53% of marketers have a content calendar according to the Content Marketing Institute, but, is it the same for influencers and bloggers?
Influencer content calendars are a vital tool to help influencers grow their audience, create coordinated content and as a result attract more brands. Many influencers whether just starting out or already having a large audience struggle to come up with content that both feels natural and helps them reach their objectives.
We have assembled some of our favourite content calendar tips to make sure that your next planning session leads to the results you are looking for.
Establish Who Your Audience Is
Many influencers, bloggers and vloggers have a general idea of who their audience is, but, you need to really know who they are by looking at data provided to you by the social media platform or by paying a third party for access to more detailed demographic information. When reviewing this data you need to consider a few questions. There might be more or less depending on your current understanding of your audience:
Who are my followers?
What are my followers interested in?
How old are they?
What are their aspirations?
Choose The Right Social Media Channels
This might seem like an obvious one, however, you need to make sure that you are creating content for the channel or channels that your audience is most active on. There might be opportunities for you on a social media channel that you hadn’t to help expand your audience. Make sure that you consider your time and resources when selecting social media channels so that you aren’t sacrificing the quality of your content for quantity of posts.
Define Your Influencer Content Calendar Goals and Objectives
As early as possible when planning your content calendar it is important to consider what your goals and objectives are. Whatever answer that you come up with will provide the foundation for everything that you do. The goals and objectives that you set for your influencer content calendar need to be as clear as possible so that the rest of the process can go as smoothly as possible. Creating content as an influencer without goals or objectives means you won’t have direction or purpose while causing you to waste valuable time and resources.
Create or Find a Content Calendar Template
A quick Google search will result in many content calendar templates. Find one that suits you best. If you are collaborating with brands (or plan to) it is vital that you have a shareable function to make communication easier between you and the brand. Every account with CreatorPilot gives you content calendars specific to each brand collaboration as well as a sharable dashboard that includes more than just a content calendar.
At a minimum your influencer content calendar needs to provide easy and clear understanding of these details:
The social media channel where the content will be shared
The topic
For brand collaborations, which brand the content is for
Date of posting
A method of marking tasks as complete
Plan Your Social Media Content
After you have identified who your audience is and what you are looking to achieve, it is time to start planning your content. Content needs to be planned specifically for each social media channel. When you are planning your content you can group it into categories to make things easier. These categories can be, for example, the type of content like video or blog posts. Planning your content in categories will help you identify which content your audience gravitates to most, making future planning much easier.
Update and Review Your Content Calendar
Every content calendar is different and requires constant updates and reviews. How far you plan in advance is completely up to you, however, as with most things the farther ahead you plan, the better off you’ll be. There are unknown factors that will impact your content calendar. These include sponsored posts that are paid for by brands. You don’t know when brands will reach out and their content might require you to adapt your content calendar on the fly to fit them in. You might also choose to update your content calendar based on the success of certain content where your audience appears to engage with more than others.
Track The Performance of Your Content
The performance of your past content should be used as a tool to help fill your content calendar. Taking a look at even analytics such as likes and comments on an Instagram post will quickly give you an idea of what content your audience engages with the most. You might discover that a certain type of content vastly underperforms other types of content. Any content that appears to consistently underperform can be limited on your calendar to make sure that you are giving your audience the content they are most excited to see.
