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Holiday Prep: Creating And Using a Content CalendarBy Caroline Stanley |  October 05, 2016 (0 comments)

Merrick, NY—You’ve prepared all year long for the holiday season. You’ve got the right inventory with the right brands and the right price points. You’ve figured out your holiday staffing needs. You’ve updated your website. You’ve ordered extra ring boxes, giftwrap and give-away jewelry cleaner, etc. In short, you’re mostly ready.

Have you given any thought to a content calendar?

A content calendar is a resource that you create and use to plan all content marketing activity. In this context, saying ‘content’ is focusing on one area of your inventory or services that you want to promote during a specified time.

Giving yourself a calendar to follow connects your marketing with your inventory and offers you a visual look at what you are doing and where you are at a given time.

If you have a content calendar for the year, then following it for fourth quarter promotions is easy. If not, consider creating one and seeing how it affects sales. Hopefully you’ll see greater sales in the specific categories you promote. It’s especially helpful with social media and email marketing but works oh-so-nicely for general marketing efforts. Here’s a great article from Mail Chimp that showcases the general retail calendar below:

While this works well for groups (or your outside agency), it also works if you’re a one-person marketing team. Just use it to track what is going and where.

There are plenty of free Content Calendar creators out there and frankly, a shared Google Calendar (http://www.google.com/calendar) or an Excel spreadsheet works pretty darn well to get you started. Both are easy to access.

Let’s suppose you are having a trunk show for your favorite designer in early December. To populate the calendar to be most useful, for the weeks prior, you’d schedule (some or all of) these items that work for you.

1. Ad in local sites (or your local newspaper) for trunk show
2. Email the event notice to your entire list and invite them to attend.
3. At least one daily post to Facebook (and/or Instagram and your other favorite social media platforms) about this event and showcasing images of her/his jewelry. If you use Pinterest, create and promote a board just for this event.
4. Schedule calls to invite and remind people to attend. This is not strictly content calendar focused, but if it helps you to have all important detail in one place, then expand your content calendar with this information.
5. Post event follow-up (with customer’s permissions) from the event for social media showing people wearing the jewelry.
6. A thank-you for attending email to go out to your entire mailing list, showcasing some of the unique pieces that were on-hand (show ‘em what they missed, if they did).

A content calendar is about keeping you and your store on track and knowing where all your moving parts are and what they are doing towards the common goal - sales. Consider what would have happened if you had this event scheduled but your social media posting person works from home or at an off-time and wasn’t fully aware of what was going on. That person would be hard at work posting interesting items, but none of them about the event. Situations like that are where a Content Calendar really helps keep everyone on track.

As with most solutions, there is no one-size fits all answer. Develop a content calendar and try it out with the parts that would most help your store to achieve greater promotions and better sales. And lastly, as always, keep security top-of-mind and don’t feel you need to share every detail on social media. As National Jeweler observed about the Kim Kardashian jewelry robbery, not all attention is good attention.