In the world of marketing, a content calendar is important. Without one, you, and those that you are partnered with are not going to have a clue about what is going on, making it easy to drop off with your marketing, and lose customers.
It’s especially important to have a content calendar when you are working in brand partnership with other companies to achieve your shared goals. It’s essential that you maintain consistency across both companies, or all of the companies that are involved in the partnership to ensure clear messaging to clients and potential clients. If you don’t do this, it’s going to be noticeable, and clients are not going to be interested in working with companies who are unable to get a clear, concise message between them, as it sends out a message of disorganisation.
But, creating a content calendar for consistent brand partnerships can be difficult at times, which is why you want to gather all of the information that you can to get it right. Luckily for you, we’re here to give you some advice. In this article, we’re going to cover some of the best practices to make this happen, and hopefully allow more brand partnerships to see success due to consistency. So, if you’re ready to get into it, let’s get started.
1. Understanding Content Calendars for Partnerships
Before we jump into any of the elements that you need to be thinking about, you need to understand content calendars for brand partnerships first. For example, what are they? Essentially, they are like a map or a plan of the content that you are going to be publishing. On the calendar will need to be a whole load of information such as dates, topics, authors, status, what channels they are going to be posted on, titles for posts, and so much more.
Content calendars are incredible as they are the quiet force in the background that allows partnerships to stay consistent in their posting. They allow the ideas to be turned into an effective collaboration between two or more brands, without the message getting lost, or distorted from company to company.
But, what does this actually do? In short, it aligns the brands. It sets out clear expectations, and ensures accountability as it will all be written on the content calendar. Who will be doing what, when they will be doing it, how it needs to be done etc. As such, there is a minimised risk of miscommunication, which is essential in a partnership.
2. Identifying Key Collaboration Opportunities
Identifying the key collaboration opportunities is essential to the success of the content calendar. It ensures a strategic fit and impact for both partners, but how do you do this?
Look At The Strength Of Each Partner
When it comes to collaborating, it’s important that you are looking at the strengths of each of the partners in this partnership. The reason for this is that the collaboration should play to the strengths of each company. So, where one may be particularly strong when it comes to video marketing, the other may excel in something different like storytelling.
As well as this, you need to consider that one partner may have more credibility, but the other may have a better reach. While it might not seem like this matters because you’re collaborating so you’re going to get the benefit of all of this, which is true, the collaboration ideas should ensure that they encompass as many strengths as possible.
Consider Marketing Objectives
You need to remember that when you’re working on a collaboration for a partnership, marketing objectives matter for both sides. As such, it’s important to try and anchor your collaborations to specific goals so that it’s easy to see how they could benefit both partners.
For example, you could look into objectives such as brand awareness, sales or lead generation, engagement growth, community growth, and so much more. But, if it doesn’t seem as though it’s going to clearly support goals for both partners here, then it’s not worth putting on the calendar. You can focus on your own marketing separately, but here and now both sets of objectives are crucial.
Audience Overlap
We want you to keep in mind here that the best collaboration opportunities solve some sort of problem, or add value in some way to both audiences, not just one. As such, you need to be considering who the collaboration is serving so that you can then nail down what it should be. For example, do you have any shared or complimentary audiences? Make sure that the content you’re going to produce has a similar tone to each other, as well as similar positioning and promoting similar values.
Important Moments And Launch Dates
Try to center your calendar and your content around high-impact moments and launch dates throughout your business year. Collaborations that surround these dates often provide context, making it easier to plan and follow. But, what are important moments?
They could be anything from events that one or both of the partners are attending, awareness days that you align with, industry trends that you feel are important and so on. Of course, on top of that, there are also product launches to consider, as collaborations at these moments tend to be some of the most successful.
3. Planning Content Around Brand Campaigns
Brand campaigns are one of the most important elements of a brand partnership, as well as for each individual company. As such, content needs to be strategically planned around these events, but it has got to be done in a way that serves everyone.
Anchor Your Content To Your Brand Campaign
Your brand campaigns, and the campaigns of your partner should be the solid foundation of your content calendar. You and your partner need to know what the dates are for the brand campaign phases to ensure that there is consistency across the board across the timeline.
Each piece of content needs to be uniquely tailored to where you are in your brand partnership, and what is going on at the time.
Balancing Your Campaigns And Your Partnerships
It’s imperative that you are balancing your campaigns, and your partnership. This might seem like a struggle at times, but it definitely is doable. Remember that not all partnerships are going to revolve around a singular launch, and therefore you need to work on building strong, long-lasting partnerships. This is not going to happen if you’re not thinking about your partners in this way.
As such, you need to ensure that your calendar includes your long-term partners into your major campaigns, making them a part of what you are doing, always. Doing this also allows for continued collaboration between launches, maintaining those partnerships and not letting them slip.
Consistency is the key when it comes to balance here. You need to put the effort into your relationships with other brands, and your content calendar can really help you do this.
Ensuring Consistency Across The Board
When planning your content calendar around brand campaigns, you need to do everything you can to provide consistency across the board. This means that the more details on the content calendar for that particular brand launch, the better. Make notes of the tone of the launch, the more specific target audience if there is one, and other key information like this so that all partners are on the same page.
It’s really easy sometimes for partners to become out of sync with one another, but the content calendar will avoid brand dilution, which is imperative when you’re in the middle of a brand campaign.
4. Scheduling Posts for Maximum Impact
One of the most important parts of a content calendar is ensuring that you are scheduling your posts to have the maximum impact. This means using a number of methods to ensure that the largest number of people see the posts when they go live, and in the hours after. But, how can you do this?
Plan The Life Cycle Of The Campaign
When you’re going for maximum impact, the last thing that you want to do is post everything that you’ve got at the same time, from both sides of the partnership. This isn’t going to provide you with the results or the engagement that you want, which is why you need to plan the life cycle of the entire campaign, and add this to the calendar.
For example, a couple of weeks before the launch of the campaign you should be looking into teasers. You should both be posting vague, cryptic countdowns, and behind the scenes footage to get people interested in what it is that you’re getting ready to do.
On the day that you’re going to launch, all partners in the partnership should be posting at the same time. The maximum difference between partner posts should be around an hour, but it’s best if you can do this all at the same time. This way, the algorithm that is being used to determine important content will pick it up as a priority. As well as this, it should help to boost engagement as people will be excited by this.
For the next few weeks, maybe even up until a month, you should have content scheduled on the calendar. The goal of this is to maintain the momentum of the campaign, ensuring that users are getting information that they are looking for. Ensure that content during this period is engaging and helpful, otherwise users will not show any interest.
Ensure You’re Coordinating Everything
When you’re posting on many different channels, it can be a challenge to ensure that you’re all posting at the same time. The good news here is that there are a range of different tools that will allow you to do this, managing and tracking this for you so that you do not have to do it manually.
Your content calendar should have details of this written down for you and them to be posting. Even though it can be a challenge, both partners need to ensure that they are aligning their schedules for this, otherwise it’s not going to work the way that you want it to.
Understanding What Time To Post
Timing is everything, as we’re sure that you know by the subheading of this section. You want to make the maximum impact? You need to know when exactly is the best time to post your content, and when the best time for your partner is to post theirs. It’s not always going to be at the exact same time, which is why your content calendar needs to account for that.
For example, if your partner is working in a different time zone, you might be struggling to work out when the best time to post is actually going to be. However, we can tell you that it’s a good idea to space your posting out for about 4-6 hours or so, just to make sure that your own posts don’t end up competing with each other.
It’s also important to know that each of the social media platforms has their own sweet spots, and leveraging them is going to be essential to seeing the level of engagement with your content that you want. As an example, if you’re going to be posting on Instagram, then the best times are between 9-11am, and 1-3pm on weekdays.
Work out what your partner’s hours of operation are, when their target audience is usually awake in their country, and yours, and come up with the best possible times to post that work well with each other.
Be As Flexible As Possible
While you might not think of flexibility when you’re attempting to create the best possible content calendar, you won’t be able to do so without some sort of wiggle room. You need to leave room for you and your partner to essentially wait and see what happens so that you can adapt and adjust as needed.
This includes rescheduling content that is underperforming, or that seems as though it’s going to underperform. You also need to be able to boost content that is performing well, using follow-ups to do so. This will extend it, ensuring that you’re getting as much out of that piece of content as possible.
This is especially important during the mid campaign, because even though you have taken the time to plan it all out, you never really know for sure how things are going to perform until they have the chance to do so.
5. Tracking Progress and Adjusting Strategies
Now, we’ve just touched on this slightly above, but we didn’t go into too much detail. One of the most important things that you need to remember when you’re setting your content calendar is that it cannot be rigid, immovable, or whatever other word you want to use.
As we mentioned, you never know what is going to happen, and it’s imperative that you don’t just sit back and think that because you have a schedule on the calendar, this is somehow good enough to sustain your campaign going forward. It isn’t. You can’t just leave it, not bothering to look or check how your content is performing, as this is a sure fire way to see problems in your future.
So, the solution to this then is to track the progress of the content that you have put on the calendar. Each piece of content needs to be looked at and analysed to see if there are any issues with it, if it’s not performing the way that you expected it to, either better or worse, or something entirely different.
When you have all of the key information that you need, it’s imperative that you use this to adapt the strategies that you are using. Think about when you’re posting, where you’re posting, how you’re posting, the timeline of your posts, and things like this. Re-evaluate the entire strategy if needed, and don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because you have set your calendar up a certain way that it can’t be modified for the good of the campaign.
6. Ensuring Consistent Communication with Brands
As with pretty much everything in the business world, communication is key. When you enter into a partnership, you need to ensure that you are leaving the lines of communication open, and making yourself accessible to your partners so that you can talk through everything that needs to be done in order to create consistency in your brand partnership. Why is this important, and for what?
The Creation
If you want your content calendar to be the best that it can be, you need to ensure consistent communication with the brands that you are partnering with. We understand that communication is a two-way street, and the other brands have to put just as much into this as you do, but at the very least you need to be doing your part.
How are you supposed to create a content calendar that works for you, that aligns with what you need, as well as what they need, if you don’t know what they need? The lines of communication need to be open at all times to ensure the highest possible quality, and the most amount of detail to be put onto the calendar.
Keeping It Organised
It can be an absolute nightmare when you’re trying to get everything done at the last minute, and yet this is what so many companies continue to do. In order to create a content calendar, you need to meet and speak with your brand partners regularly, taking this from a chaotic process, to a structured one.
There will be no more random posts that stick out as they don’t align with the brand values that have been discussed and decided. It ensures that high-quality content is the priority, with everyone involved in the process knowing what needs to be done, who needs to do it, and when it needs to be done.
Making Changes
As well as this, other brands may have newer insights that can help catapult the campaign to success, which will then need to be shared across the partnership to ensure that everyone is on the same page.
7. Measuring Results and Optimizing the Calendar
There’s one thing that you need to remember about creating a content calendar for consistent brand partnerships, it’s that it should never be 100% static. Even when you think that you have fine tuned this as much as you can, the market is always on the move, and it’s imperative that you’re moving with it.
Measuring results is a data-driven approach that involves analysing metrics to determine which data is resonating with users, and which is simply not hitting the mark. You can then use this information to make changes to the scheduled content, ensuring that it is posted in a way that maximises the potential for success.
Anything Could Happen
One of the main reasons that your calendar shouldn’t stay static is because anything can happen. The market can shift so fast, in ways that you weren’t expecting, and now you need to measure the results of the content that you put out, and see if there is any way that you can optimize the calendar to see a better return on investment (ROI) overall.
Maintaining Audience Engagement
You will also find that by measuring results, and optimizing the calendar, you will be able to maintain your audience engagement, or even improve it over time. It might not happen straight away, but you will certainly notice a difference over time. You will be able to keep your engagement rates up, rather than seeing them drop down immediately after the initial launch excitement has worn off.
Audience engagement is one of the most difficult elements to master when you’re working with any kind of marketing, but it’s also one of the most important ones to get right. Without it, all of your content is going to flop, which is why measuring results is so important.
Aligning Content With New Goals
As we mentioned, things are always changing in the business world, and the fact that you have a brand partner doesn’t stop this fact from being true. While you may have agreed upon and decided on XYZ, that doesn’t mean that ABC is now not going to enter the conversation as a factor that needs to be considered.
There is going to come a time where you need to be setting new goals for your business, and for your brand partnership, and these measured results can help guide you in creating these new goals, as well as helping you set new goals based on current data.
SEO Improvement
The goal of the content calendar is to do everything we’ve already talked about so far, right? The whole point of this is so that you can improve your audience engagement, boost your ROI etc, but also to improve SEO for your businesses. Being visible online is important, and regular updates to content will go a long way to making this happen. Improving the ranking in the search engine is paramount to success, and a content calendar makes this easier to manage.
Measuring results and optimizing the calendar is also essential here, as it will show you what needs updating, how it needs updating, when it needs updating, and any other crucial information that is needed.
Concluding Thoughts
Hopefully, now you have a stronger understanding of the best practices when it comes to content calendars for consistent brand partnerships. It might take a while to iron out all of the kinks if you’ve never used a content calendar before, or it might take you some time to get into the swing of things with it, and with partnering with other brands, but you will get there.
You just need to make sure that you are taking your time, you’re being patient, and you’re paying attention to the details that perhaps you might not have thought were important beforehand. It’s all important, and that needs to be kept in mind when creating the content calendar.
One final piece of advice that we have for you for this process is do not rush it. If you start trying to rush creating your content calendar, that’s when you’re going to make mistakes, and this is likely when you’re going to have to make multiple changes along the way due to lack of alignment with your partners. This is a pain in the behind, as it could have been avoided in the beginning if you would have heeded the advice that we’ve given.
