We’ve written before about how important a content marketing strategy is for healthcare software companies: it helps generate leads, save money, and keep your target customers engaged throughout the long healthcare sales cycle.
Once you’ve defined a solid content marketing strategy, you’ll want to roll up your sleeves and start putting it into practice. But, as many entrepreneurs have learned the hard way, even a solid plan can be hard to implement - you intend to blog weekly but don’t find the time, you never have enough content when you need it, or the content you have doesn’t work well with your latest marketing campaigns.
Enter the content marketing calendar. This vital tool helps you implement your content marketing strategy and keep your content organized, relevant, consistent, and powerful.
A solid marketing calendar - used by everyone on your team who is involved in creating or promoting your content - is especially a must for healthcare software companies, who often have complex content marketing goals, such as educating the market, reaching multiple stakeholders, and keeping target customers engaged over the long term.
Here’s our step-by-step guide to creating a high-powered content marketing calendar for your healthcare software business.
Before you can think about putting together your calendar, you need to make sure you’re rock solid on your strategy. Everyone involved in your marketing plan needs to agree on:
The calendar that works for your team will depend on the complexity of your strategy. If you’re planning to involve a lot of people, create highly complex content, or produce a high volume of content, you’ll probably need a more complex solution. For most small businesses, a simpler approach will probably work better. Here are a few of the most common solutions:
Excel: A lot of companies keep it simple with an old-school Excel sheet
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Google Sheets: Still free and flexible, but with more sharing options, the Content Marketing Institute swear by Google Sheets to track their content (click here to get their template)
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Trello: If you’re a Kanban fan, this free project management tool will work great for your content marketing too
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Mintent: Project management software designed for use in marketing projects
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CoSchedule: If you need a more complete calendar and/or are planning to create a lot of content, this purpose-built content scheduling app could be a fit
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DivvyHQ: A more complete solution if you’re going for a full-blown content marketing strategy.
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Ideally, you should have a rolling with content planned out for the next 90 days. If you’re building your own version in Excel or Google Sheets, it can be list-style or one column per day, but here’s what you’ll need to include:
You might also want to include:
And of course, it’s worth remembering that the most important thing to consider when creating your content marketing calendar is you - your team, your business, your resources, your available time, and your goals. Because, in the words of Kim Moutsos at the Content Marketing Institute, “Even the most advanced content calendar will fail if no one uses it.”
We hope you’ll find this guide to creating a content marketing calendar useful, but if you’d like our help building or implementing your calendar, just click here to schedule a free 30-minute consultation with our team.
Spot On co-founder and partner Susie Kelley is dedicated to leveraging technology to advance innovative solutions in highly regulated industries. Driven by the opportunity to elevate brands, she co-founded Spot On in 2012 after having spent 15 years honing her marketing skills in an agency. Susie leads business development with a personal touch, focusing on building lasting relationships with clients to meet — and exceed — their goals for business growth.
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