Content calendars and content calendar templates are super helpful when it comes to your annual marketing plan. They help you to keep focused, to generate timely posts and blogs in line with current events while helping you to foresee gaps in the schedule that you might want to fill.

This year, we want to do one better than our traditional standard content calendar and give you the tools to create a completely personalised editorial calendar for 2022 that is built for your target market; making the content you produce far more relevant… Which, if you didn’t already know, is what we at Reflect Digital are all about - focusing on understanding audiences (in this case, you) and delivering the most relevant content (which, in this case, is a more useful content calendar).

Why You Need a Personalised Editorial Calendar in 2022

In today’s market, it’s no longer enough to simply create content based on national holidays, awareness days, and national events. This content can feel generic or salesy when users see multiple brands doing similar things. If you want to be successful, the insights and posts you produce need to resonate with your audience.

Instead, focus on the holidays and events that align with your products, services or company values. For example, at Reflect Digital we sell marketing services, so we’ll produce content around upcoming events that Marketing Managers (one of our key markets) might be attending, or write content that supports them in their roles. We also care a lot about mental health and supporting women in business, so we’ll also produce content specifically for these awareness days to show we care while also ensuring the content is useful by pointing to relevant resources or highlighting great women. You might find these resources helpful for planning what's important to you:

List of national awareness days

Religious/national holidays and dates of importance

Using this approach will also allow you to easily identify gaps in your content which can then be appropriately filled through strategic planning. You can get your whole team involved in this process; research upcoming events in your industry, relevant podcasts, awards and don’t forget to backfill with any national holidays or events you think are important to your target audience or internal staff (they’re important too)!

By planning your content this way it’s much easier to get buy-in from your wider team. Not only will their involvement make your life easier, but it will also help them build their own personal brands as thought leaders in the industry which can lead to speaking opportunities and more. Getting content from multiple voices within your business is key, it will help showcase your expertise but also gives more personality and perspectives to your blogs, opposed to them all being from the same person! Using an editorial plan to schedule content in advance will give your busy teammates time to plan their ideas and get them to you in a time frame that suits everyone.

Time to Create Your Personalised Editorial Calendar

So, instead of using a generic marketing calendar to plan your social strategy, we want to encourage you to use an ‘editorial calendar’ to plan your content across social, video, blog, reports, events and more. This process will help you ensure your planned content aligns with your business and the needs of your consumers, rather than producing content for the sake of content.

We often forget why we’re creating content and that our target audience is made up of people. This is why using personas as part of your marketing strategy is so important. They help you put human behaviour, thoughts, feelings, challenges and intent behind your audience; allowing you to plan content that resonates with them.

This process will also allow you to focus on specific areas at different times of the year, rather than trying to do everything all at once. For example, you might choose to focus on one service in the first month, creating lots of content in one area, and then using the next for another service. This approach allows you to streamline your efforts and create better content that is more successful.

So, with this in mind, we’ve produced a template so that you can start building your very own personalised editorial content calendar for 2022, download it now.

This blog was originally published via Reflect Digital on the 22nd of December 2021.