What Exactly is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar is essentially a prearranged map for your marketing content for a set period of time. Content calendars layout pertinent information such as specific times, and platforms where you will regularly publish your content. Additionally, these tools include the type of content that you plan to publish. Examples include blog posts, social media updates, newsletters and a variety of other ways to communicate with clients. All in all, the calendar stands as a strategic way to meticulously plan out, arrange and ultimately publish your advertising efforts.
What are the Benefits of a Content Calendar?
You can benefit from using a content calendar in a variety of ways. Here are a few:
- Consistent Presence: One of the best benefits of a calendar is that it helps you maintain a consistent presence in your clients’ lives. Being consistent in your posting is essential when trying to build loyalty and trust in the insurance industry. With the help of a content calendar, clients and consumers won’t be able to forget about you.
- Effective Time Management Tool: By pre-planning all of your content, you’ll save a lot of time. This map makes it so you won’t need to decide each and every day what and where you’ll post. This enables you to concentrate on other important and pressing aspects of your job.
- Strategic Planning: Using a calendar ensures that your content lines up with your company’s goals. For example, when creating the calendar you’ll take things like objectives, seasonal needs, and client changes into account.
- Data Based Optimizations: Looking at the performance of scheduled content allows you to make optimizations based on your former results.
How to Create a Content Calendar
Putting together your content calendar might seem like a daunting task. Don’t worry! By breaking it down into steps, it becomes far more manageable.
Define Your Goals
Consider a few questions before planning out the actual content. What do you want to accomplish with your content? Is increasing client engagement most important? Do you want to educate your target audience about existing insurance products? Are you trying to entice consumers or increase loyalty by showcasing your expertise? Laying out clearly defined goals and objectives helps to guide your overall strategy.
Know Your Audience
It’s crucial to gain a solid understanding of who your audience is. Think about what they need, what their concerns are, and what their preferences are. Additionally, take account of demographic details like age, gender, and geographic location. Understanding your consumer base helps you come up with the most relevant content that resonates with the audience.
Consider the Various Channels of Publication
With the knowledge of your audience in mind, it’s now time to select the best place to publish your content. Every platform has different qualities, styles, and caters to a unique group of people. A common marketing practice is to publish content on a variety of different platforms. This is an ideal strategy if you have multiple target audiences, or if you simply wish to learn about the effectiveness of various channels. Just remember to optimize accordingly based on your results. At the end of the day, the channel(s) you pick, should align with where your clients are most active.
Brainstorm Ideas for Content
Depending on your objectives and target audience, begin to come up with relevant content ideas. For insurance advertising this might include, educational articles about important concepts, updates about industry trends, stories highlighting client success, or risk management tips.
Set Up the Calendar
Start by deciding on the format of your calendar. Common formats range from simple spreadsheets to digital calendars like Google Calendars. There are also specialized calendar softwares that offer various helpful features. After selecting the format, start to fill it in with your ideas, and channels. You’ll want to put this information on the coinciding date and time that each piece of content will be published.
Delineate Responsibilities and Roles
If you’re working with other team members, take time to assign specific roles and set firm deadlines. If everyone knows their responsibilities and timelines for creation and publication, chances of delays or issues will be lowered.
Be Flexible
It’s crucial to understand that things will sometimes change. With that said, always be ready to adjust your scheduling and content based on feedback, analytics, market changes or new opportunities.
Making the Most of Your Content Calendar
Review and Adapt on a Regular Basis
Get into the habit of constantly reviewing and updating your content calendar and strategy. When having these meetings, consider your current business objects, and client needs. Then in turn, make adjustments depending on what has changed or what current tactics are effective.
Track Data and Analyze Performance
Most channels of publication include some way to monitor the performance of your content. Using these analytical features to your advantage is necessary to get the most out of your efforts. Pay particular attention to metrics like engagement rates, click-through rates, conversion rates and associated costs (if applicable). Using this concrete evidence enables you to hone in your successes and get rid of failures.
Consistently Engage with Your Audience
Posting your content is only half of the battle. The other half is engaging with your audience on a consistent basis. Following posting, ask relevant questions to spark conversation. It’s also important to respond to comments and direct messages promptly. Doing so helps create a sense of community and brings to light the interests of your audience
Stay Informed and Up-to-Date
You never want to run out of ideas or concepts for new content. To make sure this doesn’t happen, try to keep up with industry news by paying attention to relevant publications. Doing so helps bring to light recent changes, or trends that are useful to your audience. Being on the forefront of breaking information helps establish knowledge, credibility and trust.
Consider Seasonal Trends and Relevancy
Another way to keep your topics relevant and unique is by paying attention to seasonal trends. In the insurance industry, there are certain times of the year where certain content is more relevant. For example, if you’re a health insurance agent, content about enrollment or specific plans are more relevant during the Open Enrollment Period. With that said, you could include information in your content about health insurance in certain states such as this resource.
More Tips for Developing Quality Content
While posting on a regular basis is crucial, overall, quality is more important than quantity. With that said, here are some easy ways to expand upon your content strategy.
- Team Up with Industry Experts: Try mixing things up by collaborating with other experts in the world of insurance. Some examples of this are interviews, live streams with guests, or joint webinars. Providing your audience with a new perspective helps to effectively increase the value of your content.
- Create Niche Content: Another tip is to make content that is hyper-specific to a segment of your audience. For example, if you sell Medicare, maybe you write a blog post about ways for seniors to stay healthy and minimize risks. This type of personalized content makes clients feel more valued.
- Explore New Types of Content: Social media can be highly effective, but it’s important to mix up your tactics by testing a variety of formats. Consider implementing videos, podcasts, infographics or interactive tools. While some people prefer to simply read a post or article, other content types may be more appealing to a different segment of people.
- Seek Feedback: Take the time to actively seek out feedback from clients and consumers. This practice helps ensure that your content remains relevant. It also shows your commitment to addressing your clients most recent needs and wants.
All in All
A content calendar that is tactfully designed serves as an extremely helpful tool. Not only does it help you from an organizational standpoint, but it also helps you learn from your marketing efforts. With this structured roadmap by your side, you’ll effectively create more brand awareness and improve consumer engagement. What’s most important is that you are posting interesting, relevant content that aligns with your goals. When going back to analyze your efforts, pay attention to what’s working the best and consider any changing demands of your company or target audience. This sort of flexible attitude ensures that your ideas never become stale. While creating a content calendar requires some extra effort ahead of time, in the long run you’ll actually be saving time, and your campaigns will be far more effective.
As mentioned, publishing interesting and relevant content is a great way to attract new clients. Another great way is to supplement your marketing efforts with our exclusive insurance leads. Benepath has worked for over 15 years in the insurance lead generation space. Our commitment to providing agents with leads that are exclusive and produced in real-time is what makes us stand out from the competition. Think of us as the connection between you and thousands of interested consumers. We offer both data leads and inbound phone calls in the following verticals: individual health, group health, Medicare, life and commercial insurance. If you’re interested in increasing your contact-rates and sales-rates with the help of our leads, just fill out a form or call us at 888-684-3121.
