In the world of social media marketing—planning needs to become your best friend if you want to find the success you’re looking for.
We’re not talking about just getting tons of followers… we’re talking about those YouTube videos that make SALES.
And the only way to make those sales is to publish the videos that drive viewers to your landing pages. That’s where your content calendar comes in.
If you don’t have a content calendar, you’re going to find yourself confused and unsure of what’s on your plate really quickly. This strategy might work for a little bit but after a while, you’re going to realize that scalable strategies are where 👏 it’s 👏 at👏.
Having a content calendar is going to give you a roadmap of what’s on your plate this month and when you should be promoting what offer. It’s going to be one of the biggest reasons you’re getting more than followers, you’re making SALES! And isn’t that why we’re making YouTube videos in the first place?
So let’s dive into how you can create a content calendar for your YouTube strategy that makes your life as a business owner, agency, or marketer sooo much easier.
Here are the 5 steps to creating your YouTube content calendar.
#1: Choose your upload schedule
How often are you going to upload videos?
There are a lot of different schedules you can choose for your YouTube strategy, and there isn’t necessarily one right answer. It just depends on your industry and your team.
For example, a YouTube vlogger can’t expect to get much pay-off from uploading one video a month. For their industry, viewers want to have constant contact with their favorite vloggers and they’ll want to see them as much as possible. Uploading 3 videos per week is a good start for a vlogger.
On the other hand, if you’re an agency owner posting about marketing strategies—you can post one GREAT video per week. Or, if you’re feeling like an overachiever, you can post 3 times a week.
That brings us to the second part of choosing your schedule: your team. If you are a one-person show, make sure your YouTube schedule is realistic. For example, if you need to do all of the work within your agency and shoot, edit, and upload 3x YouTube videos a week—that might lead to biting off more than you can chew.
If you have a 10-person team and you know that between two of your team members they could handle a posting schedule like this, then green light your way to a 3x per week posting schedule.
Decide what schedule works best for your industry and your team and then decide what days your videos are going to live. It could be every Tuesday, or every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
Whatever works best for your audience and your schedule.
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#2: Choose the topics you’ll make your videos about
Bet you weren’t surprised to see this task on your content calendar to-do list. That’s right, the second thing you need to create a content calendar is…content.
Sit down and figure out what content works best for your audience right now. You’re going to want to come up with as many content topics as you need to create videos on per month (and maybe a few extras in case one topic doesn’t end up working out).
For example, if you’re posting 1 video per week each month you need 4-6 content ideas. You can either come up with all of these ideas in one brainstorming session each month or come up with 12+ ideas at once so you have 3 months of content ready to film.
But WHERE do you find content topics that your audience will be interested in watching?
- Quora: Search for questions related to your industry and create videos that answer those questions
- AnswerThePublic: Search for your industry and look for questions you can answer in your videos
- Ask your customers: Send out surveys on what content your customers want from you and look through customer feedback for questions that come up often
- Facebook groups: Read through Facebook group posts related to your industry to see what your customer avatar is struggling with
- YouTube: Search YouTube to see what content is doing really well in your niche and figure out how you can make what they have even better
With your upload schedule and content topics in hand, it’s time to whip out your upcoming product launches, promotions, and offers to make sure your content is in line with what you’re selling at the time.
#3: Put your product launches, promotions, and new offers in your calendar
If you’re wondering where your YouTube video topic ideas went—we’ll come back to them in the next step.
First, we want to make sure your upcoming product launches, promotions, and new offers are in your calendar so we know when you’re going to need your content to support certain products or services you offer.
This is the time to put everything in your calendar on the DAY that it is going to launch. You want to have the day your new product is launching, the day you’re going to announce a new promotion, and the day you’re going to talk about a new offer.
It’s important that you have each of these dates because we’re going to work your YouTube videos around these promotions so that your content feeds into everything you’re running at that time.
#4: Put your YouTube video content ideas into your calendar
Alright, now for the part that you probably thought was coming first in this article—putting your YouTube content in your calendar. Now that you have all of your launches, promotions, and offers in your calendar it’s easy to tell what content topic should go live each week.
For example, if we’re running a promotion on our Social Media Mastery Course in the middle of the month, we want to post a social media marketing related YouTube video that week so we get more traffic to that offer.
See what we’re doing here?
Your YouTube strategy isn’t just there for views and followers, you want to be using YouTube as an asset to getting more sales in your business. By pairing your YouTube content calendar with your promotions calendar you’re creating a cohesive calendar that fits together like peanut butter and jelly. 🥜
#5: Choose the dates you’ll promote your YouTube videos
Last but not least, your content calendar needs to have the dates that you’ll be promoting your YouTube content as well.
For example, if your schedule is to post YouTube videos on Tuesdays, then you’ll want to be promoting that video on Monday and Tuesday each week.
- On Monday you’ll talk about how it’s going to be live tomorrow and ask your audience to turn their post notifications on so they know when your video is live on YouTube
- On Tuesday, you’ll be reminding your audience that your video just went live and giving them the link to check it out
You want these dates in your calendar so you can SEE what you’re promoting and on what day. This means that when it’s time to promote a video, you’re not stumbling to get your promotional assets together—you’re good to go and can sail smoothly through the day. The reason content calendars exist is to make our lives as content creators easier. Use a YouTube content calendar to fit your YouTube strategy into your entire marketing strategy and to make sure you stay on track with your uploading schedule.
