Does your brand’s social media strategy need a refresh? We’ve all been there, and content planning will help.
The time comes to build out the monthly content calendar, and you wrack your brain trying to figure out what holidays are coming up, what evergreen content is relevant, and how often and on which platforms you should post.
These decisions are not to be taken lightly — they’ll impact your brand, reach, and engagement.
If you strategize and plan ahead with content planning and scheduling tools, you can make this process more streamlined and efficient, all while increasing ROI. By looking at previous post data, your brand can lower costs by optimizing what posts have the most money behind them and limiting spending on posts that aren’t performing.
Additionally, content planning can give external teams an understanding of how social media can impact a larger marketing strategy.
When your posts reach larger audiences, increase site traffic, and generate leads, you’ll be able to demonstrate revenue generated by social marketing campaigns.
This blog covers why content planning and scheduling are important, how to create a content strategy, and why your brand should partner with Khoros and Everyone Social for a social strategic victory.
Why Content Planning and Scheduling are Important
Let’s dive right in.
What is content planning?
Content planning helps brands achieve their organizational and strategic goals.
So, what is a content plan? Content plans encompass the workflows and procedures that support overall marketing strategy and initiatives.
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking this is just about social media; it’s quite a bit larger than that.
Think of a content plan as everything a brand needs to go to market, including publishing tools, content management, global calendars, team collaboration, KPI identification, and reporting — to name only a few. Social media is an important component of any content plan.
What is a content calendar?
A good content plan always includes a content calendar. A content calendar includes everything your brand plans to publish in a relevant time frame, from blogs and promotional emails to whitepapers and ebooks.
As long as your brand has active social media channels, including social media within the larger content calendar is essential. If your brand publishes a lot, you may even consider giving social media its own calendar.
Social media content calendars allow you to look ahead and see and plan social media posts in advance.Typically, businesses will plan out their social media posts anywhere from a few weeks to months in advance. This helps businesses organize when they post, which platforms they post to, and what content types get published on each platform.
One thing social media managers can always count on is for the social landscape to constantly change.
There’s an ever-growing number of social media channels to keep track of, not to mention the endless new trends emerging from each one. And don’t even get us started on algorithm changes.
If your brand’s social media team is going to keep up with the demand for content across growing channels, planning is absolutely crucial. Plan your posts well in advance, and work to understand the unique needs of the audiences on each respective platform.
We recommend only adopting only new social media channels that you can ensure will be updated regularly with content tailored to that platform — it’s often better to not say anything at all on a new channel than to create low-quality or sporadic content.
Forming a content strategy
A content strategy has three main components: planning, content, and collaboration.
You’ll need to look at your brand’s plan holistically. Content strategy isn’t just about brainstorming — it requires time to set up your calendar, gather results, and optimize your content.
- Planning
The planning stage is a collaborative process amongbetween marketers, brand managers, and other key stakeholders. In this stage, it’s important to outline content KPIs and how you plan to achieve them.
A helpful way to map this out is to organize the content by campaigns. This way you can track and report how each campaign and its content performs in relation to your KPIs.
- Content
There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for determining what and how often you should post, so tailor your cadence based on facts and data you know about your audience. Use any existing brand data to identify which social media sites your customers use the most and ensure these platforms receive extra attention.
To help your team stay agile, keep an updated library of easily accessible content in your publishing platform. This will make the process of changing content more straightforward and faster when needed.
- Collaboration
To prevent teams from operating in silos, give them one central place where they can reference what’s happening across channels, – including the content center, planning space, in-app notes, email notifications, and more.
Determine whether you want specific people on your team to be in charge of posts for particular platforms or if you want to delegate responsibilities by day or project. Empower your teams with direct access to the data and insights they need to keep your brand relevant and protected.
Calculate Your Employee Advocacy ROI 📈
Get a custom, shareable report highlighting the ROI you can expect to generate from employees sharing and creating content.
Tools for content planning and scheduling
Whether you’re a social media novice or a seasoned pro, planning out social media is a lot for anyone to keep track of.
The best brands in the world don’t rely on humans alone to make social media campaigns great; they have advanced strategies and tools to help them plan posts, create content, and measure success.
One way brands increase success on social media is by integrating employee advocacy into their content strategy plan — encouraging employees to share posts about their brand on social media and expanding the overall reach of social posts.
Here are two solutions brands rely on to make their campaigns succeed.
Khoros Marketing
Khoros Marketing brings together all of your social accounts and campaigns — and the people who manage them — into one place.
It enables sophisticated, distributed marketing organizations to bring social data into each step of the customer journey, from generating leads for future targeting to inspiring ongoing participation through branded digital experiences.
With Khoros, you can track content performance and conversion events to make the link between social dollars and business dollars and share those insights with key stakeholders. The Khoros Social Media Platform is proven to help increase ROI by decreasing the amount of time spent planning and scheduling content and using insights to help you know how to reach your customers.
Engage customers with meaningful social media marketing campaigns through Khoros’s easy-to-use marketing solution. With Khoros Marketing, you can publish, plan, report and analyze, reduce risk, moderate and more… all from one convenient platform.
EveryoneSocial
EveryoneSocial helps brands amplify employee advocacy campaigns, which are a key part of many content plans.
With EveryoneSocial, you can expand shares and reach of content, drive social growth on branded accounts, and more.
EveryoneSocial enables companies to organize and distribute content to their employees, who can then easily share it to their own professional networks to build influence and brand impact.
