“I want to generate a following on YouTube and raise awareness of my brand”, said one client to me. After making sure this new marketing objective was realistic, effective and it aligned with the business goals, we agreed that the first step would be to do a little research. However, when I presented the research, my client seemed overwhelmed by the amount of content that would have to be created before any significant traction was gained on a site like YouTube.

Content creation, if you want it to be of any value, can be overwhelming. That’s why we are going to look at creating a content marketing schedule this week. Having a schedule, I think, is the best way to tame the beast.

We’ve looked at how to create compelling content before so we won’t go over the same material in depth here. If you really don’t want to click through to the excellent article on creating content, here are the basics.

1. Answer a question – Create useful and interesting content that people will want to click on.
2. Know and write for your audience – Imagine they are sat in front of you as you plan and create your content. Explaining how to build a house will be done differently speaking to a child with Lego, and speaking to an architect. Here’s another article about identifying your target audience.
3. Share it – After putting all the effort into producing something useful and interesting for your target audience, it is essential to make sure you push it out and get it in front of people’s eyes and into their hands. Make use of your social media, website, email list and shop front here.

So far, so good but how do we create a schedule to help us manage our content.

Generate ideas

One of my favourite tasks is brainstorming and this is a great tool to use for creating content. Set a timer and allow yourself to put down absolutely anything that springs to mind – no limits. If you need more time, reset your timer and go again; use some of your ideas as a springboard to help you come up with more ideas. When you have everything down on paper, assess your ideas: scrub out those that, on reflection, won’t work and highlight all those that you think are stellar. If you walk away with 20 great ideas and 20 back up ideas to be developed, you have almost a year’s worth of weekly content ready to be produced.

Sometimes not even a brainstorm can help you through the first step in creating a schedule. This is where online tools can be helpful in generating ideas. Hubspot’s Blog Ideas Generator can generate a blog title from just one key term and NeuralText’s Blog Ideas Generator does the same but I think it creates some more interesting ideas. Both of these are limited to about five ideas if you don’t want to pay; that may be enough to get your creative juices flowing. Chat GPT can create many more ideas if you need a little more help and it will work with more than just one keyword so its suggestions can be better tailored to your target audience.

Don’t let AI tools do all the work for you. It is really important that you have the greater input. After all, you know your charity or business and target audience better than any computer program ever does.

Regularity

Now you have your list of content ideas, you get to decide how often you publish your content. This is where you want to be realistic. How much time do you have to dedicate to creating content? Even if you have plenty of time now, is that only for a season? Don’t commit to something overly ambitious if you are not going to be able maintain it. Regularity is key!

The more you share, the more your business or charity will get noticed. There’s no magic amount of content to create per week or per month; this is something you will have to decide after weighing up your commitments and your team’s workload.

Timing

After deciding how regularly you would like to share content, it is best practice to stick to the same day and time. I like to use a blank paper calendar which I fill in but you can just as easily use a digital calendar (which is where my schedule will end up). I start to populate the calendar with:

• important business dates – If a business is planning to launch a new product, it is important to know this – it is an opportunity to tie up your marketing activities and promote the product in your content.
• Busy times for the organisation – These might be days when your team is at reduced capacity due to days off or other commitments. It might also be because these are the busy days for your charity so you simply can’t commit to doing even more.
• Other significant dates – It’s really important to keep an eye on what is happening outside of your business or charity. A florist might want to tie their content into significant dates like St. Valentine’s Day and national days like St. David’s Day. Not only does this keep your content relevant, but it is also going to help you appear high up on search page results. Hubspot have helpfully created a calendar with a lot of these important dates.
• Key audience times – This one requires a bit more research. Use your existing data if you can, to find out when your target audience are most likely to consume your content. If your content typically gets consumed at the end of the week, don’t post on Tuesday as it’ll get buried and forgotten about.

Now you can take your list of content ideas and slot them into your calendar at the most opportune times.

At the end of this task, your content marketing should seem a lot more manageable. You’ll know what’s coming up and when it’s coming up (ie. not all at once).

Don’t forget

If content marketing still seems like too big a task, there are a few more tricks to help you out.

• Get guests to create some content for you – This definitely isn’t a matter of dumping a job on someone else. You still need to write a brief for the guest, then you need to publish and promote the content. However, your guests, as experts in their field, will save you the time researching, learning and writing.
• Repackage your content – Videos and podcasts can be transcribed into text for a blog post using tools like Veed. You can use AI to turn text into videos and podcasts too but I’m not sure there are any tools that do this very well yet. Almost all your content can be repackaged which will give you the best returns on your time and effort, and it will help you engage different groups.
• Return to your work – Some of your work will have a limited lifespan and that’s fine but other content may be just as useful ten years later. It’d be silly to leave this content languishing forgotten in an archive. Reference, refresh and repost your evergreen content.

Conclusion

There is no getting around it, creating compelling content consistently can be quite intimidating. By following these steps though, you should be able to break the job down and make it more manageable.

These are the steps we went through when creating our content marketing strategy at Aubrey. Now it’s all on Asana (our project manager) and whenever there is a task to complete we get a notification and can deal with it and move on. We can be flexible if we need to be but by scheduling our content, we avoid moments of panic.