What You Need to Know to Create an Online Content Calendar
So you’ve used social listening tools to listen carefully online to what customers and others are saying about your brand. You’ve determined where they are congregating and what they are talking about. You’ve developed a social game plan and where it will get to work— Twitter, Facebook, blogs, microsites, YouTube—all of the above. Now it’s time to create an actionable, results oriented promotional content calendar by following these straightforward steps.
Step 1. Audit Internal Assets Take a look around. What internal assets do you have to promote? What is going on within the agency that you can utilize? Is there video content other departments may have created that would be useful? As an example, Coors Light could repurpose its flash-mob video set in Las Vegas as jumping off point for a promotion asking consumers to pick the locale for the next flash-mob video. Check in with your public relations and research and development departments. Are there existing partnerships with outside brands or others that you can leverage for content or use as a distribution tool? Locate people within your organization—not necessarily those who work in your department—who have a real passion for social. Is there an active blogger who could work on your team? Dust off the archives to unearth retro TV spots or other memorabilia that would be fun to put out there.
“One of the biggest missteps for siloed brands and agencies is that they don’t have conversations with other departments about what those departments are doing or what existing content they may have that might be useful to what you’re doing,” said Mark Evans, the vice president of digital for Catapult Action-Biased Marketing, which ranked No. 31 on the 2010 Promo 100 with $33.7 million in U.S. net revenue. “It’s really about knowing what you have in the quiver of arrows.”
Step 2. Content Closet Make sure you have the right amount of content to carry you through. This can be as simple as building an Excel spreadsheet with the days of the week and the content that you want to push out during specific time frames. You don’t want to be scrambling at the last minute and push out content that will disappoint your customers.
Step 3. The Gatekeepers In most agencies and brand houses there are typically multiple people involved in promotional content creation and distribution. Everyone involved should know exactly what their jobs are—assign those jobs and create job descriptions. Who creates the content? Who is responsible for the calendar? Who gets content approved? Who monitors responses from consumers? Who responds to consumer comments?
“When someone posts negative comments, some brands just take it off the wall and that’s the wrong thing to do,” Evans said. “It’s about responding quickly. If consumer postings are constantly being pulled down they won’t bother to voice their opinion on that page. If you get negative feedback, react appropriately and show your audience that you’re doing something about it.”
Step 3 Pay Attention There are numerous occasions where brands and agencies will be so excited about getting content up online that once it’s up there they just assume it will catch fire with no problems. You need to test and monitor any content put online. If you see people aren’t responding listen up and use that information to adjust the program. If they are responding, what are they saying? Is your content being shared and retweeted?
“It goes back to the continuous cycle of testing and learning,” he said. “If no one is passing your content along, something is wrong. Look at the engagement metrics and respond to them.”
As an example, Aunt Jemima recently produced a video to show consumers how its pancakes are made just like moms make at home. The video was set in a Jackson, TN, plant and starred three employees. It was posted on Facebook Feb. 17 along with a downloadable coupon. Almost immediately, consumers were commenting that they couldn’t find or view the video or had trouble accessing the coupon. Similar comments, like “Here, linky linky…” and “Downloaded Java and still could not print coupon.” were still being posted March 21.
“Once you start that conversation you want to be able to keep it going, things can fall through the cracks,” Evans said. “If people post something to a brand, they are expecting a response in at least 24 hours, if not sooner. You want the takeaway to be that you are in this with both feet, that you are genuine and know what you are doing.
Step 4 Co-Create Allow customers to participate in the creation of content is something that should be investigated. There are plenty of brand examples out in the market and multiple ways of going about this, like Cesar Canine Cuisine brand food for small dogs. It is running a contest where consumers create doggie entrées that will be put up for a public vote with two winning recipe flavors developed for retail. And Wrangler is underway with a jean design competition ending with the winner’s design appearing as part of the Next Blue jean collection launching this fall.
“So much of what people come back to you with potentially leads to other things marketers want to do down the road with content creation. Allowing consumer to help shape content changes the cadence of what we’re publishing and brings in different voices,” Evans said. “It’s not about broadcasting, it’s about a conversation; a river of ideas flowing back and forth.”
Step 5 As the Months go by Use those social listening tools you relied on to get things started in the first place to check up on what people are saying about your content and brand. Make sure you’re moving toward the intended goals and adjusting content appropriately.
“When you look at a lot of brands, they just go out there and create a blog or twitter feed and then go dormant after a few months,” Evans said. “That says somebody wasn’t really thinking about this. It requires someone to really spend time and be committed to it. They almost have to work that much harder the second time around to get the consumer back.”
