How can you align your content distribution plan with your calendar process?

1 Assess your current situation

Before you start planning your content distribution, it's important to assess your current situation and identify your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Doing so will help you understand where you are now, where you want to go, and what needs to be done to get there. Some questions to consider include: what are your content marketing objectives and how do they relate to your business goals? Who is your target audience and what are their needs, preferences, and pain points? What are the best channels and platforms to reach them? How are you measuring the performance and impact of your content distribution efforts? And what gaps or challenges do you need to address or overcome?

2 Define your content distribution strategy

Once you have a clear understanding of your current situation, you can define your content distribution strategy. This should include the types of content you will create and distribute, such as blog posts, videos, podcasts, and infographics. You should also decide how often you will create and distribute content, the tone and voice you will use to communicate with your audience, how you will segment and personalize your content for different segments and stages of the buyer journey, how you will optimize it for search engines and social media platforms, as well as how you will amplify and promote it through paid, earned, and owned media.

3 Create your content distribution calendar

Once you have determined your content distribution strategy, you need to create a content distribution calendar to organize and plan your content creation and distribution activities. This calendar should include the title and topic of each piece of content, its format and length, the channel and platform it will be distributed on, the date and time it will be published, the target audience and persona for it, the goal and call to action associated with it, as well as the resources and responsibilities for each piece of content. You can use a spreadsheet, project management tool, or content marketing software to create and manage your content distribution calendar.

4 Execute your content distribution plan

Creating and executing a content distribution plan requires creating high-quality and relevant content that matches your audience's needs and expectations, distributing it across your chosen channels and platforms in a timely and consistent manner, optimizing it for each channel to maximize its visibility and engagement, amplifying it through paid, earned, and owned media channels to boost its reach and impact, and engaging with your audience to encourage them to share, comment, and take action on your content.

5 Monitor and measure your content distribution results

As you execute your content distribution plan, it is essential to monitor and measure your content distribution results to track your progress and performance. This includes collecting and analyzing data and metrics from your content distribution channels and platforms (e.g., impressions, clicks, views, shares, likes, comments, conversions, etc.), comparing your results with objectives and benchmarks to evaluate success and ROI, pinpointing what works and what doesn't work in your content distribution efforts, and adjusting and improving your content distribution plan based on insights and feedback.

6 Review and update your content distribution plan

Periodically reviewing and updating your content distribution plan is essential for aligning it with your calendar process and changing goals, audience, and market conditions. This entails conducting a SWOT analysis to identify new opportunities and threats, revising your content distribution strategy and objectives based on your current situation and future vision, updating your calendar and schedule according to the new strategy, testing out new types of content, channels, platforms, and tactics to optimize results, as well as learning and applying best practices and trends in content distribution and promotion.

7 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?