“Brands need to take the phrase 'acting like a publisher' literally.” - Michael Brenner
Content is king, but which content rules the land varies as the year rolls out. Though there’s nothing better than that spontaneous spark that leads to a good idea, hitting the right audience at the right time is essential.
Seasonality is a great way to plan and systemize your content creation, taking much of the guesswork out of your editorial calendar. Here’s how it works.
Know Your Industry
Some seasons in your calendar are quite obvious. Christmas, Summer vacations, and national holidays are a great place to start. But your target industry likely has specific calendar points, too.
For example, you might work in a less Instagram-friendly industry, such as a company specializing in installing swimming pools. Then Summer would be an important season for you. On the other hand, winter might be a great time for sales on equipment and content around caring for your pool over the winter. If you’re a Mommy blogger, the school year might be an ideal calendar to model your content calendar on.
Use the Tools You Have
Keep an eye on Google Trends! If you’re stuck for ideas for your content calendar, it’s the first place you or your team should be looking for Google searches common to your area, your business, and your chosen topics.
Google trend searches can teach you what’s an important topic in your area and which related keywords you might be missing. It can even advise you on your competitors' keywords, which can help you find gaps in the competition’s content to capitalize on or even help you build relationships with those in your field.
A Great Plan and a Great Team
To run a successful content calendar, you’ll need a winning social media strategy and a great team. These tips should help in assembling your team and in creating your social media plan:
- Choose no more than three major events to schedule your content around per month. This has a few benefits. You’re not milking every passing trend, instead, you can really spend time delivering content that matters to your customers. You still have some flexibility to create content-on-demand if an unexpected trend takes off.
- Spend as much time planning your off-season as you do planning your seasonal events. End-of-season sales are a great opportunity to lure new customers, and the time you save automating some of your quieter periods can be put to exciting and innovative marketing campaigns during peak season.
- Don’t reinvent the wheel. Christmas will always be a great time for posts about perfect gifts, and who doesn’t dream of a family vacation as a summer adventure? Use the more predictable seasonal events, like holidays and local festivals, to save time planning your content so you can spend it where it matters.
- Use Google’s scheduling calendar, or pay for content calendar services to keep your team on-task, and ensure everyone is on the same page. When planning your marketing strategy for the month or the year, delegate tasks and teams by their strengths. It’s a great idea to have teams on:
- Content Strategists and Subject-Matter Experts (or Researchers)
• Writers
• Graphic Designers
• Marketers
• Reviewers
• Project Managers
A team with a variety of skills will not only help you diversify your content marketing strategy. It will also help you reach a wider audience, as different specializations and styles will have an impact on your reach.
For larger companies, it’s common to have marketing teams on each campaign. If you’re a smaller company or an independent company, you can choose to hire freelance writers, graphic designers, and more, to add to your growing team. While giving yourself the skills to create the best content, for every time of year.
Creating Your Content Calendar With Seasonality
To show you how seasonality can give you the best results, we’ve created an example.
Let’s say you run a small landscaping business. Your keyword research has shown that your area is host to some major spring music festivals and that your sales are lowest in the winter months, for obvious reasons.
With this information, you plan your yearly content calendar around big spring deals, as your area gets ready to celebrate, and warms up to spring cleaning, fourth of July entertaining tips, and the best ways to keep your lawn clear as the leaves begin to fall. What’s next for winter? Gift guides for gardeners? How to take care of your outdoor power tools in the winter months? Maybe even a seasonal sale as your stock clears out.
Your team can then decide on the marketing strategy for each campaign, including scheduling posts, creating assets, and deciding on the platforms you’ll utilize, as well as any relevant hashtags and promotional codes.
They can use a shared content calendar to plan on when to brainstorm, write, review, rewrite, and post each content. They can also track who is responsible for each piece of content, and better coordinate posts on multiple platforms, for maximum exposure.
Using these tips, you can plan your month, your season, or even your whole year around key promotional periods, and specific marketing strategies. These will help you rank higher and expand your marketing reach. It also makes it easier to provide backlinks, recycle content, and find other ways to automate your content marketing.
Follow Up
SEO and content marketing is a game that’s always changing. Your marketing strategies will need to be adjusted over time. It’s important to track the success of your marketing campaigns.
A Christmas campaign that does well one year can be repurposed for next year, turned into a “tradition” or “limited-time event.” Incorporating local events in your content marketing strategy can pave the way for a further relationship with the crowd as your business and goals continue to grow. You can find ways to recycle popular posts and use those posts with more traffic to boost or rework content that isn’t getting the numbers you were hoping for.
By keeping an eye on your analytics, you can adjust your marketing strategy on the fly. And thanks to your seasonally geared content calendar, you’ll still have a great source of material, even if you learn something doesn’t work.
Save Time and Effort
One of the benefits of seasonal content that you can count on is that you’ll have the space and capability to capitalize on trends that may pop up throughout the year, and fade relatively quickly. This will give your brand a sense of being both valuable and dependable, while also honing in on something new and exciting in the present moment.
Whatever business you’re in, you know that content marketing strategies are critical to your success. No matter how small your team, having a ready stream of content is essential.
Creating a content calendar based on repeated seasonal events, for your community, your business, or the world, can help you plan relevant content that will gain engagement, without having to reinvent the wheel each time you design a marketing strategy.
The right schedule, the right team, and the right workflow can help you automate your content creation to save you time and money.