Feel like you’re in a crowd shouting and no one can hear you? If your content is stale that could be happening.
Search engines are like magpies, drawn to shiny and new. Feed them a stream of regular content.
Whether you know it or not, as a business, you have a tidal wave of content opportunities. You just need to be prepared to capitalize on them and shift your thinking. You’re getting together with teammates for brainstorming sessions, for team building activities, for the casual video game or foosball tourney. You’re also probably attending and speaking at meetups, user groups, or conferences, exhibiting at tradeshows. You may be hosting a weekly or monthly chat with customers. All of these activities can be subjects for your content.
With an annual Marketing Communications calendar, an editorial calendar of sorts, you can turn many of your regular business activities into a consistent, predictable stream of content. You’ll use this calendar to develop and execute coordinated cross-channel content campaigns that amplify your message and increase the number of qualified leads.
A Marketing Communications calendar should include: Themes, Important Dates, and Distribution Channels.
How to Create Your Marketing Communications Calendar
- Start a spreadsheet. Across the top in the first row, label four columns: Month, Events, Black out Dates, Themes, and Channels. In the first column, you’ll label twelve rows, one for each month.
- List all public events. You want to include all meetups, user groups, industry conferences and partner tradeshows that you may or may not be at. Don’t stop at just company events or events you are attending. Include conferences that your developers and product team are attending. Every time someone from your company is out in public is an opportunity to talk about what you’re doing.
Notice I don’t include product releases. One, product releases aren’t usually known in advance by the general public. And, two, unless you can reliably predict the future, you only want dates that you know are going to happen. Product releases, when they happen, get layered on top of your regular storytelling. - Record every black out date. These are holidays and employee vacations. If you send an email when your customers are away for Thanksgiving, the likelihood it will be read, or even seen, is low. You want to maximize exposure for your efforts. To use a cliché: work smart, not hard. Employee vacations highlight when someone won’t be available to answer press questions and identify the need for longer lead times.
- Add your three themes, no more than one a month and never back to back. When spacing your themes, look at when your internal experts will be available. If only one person knows widgets inside and out, don’t plan your widget content campaign to go live during his/her vacation. Also consider what key tradeshows are talking about. If your theme is complimentary, you’ll have more places you can share your content. You’ll have a wider audience for your story.
- Note how you’ll spread your story. Consider each opportunity to connect with someone a channel. For months when you have events, the meetup, the conference, are each a channel. If you have a month with no events, consider a podcast or a live webinar. Each social media platform you use is one channel. Not all stories will be a fit for all your channels. Think about your themes. Some will be fits for your website, emails, a newsletter write up, a series of blog posts, and a white paper. Not all will be.
Next month I’ll share how you can begin publishing quality content by incorporating storytelling into your daily routine.
Photo Credit: David Saddler, the bridge, via Flickr.