Finalizing your Digital Strategy is a significant milestone for your business. Once you’ll know what to do in terms of digital tactics, the next step is going to be how to implement them on a timeline aligned with your customer personas and journeys. Since customer personas and journeys are other big topics, I will leave it to discuss them in other articles and will focus on digital content and service calendars in this post.

Planning your digital content and services, starting from your marketing objectives and then linking them to customer personas, and finally aligning with customer journeys are the key steps that need to be taken. But, it is not the end of finalizing your digital marketing journey, you still need to complete one last step, which is also a critical one, “digital content and service calendars”.

Digital content and service calendars are not just being created for editorial purposes, they are actually the reflections of your digital touch points with your customers on a timeline. And, through such a comprehensive planning approach, you can ensure that there will be no overlap in communicating your key messages to your customers.

This is an important point as each day there are hundreds of messages are being shared with your customers, and you should be able to differentiate your activities with the right frequency, more precise targeting, and with the right messages shared through the right channels. Creating content and service calendars will help you to ensure delivering the correct messages to your targeted customers at the correct time without overlapping on communicating your key messages.

You may even apply a similar principle to your social media usage and test this approach. Sharing through social media with some planning in terms of the timing of the posts (day, time, … etc. details) can make a difference in terms of the number of impressions you can get. Continuously bombarding your contacts with messages is really not a good user experience, and the same is valid for your digital marketing strategy and communicating your key messages.

Another benefit of content and service calendars is allowing your creative Teams to able to plan their resources and activities better. If you can provide your content and service calendars to the creative Teams as early as possible (preferably around the beginning of your annual cycle or even before), they can organize themselves better and put in enough resourcing to support your digital activities. This approach can be even more critical in some industries like Pharma, where you also need to spend a significant amount of time for Medical, Legal, and Regulatory (MLR) reviews and approvals for your digital content and services to align with local regulations. With digital content and service calendars in place, you can also give early heads-up to such regulations-related groups to review and approve the content on time before publishing it.

In summary, digital content and service calendars are essential components for implementing your company’s digital marketing strategy. Providing the right messages to your right/targeted customers at the right time through the right channels can be possible by creating your digital content and service calendars. They are not nice to have components, they are the key parts of your digital strategy execution.