The Role of Content Calendar in Serving your Inbound Communities

Most everybody who creates content is aware of the value of the content calendar, but it’s much more than just a date-specific to-do list for scheduling tweets or blog posts. How do you make the most of your content calendar when thinking about adding value to your communities? With the right insight about your communities (and their communities), your content can be much more useful and have a greater likelihood for success.

Over the past couple of months, we’ve covered a bit about what it means for your inbound marketing efforts to be “community-centric.” Community-centricity is a key element of what we call Intelligent Inbound. Identifying your communities and learning about them, and then synthesizing that information into viable personas or planning content are not easy tasks. There are more data points than ever to look at, and it can often be misleading or confusing when trying to find the right data to inform the process.

One valuable lesson we’ve learned when working with clients through this process is that the seasons impacting your communities can have a huge role to play in the success of your inbound marketing efforts. For example, if you are a business selling to other businesses, recognizing the ebb and flow of the volumes of business in your targeted communities can help you understand the best times to make sure your content isn’t hitting them when they are super busy and not able to take any action - even if your call-to-action (CTA) might be relevant for them.

Also, are there common events that those communities attend? Do they tend to happen at the same time of year every year? Working these details into a content calendar at the start of the year can be a chore, but it will increase the chances of your content being able to cut through the noise and be recognized as useful to those communities.

One tool that HubSpot has for staying on top of these seasonal movements that can influence your content calendar is the “campaign” tool. Along with scheduling date specific tasks around things like blog posts and email newsletters, users can view their calendar from a broader perspective. Attaching each task to a broader seasonal “campaign” is one way to stay on top of what’s going on inside the communities that you are attempting to serve with your content.

For example, do you know that every spring the communities your content is engineered to serve faces a common challenge? Perhaps they have an influx of business when the weather gets warmer? Build a campaign of content that takes this influx of business into consideration.

How are you using your calendar to keep track of the ways your content can serve your communities? How can we help? Let us know in the comments below.