Producing quality social media marketing content takes time. Marketing teams must research topics, write posts, edit posts and publish posts all while juggling multiple platforms. For enterprises, this work is often multiplied by location or department.

Without a plan in place, what was once a solid social media strategy may succumb to forgotten tasks and subpar content. And when 57% of consumers follow brands on social media to learn more about them, you can’t afford to publish anything but your best.

A social media calendar is a great solution for marketing teams who want to track their content development process to ensure success.

What Is a Social Media Planning Calendar?

2 Facebook posts each day.

5+ Tweets each day.

Multiple Instagram Stories daily.

There are so many tasks to complete each day—and this is for just three platforms. A social media calendar helps marketing teams track all of the content they’re going to publish for each platform, each day. It also typically includes the specific content (or links to the content) so everything is in one place.

Social media calendars come in many shapes and forms, including spreadsheets, documents and software tools. These calendars can track everything about your social media content such as:

• Platform
• Publish date and time
• Copy for posts
• Links to include in posts
• Links to the published posts
• Visuals such as images and videos
• Links to analytics and results

Why Is Using a Calendar Important for Enterprises?

Perhaps the most important benefit of using a social media calendar is improved planning capabilities. Using a calendar, enterprise marketing teams can plan their content weeks in advance, saving time and effort. 

Plus, a calendar also helps you successfully plan content for each of your platforms instead of posting the same message to each. You must customize your message to make the most impact.

Improved planning is only one of the benefits a social media planning calendar can provide. Let’s discuss some of the others.

1. Simplified Organization

Who’s responsible for publishing approved posts? What topics should the writers be focused on this month? How did last week’s posts perform? All of these questions can be answered inside your content calendar, keeping your entire marketing team on the same page.

Content calendars also keep your social media aligned with your entire marketing strategy. For example, if you have an email campaign moving forward next week, you can use your calendar to plan social posts to go along with it, without developing and publishing on the fly.

2. Improved Consistency

Successful marketing teams understand you can’t publish content once and walk away. Most of the time, you won’t convert a new lead with one piece of content. Consistency is key.

A calendar is a great way to maintain consistency by ensuring content development is kept top of mind. Plus, scheduling content in advance eliminates missing content deadlines.

3. Enhanced Collaboration Across Teams

An enterprise consists of many teams from marketing to sales to customer service. Keeping all of these teams in collaboration with one another benefits your marketing efforts. For example, your sales team better understands your customers’ needs and desires. Your marketing team can use those insights to develop personalized content.

Also, your marketing team can help develop resources for the sales team to use to further enhance the customer experience. Everything working in tandem can improve your bottom line. It all starts with a content calendar for easy visibility.

4. Visualized Performance

The only way to ensure your marketing strategy is helping you reach your business goals is by tracking its performance. Keeping an eye on metrics will show you which social posts are performing best and which ones you should avoid in the future.

All of your metrics can be easily tracked inside your content calendar. This visibility will enable you to improve your social media strategy and provide the content your audience is looking for. As a result, you can more effectively reach your goals.

Improve Your Social Media Marketing With CrossCap’s Marketing Calendar

There are many content calendar tools out there to choose from, including downloadable spreadsheet templates and apps. Yet, as an enterprise, it’s best to have a complete software solution. 

The solution you choose must allow you to manage your content, collaborate with your team, visualize your performance and optimize your workflow, all in one place. CrossCap’s Marketing Calendar is a great choice.

The Marketing Calendar delivers many benefits, including:

• Easy visualization: The Marketing Calendar gives you the power to visualize all of your marketing campaign calendars, customer journey maps and customer segments. It’s a centralized solution your entire team can use with filters for day to year views, as well as calendar and planning views. Plus, the Marketing Calendar houses all of your performance data, including KPIs and campaign results.

• Simple set-up and interface: The interface is user-friendly, even without technical skills. Plus, the setup is simple and the solution offers integration capabilities through APIs. The Marketing Calendar can be deployed in no time.

• Advanced collaboration: The Marketing Calendar keeps you and your team connected. Receive notifications whenever content plans change, access tablet and phone apps for on-the-go editing and more.

Don’t Forget to Integrate Your Calendar With Your Current Tech Stack

No matter which calendar solution you choose, it’s critical that you integrate it fully with other tools in your tech stack such as Hootsuite and Sprinklr. Otherwise, you’ll end up doing twice the work. Integrating your calendar and other tools will help you create efficiencies in your process, from social media content creation to final publishing.

Learn More About CrossCap’s Marketing Calendar Software

CrossCap’s Marketing Calendar software is a great choice for enterprise marketing teams. Visualize your marketing campaigns, streamline your marketing workflow and collaborate with your team simply with CrossCap. To learn more, request a demo today!