One of the hallmarks of businesses that rock content marketing is that they have a content marketing plan accompanied by a content marketing calendar. Content marketing has evolved into a many-headed hydra, all of which require attention and care.
Precisely because of the ease with which you can publish content in various forms all over the Web in the blink of an eye, having an organized plan of attack and strategy is more important than ever before. Let's take a look at some of the hallmarks of an effective content marketing calendar, and how you can implement one.
Who should do this?
You may be tempted to think that with so many different forms of content you may be marketing with, each of them should have their own content marketing calendar, but you'd be wrong. Resist the urge to let each department run it on their own, and insist on a consolidated plan that encompasses all aspects of your content marketing. Put specific people in charge of managing the content marketing calendar, and set up a system that alerts you when tasks are falling through the cracks, as they inevitably will.
The reasons for this are numerous. Primarily though, you want to be able to execute an overall strategy, and having it segmented across several calendars is amazingly counter-productive, as some departments drop the ball and others thrive, accountability and promotion will be the casualties here.
What form should the content marketing calendar take?
This can be a simple spreadsheet customized for the task. This is usually sufficient. There are numerous other forms of collaborative software if you have a large organization or want more automation.
There are also software solutions that do the job nicely, which may be the ticket for you if you have a sizable organization or simply wish to automate more of the task completion reporting and project management. Tools like Basecamp and Teamwork come quickly to mind, but there are literally dozens of quality programs to pick from, so set aside some time to look them over. Be forewarned that there are costs and learning curves involved with this type of solution.
Usually a simple solution works best, and we would encourage this to start, especially of you haven't before attempted to task your content marketing. Moving up to more sophisticated systems can always happen in the future if need be.