The purpose of having a content calendar is to make sure your content team stays organized and on top of your publishing schedule. Some specific benefits include:
• Keeping track of deadlines.
• Giving your whole team visibility on what you’re working on.
• Making it easier to plan ahead.
In this post, we took seven companies across a variety of industries and reconstructed their blog and social media posting schedules (based on manual research) to create example content calendars.
Let's Look At 3 Content Calendar Examples From These Leading Brands
We chose the following companies to reconstruct their publishing schedule. Each one of these organizations had an active blog and a regular social media presence.
•
Red Bull: Red Bull is a publishing company that just happens to sell an energy drink. This makes them interesting because they publish a large amount of high quality content.
•
Disney Parks: An estimated 150 million people visit Disney parks every year. Their content helps those visitors have the best time.
•
BMW: BMW is the most popular car brand on Instagram. Their messages promote an aspirational lifestyle that people strive to achieve.
Each one of these organizations span a variety of industries and company sizes. No matter what your organization does you can see a variety of schedules to inspire your own.
Red Bull
Red Bull is a massive media powerhouse that just happens to sell an energy drink. As you can see from their content calendar, they publish a lot of stuff whether it’s blogs, social media messages, videos and more.
What conclusions can we draw from Red Bull’s content calendar?
•
Post your content where your audience is most active. Red Bull’s audience of 20 to 30 year old males is most active on Facebook and Instagram. Therefore it makes sense that Red Bull would publish a larger amount of content on these channels.
•
Reuse video content on social media. Red Bull is known for their incredible video content. Much of that gets shared on Facebook and their other social platforms. You might not be able to shoot the same kind of video, but if you have video content at all, repackage it for social media for maximum mileage.
•
Create content that looks and feel authentically like the non-branded content that your audience seeks out. Red Bull is so successful because it looks like content from a publishing house. They don’t feel like they are being sold too.
Takeaway: Organic social media content doesn't always need to sell directly in order to be successful.
Disney Parks
Disney is a behemoth in the hospitality and service world and needless to say they publish a lot of content. The Disney Parks blog is just one of several blogs, Facebook pages and more that Disney runs.
What conclusions can we draw from Disney Park’s content calendar?
•
Create content that creates FOMO. Disney has many massive theme parks that are packed full of attractions and fun family things to do. Their content creates a FOMO or feeling of missing out on all the fun. This move creates a sense of urgency and longing for your audience hopefully promoting them to take action.
•
Show them what they will experience. Create content that shows your audience what they will get or experience when they purchase your products. Instead of letting them guess what will happen, show them instead.
•
Help them have the best time when they do business with you. Disney’s content focuses a lot on the experiences that their customers have. You can do this as well by letting your content show them how working with you creates the best possible experience they’ll ever have.
Takeaway: Show your audience how to create an experience when they visit you.
BMW
BMW is a world-renowned luxury vehicle maker. Their designs are timeless, classic, and out of reach for
many pocket books. Their content marketing strategy however, is not.
What conclusions can we draw from BMW content calendar?
•
Use your blog to show behind the scenes stuff about your product. People love seeing what makes a product tick. Use your blog to show them information that they may not get by seeing advertisements or use cases of your product.
•
If you sell an expensive product, use social media to reinforce your brand not make a direct sale. People know who BMW is and how it makes them feel. Their product is out of reach for many of their audience members meaning that a link to a dealership in a post probably isn’t going to result in a sale. If your product has a pretty hefty price tag use your social media to reinforce the luxury idea of your brand.
•
Make people feel like they’re part of the community. BMW is great at making their audience feel included when they buy their product. They’re not just purchasing a car, they’re also becoming part of a community.
Takeaway: If your product is a hard direct sell, create content that caters to your audience’s aspirations.
How Can You Build Your Own Calendar Like a Leading Brand?
You’ve seen three different examples. The next step in your process is to create a content publishing schedule and a social media promotion schedule.
So how do you do that?
Step One: Figure Out Content Types and Publishing Schedule
The very first step in developing your content calendar is deciding what types content you’re going to be publishing. Some common options are:
• Blog Posts
• E-Books
• Landing pages
• Podcasts
• Videos
• Social media posts
• Email newsletters
There’s no limit to the types of content that your team can publish but remember to start small and grow into more types later down the road.
Once you’ve decided what types of content you’re going to publish, you need to decide how often you’re going publish each type of content. For example it could look something like:
• Publish two blog posts a week.
• Publish one podcast a week.
• Publish one e-book each quarter.
The publishing schedule that your company decides on can grow or shrink depending on For every content piece you publish you should include the following information in your content calendar:
• The date it publishes.
• The topic it covers.
• The content format you’ll create.
In your content calendar template it would look something like this:
Step Two: Decide What Channels You Want To Publish Your Messages On
Once you have your publishing schedule figured out you need to decide how you’re going to promote the content you’ve created.
You can choose one standard promotional schedule for every piece of content that you publish or you can create a different promotional schedules for each type of content.
Step Three: Determine How Often You’re Going To Post
You can use the How Often To Post on Social Media infographic to help create your schedule.
Step Four: Decide What Times You’re Going To Post
Once you’ve decided how often you’re going to post on each of your channels you need to decide when you’re going to post. This infographic on the best times to post on social media can help you get started:
Now You’re Ready To Create Your Own Content Calendar
You have all of the tools you need to create a killer content calendar. Whether you’re using an excel spreadsheet or a CoSchedule calendar your publishing schedule is up to you and your team.