5 tools to help you create an always-on content calendar
Creating a high-level content strategy for your business – complete with compelling themes and on-brand messages – is a pretty sizeable task in itself. But what some might underestimate is the work involved in actually delivering on that content strategy day-to-day, ensuring a regular flow of published content to all your channels.
Creating a monthly content calendar is the most practical way of focusing your efforts and ensuring your content is an ‘always-on’ stream – rather than a sporadic trickle. Here are five handy tools to make building a content calendar a much more manageable task.
Created by Postcron, the social scheduling platform provider, this useful free content calendar template comes in a simple Google Sheet format and (refreshingly) isn’t gated.
With a month-by-month layout and columns for content type, topic, post title, audience, keywords, author and publishing channels, it provides a basic structure that you can use as a starting point and customise to suit your own needs – rather than completely reinventing the wheel.
And with marketers under particular pressure to demonstrate results from content, the measurement section, with columns for engagement stats after 30 days, is another nice feature of this template.
‘Evergreen’ content is one of the core pillars of most content strategies, because it typically addresses an ongoing issue or long-term topic of interest in your industry – meaning you can stock up your calendar weeks or months in advance with ‘evergreen’ ideas, without the pressure of time-sensitivity.
But how do you come up with those evergreen ideas in the first place? That’s where Answer The Public comes in. This extremely useful tool works by tapping into the ‘auto suggest’ results from Google and Bing to surface the most commonly searched questions around a particular keyword.
Type in ‘wearable’, for example, and you’ll get a beautifully visualised wheel of question phrases (e.g. ‘How wearable technology works’), that provide a rich mine of ideas, ripe for being turned into highly relevant, SEO-friendly content pieces.
On the flipside of producing evergreen content, there’s also the need to balance this with up-to-date content that reflects current events.
The Awareness Days calendar tool is helpful when it comes to staying on top of charitable and ethical awareness days, but also cultural events (like ‘National Storytelling Week’) and even more frivolous (but entirely essential) occasions, like ‘National Pizza Day’. Finding relevant dates and plugging them into your calendar is a good way to get some topical inspiration for blog and social content.
Staying with the theme of topical, reactive content, Google Alerts is an excellent tool that can drastically reduce the amount of time you spend researching industry-relevant news stories.
Rather than trawling Google News, you can set alerts for various custom topics and keywords of interest – or pick from a list of pre-populated suggestions – and then input your email address to get daily digests of matching news stories delivered direct to your inbox.
Builtvisible’s Content Strategy Discovery Tool is another boon for marketers who need a little inspiration to help populate their content calendars. Accessible through a seemingly simple Google Docs spreadsheet, the tool is plugged into data sources ranging from Google News, Reddit and YouTube to pollsters Yougov and ONS.gov.uk.
Put a keyword or topic into the ‘Ideas’ tab, and it surfaces the most successful current content related to your query. Alternatively, the ‘Trending’ tab reveals a more general view of current trending topics across a range of social channels.
Quill Content is a LinkedIn Certified Content Partner, and produces high-quality, multi-lingual content for businesses to use on their websites and social media - specialising in pre-purchase content that improves conversion rates, search rankings and average order values. Find out more about our Certified Content Partners.
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