3 Benefits Professionals Gain from Using a Content Calendar

With so much information floating around about the importance of a strong content marketing strategy, it’s difficult to determine what advice is legitimate. So, let’s make one thing clear: Before you can implement any content strategy, you need to first have it organized. That’s where a content calendar comes into play.

Unlike your personal calendar and work calendars, this one is not filled with appointments and meetings. Instead it is a place to lay out all of your content ideas, assign responsibility, and track your efforts. It’s the very first step to any content efforts we do internally or for our clients.

Check out these three reasons why we love our content calendar so much, and why it should become part of your content strategy:

1. It allows us to work ahead: You know how people say early is on time and on time is late? The same goes for content. If you are not working ahead, you are behind. When we put out a blog post or post content on social media, it is not often that it is unplanned. That only happens if we go to an incredible event or if something unplanned hits our radar and we just need to talk about it, or there’s a puppy in the office. Every piece of unique content we put out takes time, research, and energy. All of that means strategy and planning. Using a content calendar gives us the ability to map it out and give our work the time it needs.
2. It allows us to see the big picture: Having a filled out content calendar allows us to step back and identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities. This allows us to diversify our content, and determine which areas need additional work. At 3Seed, we offer a wide array of services and have many team members with unique skill-sets. We want to talk about all of them, not the same ones week after week.
3. It allows us to create a well rounded content strategy: Blog content lends to additional parts of your content strategy, like social media and a monthly newsletter. Knowing what blog will be published when gives us additional time to create relevant graphics for social media to link to our blog, and gives us the opportunity to curate newsletter content for the upcoming months. All of this helps lead traffic back to your website and hopefully get users to travel through your site from there. Pro tip: Try to write blogs that have the ability to link to other unique pieces of content you have written in the past, or to examples of your past work/case studies. (See what I did when I mentioned puppies in the office…)

The bottom line is to create a sound and comprehensive content strategy, a content calendar is vital. Our team of content marketers, designers, social media marketers, and SEM/SEO experts are constantly working together on each piece of unique content we put out. That means a lot of planning ahead to ensure that each piece works together. Have a question about content marketing, or want to have a conversation about how we can help? Just reach out! We would be happy to help you get ahead.