8. Calendars Will Keep You Sane
Perhaps the most important steps to making anything real, is to plan out your whens. After all, everything happens at a time, so choosing the times when and how content goes is a requisite step in making sure it happens. A strong content calendar has a bunch of things to like about it:
Distribution of content. While consistency is important, the last thing you want is for your audience to know what you’re going to say before you say it. Understanding the different beats you need to hit and emotions you need to evoke is only as good as your ability to vary them up. Engagement is driven by a balance of relevance and surprise. Use your content calendar to ensure you are reaching your audience regularly and with something new to say.
Drafting off of macro awareness. Getting your audience to care about what you have to say is the sin qua non of an impactful strategy. Knowing what they are already thinking about, and speaking to that lets you start on second base. There are right ways to do this (daylight savings messing everyone up) and wrong (“National Pho Day”. Love you, pho.)
Projecting costs. Knowing you need to publish a video on a day, allows you to back out when you need to pay your freelance script-writer or your producer/editor. If you are managing the cash your content strategy requires, you’re flying blind without a calendar.
Planning complex support for brand moments. These instances should be few and far between. When something major happens at your brand, it takes a multi-pronged effort to really ring the bell. This content calendar allows you to set the big moment, plan out any teasers leading up to it, map out synchronous content, and lay out the follow ups that help amplify the digital footprint of your biggest events.
