Did you know that a huge 1 in 4 purchases in the UK happen because of an interaction with social media? More so, 70% of customers prefer to learn about businesses through articles and blogs (‘content marketing’) rather than through ads. In fact, content marketing itself costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads!
However, for most small businesses, coming up with fresh content ideas for your social media efforts can seem like a minefield. We have put together this guide on what a content calendar is and how using one can make your marketing so much easier to do.
A content calendar, according to the people at The Quirky Pineapple Studio, is a written schedule which allows you to organise how, where and when your social media content will be published. By keeping track of everything you’re posting across your channels, a calendar has the added benefit of helping small businesses to increase their online visibility as part of their marketing strategy. There are multiple ways of creating a calendar, whether that be in paper form, in a spreadsheet, or by using a calendar tool. Our advice would be to keep it simple and use a format and process that works for you.
Did you know that a huge 1 in 4 purchases in the UK happen because of an interaction with social media? More so, 70% of customers prefer to learn about businesses through articles and blogs (‘content marketing’) rather than through ads. In fact, content marketing itself costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3 times as many leads!
However, for most small businesses, coming up with fresh content ideas for your social media efforts can seem like a minefield. We have put together this guide on what a content calendar is and how using one can make your marketing so much easier to do.
A content calendar, according to the people at The Quirky Pineapple Studio, is a written schedule which allows you to organise how, where and when your social media content will be published. By keeping track of everything you’re posting across your channels, a calendar has the added benefit of helping small businesses to increase their online visibility as part of their marketing strategy. There are multiple ways of creating a calendar, whether that be in paper form, in a spreadsheet, or by using a calendar tool. Our advice would be to keep it simple and use a format and process that works for you.
By way of illustration, the image below shows what a content calendar built in social platform Sprout Social, Inc. looks like:
You can see how it enables you to visualise and schedule your content across your various social networks, and indicate the channel a given post is going to be posted to, all within a single calendar.
As a small business, you may be thinking that, although a content calendar sounds like it would be ideal to have, it would be too time-consuming to put together whilst running your business. Contrary to what you might expect though, a content calendar can actually turn out less time-consuming than posting individual posts every day.
Using an online social media content calendar enables social media content to be posted in batches, meaning that businesses can organise their content for months ahead of time.
Jessica Crosby from Crosby Digital Marketing has outlined 6 steps for small businesses to get the most out of a content calendar:
1. Audit your current social media
Doing a review of your social media can help you assess what you are doing right now, and can also help you define your audience. What is your most successful post? What content are you posting that isn’t working so well? From here, you can ask yourself if the audience is the one that you are hoping to target.
2. Develop a social strategy that includes a content ratio
The first step to setting up a content calendar is establishing a content strategy. Although slightly different from working out your social media goals, these are still two sides of the same coin. Crosby Digital Marketing suggest that having a content ratio in place can be a helpful starting point here. For example, this may be 80% of content that educates or solves a problem for your audience with the other 20% being geared towards promoting your business.
The message here from Crosby Digital Marketing is that followers may become annoyed and unfollow your business if 100% of your content is lead-generating. Therefore, by adopting the above ratio and having content that informs and educates your viewer, you will naturally increase your business’ organic social following.
3. Create a system
This initially looks like a template for a spreadsheet or a calendar at first. A calendar probably would work well if you are just exploring getting started with a calendar however, Crosby Digital Marketing advises using a spreadsheet format to get going and list the following as examples of different types of elements to include in an Excel sheet:
4. Get organised
It can be hard to keep track of your social strategy ideas without having a designated place where you can quickly collate your ideas and you may find that, without one, they may get lost or forgotten about. One way around this is to create a folder in Google Drive which can be easily accessible on a phone. You can then put anything you come across into this folder whether that be an online source or article, or even simply just an idea to make note of. This can help with your content planning as one main advantage is that it gives you something to scroll through for inspiration if you ever feel at a loss as to what to put out on your channels.
5. Set amounts
At this stage, you will need to decide how much content you will need to develop, whether that be for your industry or the optimum amount of posts for the platforms you are posting to. One key consideration here might be working out the best time of day to post for your business. In other words, when are your audience most likely to be on social media? Knowing these insights will help you post at the right time for an increase in digital engagement.
6. Create posts
Now you can actually start creating content for your business channels. With the above steps underway, you will have content to add in for different days per week rather than multiple blank spaces needing to be filled. By having a process for storing and organising content ideas as they come, you should find that you start seeing opportunities for new content in all aspects of running your business, whether that be a recurring customer question or an informative email you have already written to a customer. Whatever it may be, see if there is a way you can use it as part of your content strategy.
The six steps above can be used by any business to get a content calendar in place. Spreadsheets can be a simple way to get started but we think there are lots of tools out there, some with free options, which can be really helpful. Here at GrowthBox, for example, we use www.trello.com to help manage content from ideas, through to development and out to published status once we post them on our social media channels. For advance scheduling, tools like www.hootsuite.com, www.socialpilot.com, www.contentcal.com or (we use) www.sendible.com to build a queue of content and set our publishing schedule to each social media channel in advance.
But - plan ahead. Spend time upfront on step 2 above - what are your ‘content pillars’ (e.g. educational / promotion etc.)? How often will you post each type and how will you create it?
We hope you’ve found this guide to setting up a content calendar useful. For more content marketing advice, check out our advice pages here: https://www.growthbox.co.uk/subscribe/
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