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Creating a content marketing calendar for your digital marketing or local marketing campaigns is supposed to help you in your content marketing efforts across various channels and platforms. However, some marketers find themselves burdened instead of eased by creating a content calendar, and realizing that it actually does not help much in their brand promotions. There are also those who feel that making a calendar just won’t make any difference in their endeavors.

A content marketing calendar is designed to make content marketing easier and more effective. But why are some marketers not benefiting from it? Here are the top reasons why.

 

1.   You Don’t Consolidate Your Calendars into One

Some marketers find their content calendar ineffective simply because of the lack of collaborative efforts. This means that different people within the organization are using different tools to create their respective editorial plans separately. The social media manager creates a social media content calendar, while the marketing head creates a separate calendar for events and other promotions, and the graphics designer and video editor creates a different one for different content types. This is where the problems arise—too many content calendars for a single campaign, and it ends up with less engagement, less conversion, less ROI.

To Fix: Put all your brand’s content marketing efforts in one place and strategically plan it out.

 

2.   Your Content Sucks

This could not be truer. In the art of content marketing, content is the main ingredient, of course, and if you lack the right recipe for good content, everything else will fail. People digest, read, and give attention to what offers them value, entertains them, or captures their interest.

To Fix: Improve your content. Know what’s potentially viral and what could get your audience’s attention. Plan better content basing on what worked out so far and make it a benchmark for your content creation strategy.

 

3.   You Don’t Share to Social Media Effectively or You Don’t Share it At All

It has been proven time and again that social media plays a key role in today’s content marketing, but some marketers just don’t understand this. They spread content on different sites—blogs, article directories, video submission sites, PR sites, etc, and then fail to include social media in the list. Still, there are those who use social media, but don’t use it effectively.

To Fix: Integrate social media in your content marketing and study how to make it more effective by “social listening” and learning from those who are successful in this kind of campaign.

 

4.   You Don’t Know What’s Working and What’s Not

Creating a content marketing calendar for local marketing, for example, is both a science and an art. An art, because you need to be creative, and a science because you need to understand the dynamics—what’s working and what’s not. Some marketers continue to create content now and then but fail to study analytics and how their contents are performing on different channels, blinding them of what actually works in line with the microcosm, “quality over quantity”.

To Fix: Track your content’s performance. Determine what worked and what did not. This will give you an insight on how you should design your content to be more effective.

 

5.   You Don’t Invest Enough in Your Content Marketing Calendar

Some brands simply fail in creating an effective content marketing calendar because they just don’t devote enough time, effort, attention, and resources into it. They don’t commit to posting consistently or having a solid team that will implement what is being planned. Finally, some lack the right tools to make it happen and hesitate to invest on them.

To Fix: Devote your time and effort to improve your content marketing calendar and see it through. Create a good team that will implement the plans and make sure that everything is done consistently. Finally, get to know the right tools that will help you and invest in them.