How often should eCommerce brands re-evaluate their content calendars?

In the current landscape, eCommerce brands compete mightily to land their content in front of their target audience at the right place at the right time. Statistics at the beginning of the year showed that there are a whopping 12-24 million websites worldwide. 

Out of those, a significant number of businesses are present on social media. Even if we make a niche-specific division, there still are multiple brands battling for the perfect marketing opportunity. To do so, they should always present users with relevant, informative and engaging content. 

Circling back to the majority of businesses competing to get the user’s attention, they need to create content regularly to get noticed. 

Once a brand successfully captures a user’s interest, it needs to nourish the relationship with regular content to develop brand loyalty. Planning, creating and posting new content in the nick of time can be a fairly challenging task and is highly discouraged by experts, too. 

This is where content calendars come in.

A content calendar can provide businesses with an accurate plan to follow to do the dot. A well-made calendar should answer the following questions:

• What are your content/campaign ideas?
• What needs to be produced and published?
• What channels would be covered?
• When will the content be published?
• What purpose does a specific content serve?
• Is it paid or organic?
• What would the content format be?
• Who will be responsible for the creation, design, and publishing?
• What time will it be published?
• Is there a deadline for each piece of content?
• Is it paid or organic?

While these may be a good starting point, businesses can specify the calendar as much as they like. In fact, the more detail-oriented, the better. 

What is the ideal length of a content calendar?

The ideal length for how far out eCommerce businesses plan their content varies from niche to niche or even the size of the business. Some businesses choose to plan content calendars for a year in advance, some 6 months and some a month and even lesser. 

Our advice: Aim for a few months ahead at least. Make a file with content ideas for important holidays and campaigns, to keep track of content that is under production, that is finished, but under revision and content that is ready. 

Now that you’ve chartered the course for a specific time, let’s look at the reasons that may prompt you to modify the calendar:

1. Current strategy underperforming:

Marketing Insider Group says that the ideal time to gauge the performance of content marketing is 4-5 months. According to other experts like Neil Patel, 6-9 months is the right time to see results. 

Safe to say, it is advisable to not touch your pre-planned content calendar for three months at least. While you may be pushing out informative and engaging content, numerous external factors affect marketing performance too.

You only need to make sure of the following things. Your content should be:

• Relevant to your business
• Informative 
• Engaging
• Of value to the users
• The right content type
• Targeted to the right audience
• Targeted at the right platform
• Published at the right time

Like SEO, content marketing is a practice that, though slow at first, churns out significant results for businesses in the long run. With the proper content, eCommerce brands cannot only educate their target audiences but build long-lasting relationships with them too.

If your content ticks all the boxes in the checklist above and, but hasn’t wielded results over roughly 6 months, now would be a good time for re-evaluation.

But how to do it? The first step would be to not get worried. Even with content that didn’t give you the results you wanted, there’s plenty to take away from.

Do a social media content analysis:

An analysis can give you clear insight into what worked and what underperformed. While we’re sure your content was top-notch, there could be other factors hindering its success. 

An approach like social media SWOT analysis can bring clarity more than mere engagement metrics, which can ultimately help you identify customer pain points and develop content around it.

Research shows that the 70-20-10 is the golden posting rule. 

• 70% Should add value and build brand recognition (your memes, quotes that can go viral)
• 20% of other brands (Retweeting sharing their stuff that’s relevant to your brand)
• 10% of promotional stuff (1 in 10 posts only)

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2. Market Shift:

The internet spears ahead at lightning speeds without stopping for anyone. Consequently, the fast pace translates into eCommerce marketing too.

Content calendars undoubtedly provide a clear vision of what a business’s digital image looks like for a certain period. But, relevance is crucial and brands must reflect the zeitgeist of the current age. A marketing trend may last for a few years with great ROI to reflect but can be short-lived and die down within a few months too. 

Despite their short life, using the trend can be a tipping point to have your business go viral. When planning out the topics and content types, of course, businesses should incorporate important holidays and occasions, i.e. New Year, Black Friday, summer holidays, back-to-school campaigns and much more. 

We advise you to keep some windows open in your commerce content so you can jump on the ongoing trend bandwagon. This could be in the form of memes, a content format type or even a hot topic (like Elon Musk buying Twitter). If you have locked the entire calendar to the dot, it can be difficult to trends to your advantage. 

Likewise, when COVID hit, a tonne of eCommerce strategies was affected. Businesses had to pivot to cater to the limitations brought by it. 

3. When you feel like it needs a refresh.

Being stuck in a recurring loop can weigh down creativity and generally be unproductive too. Small to medium businesses can certainly make the choice of changing course. Apart from a number and technology game, marketing at its core is about creativity too.

A change in commerce content can certainly give you the nudge you needed to bring fresh ideas and productivity to the table. What needs to be realised is that content essentially needs to add value to the customer. Once they are hooked on what you create, guiding them to the final stages of the sales funnel will be a piece of cake. 

In conclusion:

Once you have the wheels of your content posting in motion, we advise you to ride the wave and not touch it for approximately 6 months. If you still cannot see results, you can carry out a social media analysis to see what the flaws are. Apart from your efforts, external factors like market trends can play a significant role in underperformance, too. 

Just make sure that you’re following the best content creation and posting practices and, above all, have fun! Emotion translates through the screen and content made with interest and dedication resonates with the audience the most!

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