What Gets Measured Gets Managed – A FREE Content Calendar For SEO and Social Media

Peter Drucker was a legendary business thinker. If you’ve never read any of his books on business and management, you should (at the very least) memorize his most famous words. What gets measured, gets managed. It’s not rocket science, it’s pure common sense. At past companies, I felt like Marketing Departments worked in silos, which doesn’t help year-end goals. You have the Search Team over here working on X, Social Media is working on Y, Public Relations is building out Z, and your CRM team is not being looped in on any of this great content for their own needs!

More importantly who is tracking what, and how well did it perform in specific marketing channels the year before? This 2019-2020 planning template can go a long way in brainstorming and planning new content each year as you work as a team. Feel free to share it on Google Sheets and let collaboration begin!

<Download your FREE SEO and Content Calendar>

 

Content Calendar Examples

This content calendar template is a shareable resource that marketing teams can use to plan all content marketing activity. The benefit of using the calendar format, rather than just a long list of content to be published, is that you can visualize how your content is distributed throughout the year. I’ve worked with many Marketing Calendars over the past decade, but we decided to create more in depth, shareable calendar that includes a Social Media Calendar and SEO Calendar interweaved with some analytics reporting. The analytics section is a simple content audit tool that manages and measures content engagement. Our analytics metrics capture things like page views, bounce rate, social shares, and SEO rankings of content created each year to see if we want to run a similar campaign or take it off the schedule if it produced high bounce rates and no conversions (lead form, phone call, downloads, etc.) on the website.

 

How to Create an Editorial Calendar for Blogs and Social Media

Here are some recommendations we have while you are planning your content strategy for your SEO and Social Content Calendar.

Follow this outline as you brainstorm topics for future blog posts and of course social media:

Things to Consider for Your 2019 Content Calendar

Each month you will add weekly or monthly content to your website, and as you do, here are a few tips to improve your ROI and SEO results on your website:

Create a unique title tag for the headline

Select an outward facing title. This what you’ll use to entice people to read your SEO and Social Media Calendar

Perform Keyword Research around your topic

Select 1-3 focused keywords or a general topic you want to focus on. Have the SEO team perform some SEO keyword research weeks before the launch of the blog post and consider adding one of your focus words in the header tag of the title. This applies for topics spanning the entire year.

Target Audience

Select a person(a)—Who do you want to read this?

Content Type

Blog Post?

Facebook post?

Whitepaper?

Video?

Instagram photo

Email?

Repurpose For

Select additional channels for posting this content.

Your Calendar Is Ready to Launch…but Back to Removing Silos

Regular content planning meetings between all teams in content creation should be scheduled well before the next publishing period – be it monthly or quarterly. This meeting can be used to schedule the publishing content with realistic time frames and to support blogging, social media activity, marketing automation emails, etc.

Your planning meetings can also be used to review the analytic stats from previous periods to assess which types of content are most successful (and perhaps need to be replicated) and which are less successful (and perhaps need to be rethought).

Analytics (both web and social) and important KPI metrics can also be used to make tweaks to already published content, e.g. header titles, intro paragraphs, outbound links etc., to optimize visits and engagement across your web pages.

<Download your SEO and content calendar here>

Have questions about implementing this template into your Content Marketing Strategy? Ask us a question in the comments, or send us an email at expert@emfluence.com to get started.


2 COMMENTS:

  1. Brian – just seeing this now, but it’s really well done — the best summary of which days and times to post for greatest reach that I’ve seen. Especially interesting to me was how best times vary by platform, as my impulse is to immediately push new blog posts to all of my social media channels at once (typically around 8:00 am Eastern).

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