How to Plan Out Your Yearly Social Media Content Calendar
When you start to make plans for your business, you often set revenue goals, product launches, planning for vacation… and a yearly social media content plan is usually put on the back burner.
What a lot of business owners forget is that when you plan out your yearly social media content calendar, you will feel a lot more at peace, you will avoid conflicts between your personal life and work, and you will not forget to promote things that matter for your business!
And it is not as difficult as you think. I am not asking you to CREATE all of your social media for the entire year, but instead you can plan out what your content will look like throughout the year.
No more second-guessing what you should be posting. You have a strategy and a plan…
… IN JUST SEVEN STEPS!!
Grab a calendar (paper or digital, it works either way), and let’s get started!!
STEP ONE: PERSONAL DATES
I always start with this step to ensure that my personal life comes first. Don’t get me wrong, I love my business, but between vacations, holidays, and my kids school breaks and events… those things take priority! So make sure you put these on your calendar AHEAD of time so that you aren’t creating any friction between your personal life and your business.
STEP TWO: QUARTERLY CAMPAIGN DATES FOR MAIN OFFER
This is something that works so well for my business, and it can work for yours too! My main offer, “Your Template Club,” opens doors for enrollment once a quarter. So I plan an open/close cart campaign to my calendar quarterly!
Even if you don’t have an open/close cart type of offer, you can still incorporate quarterly campaigns to sell your main product, service, or offer. You should consistently sell your offers on social media, but by focusing a campaign on your main offer once a quarter, you can ensure that you have consistent income throughout the year!
STEP THREE: ADDITIONAL CAMPAIGNS FOR OTHER OFFERS
Once I have my main offer campaigns planned, I then take a look at other products and products where I am an affiliate, and build in other campaigns throughout the year based on specific goals and timelines. Again, you should consistently talk about your offer suite, but you can dedicate a specific amount of time on social media to focus on selling JUST one thing at a time.
STEP FOUR: ADD PRE-CAMPAIGN WARMUP PERIODS
Now that you know when you are going to have campaigns throughout the year, you need to plan a warmup period. Typically for me, a content warmup period is only a week, but other business owners may dedicate more time to this.
What you want to do is block out time before your campaign to start creating content that will warm your audience up to your offer. For example, when I ramp up for a campaign for Your Template Club, the week before I start talking about tips and tricks, educational content, or content that addresses my customers' pain points, in relation to what I am about to sell.
STEP FIVE: GIVEAWAYS
Even if I don’t know the details of my giveaways I always put them on my calendar to ensure that I have a deadline and I can make it a priority in my business and content calendar. I try and plan them in between campaigns about 2-3 times a year. You shouldn’t rely on giveaways to grow your business or your following, but it is a great way to tap into a new audience a few times a year.
STEP SIX: END-OF-YEAR COUNTDOWN
This is something new I have started to implement over the last few years… and it is a game changer. Around the holidays' engagement is always low, most people are taking a vacation, and overall people are just burnt out. Content creation is NOT top of mind in December. Now I focus on a fun strategy to repurpose old content by doing a “TOP 10” post countdown.
I can quickly and easily take the content I have posted before… and post it again!!
This ensures that I have content going out through December, and I don’t have to create anything new. It gives a bit of incentive for my followers to engage because (1) the content was high-performing in the past, it is likely they will like it again, and (2) they get excited for the countdown and look forward to it every single day!
And if you want to add a bit of spice - I created THESE templates to make this even easier… and more fun!
STEP SEVEN: ADDITIONAL CONNECTION POINTS
Now that you have all of the “big” stuff planned out for the year, you can fill in the gap with connection points with your audience. To reiterate, you aren’t creating every single social post for the entire year, but you can start to plan out what your content will look like! For example:
You are a social media manager and you want to talk to your audience about social media wellness during July since it is “Social Media Wellness Month.” So in July, you can block out a week to run a fun challenge, or plan to go live with peers in your industry or start a fun content series.
You are a business coach and you want to make it a priority to go live with 3 other people at least once a month. This will help you connect with new potential audience members, and you can pre-schedule it on your calendar to plan accordingly.
You are a product-based business owner, and you know that most of your sales come in October - December because of the holiday season, you know you really need to prep social media content for those months since you will be so busy.
VIDEO TUTORIAL: How to Use Content Packs to Make Content Creation Easier
Now that you have your social media content calendar, it is time to put in the work to actually create the content. Whether you like to post 1 time a week, or 7 times, schedule a week of content ahead of time, or create in the moment… we could all use a little help!!
You can shop our best-selling templates to help you create content for Instagram! Everything from caption templates, Instagram Carousels, and even Instagram Reels!
P.S. If you are a member of Your Template Club, you can find all of these templates when you log in to the portal.
check out our best-selling canva templates help boost your engagement!
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Manu Muraro is the founder of Your Social Team, an Instagram training membership and template shop that help social media managers and Instagram-savvy small business owners to grow engagement and sales using Instagram and content marketing, without the overwhelm. Born and raised in Brazil, Manu moved to the U.S. in 2000 right out of college to work for Cartoon Network, where she made an award winning career in creative and strategy. In 2021, Manu started Your Template Club, a Canva template subscription service to help social media professionals and Canva-savvy business owners to create content that performs on Instagram, add more Instagram features into their strategy, such as Instagram Lives and Reels, and save time.