Creating a content calendar can seem like an arduous process. It’s not just about drumming up enough ideas to make it through the next quarter or longer. Your content calendar has to speak to your audience. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time creating content that your ideal customer is never going to see. The good news is, we’ve got a content creation hack that will save you countless hours and deliver the exact content your ideal customer is looking for – bringing them back to your site or social media page again and again.
First Things First: Turning Problems Into Your Content Calendar Solution
The best way to get your ideal customer reading your content is to give them what you know they need, and you do that through targeting their problems.
Go through all your customer emails. Talk with your customer care team. Sort through any private messages on your company’s social media platforms. Think of recent conversations you or others in the company have had with current clients. All of these places hold the key to what you need in your content calendar. This is where you discover the exact questions your audience wants answers to.
Whether you choose to use a spreadsheet, post-it notes, or good old pen and paper, write down every single one of the problems or questions that have come up in the past six months.
Don’t have a content calendar? You can download a free content calendar from CoSchedule here.
Second: Easy Solutions for Your Customer = Easy Creation for You
With your list of problems and questions ready to go, now you can dive into the process of actually building out your full content calendar.
To start building it out, you’ll want to come up with 3-5 content ideas for each problem/question on your list. Depending on how often you put out content and how big your list of problems is will determine how much content this creates for you. You can also split the content ideas up to distribute between both social media and your company blog – helping you to maximize your time creating while minimizing your time brainstorming.
Pro tip: Don’t try to solve the entire problem in one content idea. Break the problem down into multiple, bite-sized solutions that will help get your customer closer to where they want to be while creating more content opportunities for you to bring them back to your site again and again.
I always recommend creating a content calendar for a minimum of 3 months at a time, but never more than 6 months. By focusing on quarterly content creation, you’re able to really zone in on the problems your ideal customers are facing in the moment, rather than addressing something months down the road when it isn’t in their frame of sight anymore. On that same token, if you create your content calendar too far out, you might end up missing out on the ability to cover key problems and questions that arise in between calendar creation sessions.
Need Help Creating a Full Content Calendar for Your Business?
Whether it’s social media marketing or building a strong SEO campaign that drives traffic back to your website, maintaining consistent content delivery to your audience is crucial. If you need help in this arena, give the experts at Connections Marketing a call today. Our team can create the precise plan you need to deliver exactly what your ideal customer is looking for.