in my career, content development requires a great deal of planning. If you are trying to do this as you go, you will eventually run into a lack of time. The more you can develop ideas in advance, it will help you create or repurpose content and stay on your calendar schedule.
Rand Inc. has developed both in-depth content programs like you see here as well as more abbreviated versions. If you would like to discuss further – please reach out to us at tjobe@randinc.cc.
