In this episode of Fieldmotion's Growth Hub, Adam will show you how to build a content calendar. Discussing how to keep up a regular posting schedule and thus keeping your audience coming back. No software needed, just a spreadsheet. Adam will cover how often you should post, recommended calendar structures, talking about content pillars and how to make sure you aren't overloaded.
Hi everyone, it's Adam from Fieldmotion and welcome to another episode of Fieldmotion's Growth Hub. One of the most important aspects to creating a social media platform is consistency and to do that we create a content calendar. Having regular posts creates a regular routine for your audience to keep coming back to. In this video I'll show you exactly how to go about doing a content calendar suited to your business.
There's no fancy software in this one, just pure strategy.
Step one, what is a content calendar? So what actually is a content calendar? Well basically it's just a schedule that you create usually a month in advance that will tell you which posts go up on which platform on what days. These posts would typically go up on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn.
But the real benefit to the content calendar is that you are planning it in advance. You're not rushing just to get something out the door, you're creating something that's catered specifically to your audience.
Step two, defining your goal. The core of the calendar is to know what to post and this can really vary between businesses. Is your goal to build brand awareness? Is your goal to generate leads?
Or are you trying to build a community? Maybe you want to try all of the above.
Who's your audience? What are they interested in? And what would they need to know? You don't even need to have a detailed breakdown here.
As someone who's likely working in a field service business, you've already talked to the customers, you know what their pain points are and you know what kind of typical things that they'll want to know and mainly what best way to help them.
Step three, narrow the channels and content types. Let's narrow the scope down a bit. I mentioned a few platforms earlier, but by no means do you need to create content for each one. It really depends on the individual business.
But at the start, I generally recommend doing maybe one or two. That way you can test the waters a bit and see which content performs best. For most business to business businesses, LinkedIn is a great choice as it's already got a professional audience that's already tuned into a lot of the things you're going to be talking about. And then shorter form content is better for things like Instagram or YouTube.
Step four, frequency. When you're asking yourself how often should I post, it really comes down to basically as often as you can manage. Don't spam say 10 videos a day because that's just going to create too much noise and people are going to be turned off. Or say one post or two posts a day, that's not going to seem like as much noise.
People aren't going to be needing to feel as engaged. They're going to feel like that won't be as hard of a push. But again, these consistency questions kind of come down to how big of a business you are and how much time and energy you can actually contribute to it.
Step five, building the calendar. So actually building the calendar doesn't require anything more complex than say Google Sheets or Excel. Build the table and make it something like this. When will you upload?
On what platforms? What type of content is it? Video, images, a text-based post or an email? As for the descriptions, give an idea of what the post involves.
Maybe condense it into what it is that you most want the audience to take away from the content at a glance.
A way to help figure these posts out is to create three to five content pillars. These are topics that your content can generally always revert back to. So let's say for example you're a fire safety and security company. Your pillars could be education on regulation and compliance, services and products that you offer and case studies which build trust.
Step six, schedule yourself. So set aside a few hours or maybe even a full day just to create all of the elements that you need and all the text that goes along with it. Plus this way if you want to tweak anything you can down the road. There's no need to create one entire post in one day for it to go up at the same time.
This way if you do want to tweak anything you can do so without stressing too much. This way if you do want to tweak something there's no problem you can easily do that and it doesn't take much time.
Following all of these steps will leave you with a strong content calendar that you can work from. And of course don't be afraid to tweak any of these aspects. It's all about learning. There's no really perfect way to start.
Just go for it and see what works. And that's it. We've attached a very basic content calendar down below just to get you started. And yeah this has been Adam from Fieldmotion.
Thank you very much for watching.