To find inspiration for any aspect of content marketing, you’ll find that you can learn a lot from those doing it well. They don’t have to come from your industry, as something done right applies to any scenario. Your content calendar is the holy grail for the execution of your content strategy and planning, but is it delivering ROI? If yours needs a refresh, you’ll appreciate these content calendar examples.
Content Calendars Are the Execution Part of Your Efforts
As an enterprise content team, you have a lot of responsibilities related to producing content that attracts and converts. While your content strategy is the roadmap, content planning is the actions you take. The largest vehicle for this is your content calendar.
When developing your content calendar, you’ll first start with your customers’ needs. The most successful content marketing teams do this, with 87 percent prioritizing the audience’s needs. When this is the guiding force, you may develop multiple content calendars based on personas. Other ways to segment include by product, funnel stage, content types, content cluster, distribution channel, or campaigns.
To highlight best practices, let’s look at some brands that have mastered the process.
Dropbox Marketing Dynamix
Dropbox wanted to make sure brands were familiar with all its benefits beyond transferring files. They created Marketing Dynamix based on the discovery that teams point the finger at bad communication and personality issues when it comes to failures.
It includes an assessment tool to discover “what kind of marketer are you.” The objective was to foster better collaboration, which isn’t central to their product necessarily. Providing this tool was of value to its users.
Image: Dropbox
It’s a great example of developing a content calendar that focuses on user needs. It’s also a campaign that focuses on one product — Dropbox Business. It’s a unique calendar example.
SAP: Enterprise Software with Many Niches
SAP has a large portfolio of software products, from ERPs (enterprise resource planning) to CRMs (customer relationship management) to HR. As such, they are trying to attract many different types of buyer personas.
One innovative way they engage these varied audiences is by allowing community members to publish blog posts. It’s a new spin on UGC (user-generated content). It’s impactful because it’s coming from a current user, not the company. It also provides a perspective that internal people don’t have. Check out their blog here.
Sidenote: Organizing and managing a UGC program like this might dictate the use of a different type of calendar tool.
Aspire by Marketron Drives Engagement with Sales Enablement Content
Marketron, a software company in the media industry, launched a sales enablement blog in 2021 called Aspire. It’s different from their main blog. It focuses on delivering tips, strategies, resources, and more to sellers in the field.
This content calendar example showcases writing to a specific persona and using content clusters. The site has four main categories but also multiple tags underneath each. The content production is consistent with eight to 10 new posts a month in a variety of formats (blogs, infographics, video)
While this content is not conversion-centered, the education and takeaway readers get improve the company’s thought leadership position and credibility.
Image: Marketron
Electrosonic Content Covers All the Funnel Stages
Electrosonic is an AV design and integration company, always working toward delivering on audience needs. Content planning often has to pivot being in such a dynamic industry. The brand does this well and publishes posts that align with every part of the funnel — top, mid, and bottom.
Here are some examples of their content by funnel:
Top: What Do Technology-Rich Immersive Experiences Look in 2022
- It’s a forward-looking post that addresses current trends.
- Multiple technologies are part of the post.
- It provides multiple examples from their project profiles.
Mid: Does Renovating Your Museum with Experiential Technology Lead to Greater ROI?
- It’s for a specific subset audience.
- The post’s goal is to drive the reader to see the benefits of experiential technology.
- It also includes examples and how they drove ROI.
Bottom: Technology’s Role in Creating an All-Inclusive Experience
- At this point, a buyer would be ready to implement new technology.
- The content applies specific technology to the end goal of inclusivity.
So, what can you learn from these content calendar examples to ensure yours is relevant and meaningful to your audience?
Applying Content Calendar Examples to Your Brand
No matter your industry or buyer profile, there are some valuable learnings you can take away from these examples.
- Involve your audience with ways to leverage UGC by building a community. As with SAP’s efforts, you can realize more engagement when you let your customers have a voice. UGC should have its own content calendar, managed by your community manager.
- Create educational and helpful content to build trust and value with an audience. You should dedicate a content calendar to topics about empowering your audience, not selling to them. This is a chance to collaborate with SMEs to produce posts, articles, videos, and more that support your customers.
- Ensure you cover every stage of the funnel. Often, content pieces lean toward top-of-the-funnel (ToFU). That makes sense because you need to attract people. However, you don’t want to forget about the other stages. Since you develop such a large volume of content, content calendars by funnel can be useful.
- Find a niche or novel approach to engaging prospects for a specific business line you want to grow. How you engage them, as with the Dropbox example, doesn’t have to tie to your product. Rather, you get their attention and can start fostering stronger relationships.
Content Calendars Are the Heart of Your Content Efforts
From these content calendar examples, you can see the value in using them. Keep in mind that to manage multiple calendars, you’ll need technology that makes this easy. You’ll find a robust and dynamic content calendar on the Divvy platform. Start a trial to see how it works today.