In this article, we’ll share our content calendar example for Electrician businesses and provide all the information you need to create and maintain your own.
Contents
What Is a Content Calendar?
A content calendar is a document used by a business to visualise and plan the publication of digital and traditional marketing content (blog posts, social media posts, email marketing campaigns and more) for the coming weeks, months or years.
Usually, the content calendar will show:
⚡ What content will be published
⚡ What date will it be published
⚡ What platform will the content be published on
⚡ Who in the team is responsible for each task
⚡ Links to relevant assets (copywriting and images)
This is a glimpse of a content calendar template we created:
Content calendars are typically created in spreadsheet software. At Sparky Digital, we prefer to use Google Sheets, which is easily accessible in the cloud (Google Drive) and allows the team to work on the document simultaneously. Other platforms like Microsoft Excel are also satisfactory for the job.
Download our full Electrician content calendar here.
Note: This calendar can be adapted to work for any trade business
Why Your Business Needs a Content Calendar
If you’re looking to grow your electrical business, producing digital content is a must. Content calendars can help you streamline this process and achieve greater results. Below are the key benefits of using a content calendar:
- Create more effective electrical service content: By planning ahead, you can develop informative posts about electrical services, safety tips, and industry trends and publish them when potential customers are most likely to engage.
- Optimise time management: Set timelines for content creation, ensuring your team stays on schedule with posts about new technologies, seasonal electrical tips, or service promotions.
- Manage resources efficiently: Plan your content based on available resources or determine what you’ll need to create engaging posts about electrical projects, energy-saving tips, or customer satisfaction.
- Coordinate team efforts: Content calendars allow your electricians and office/marketing staff to know who’s responsible for what content and when, improving overall workflow.
- Define team responsibilities: Clearly assign tasks for content creation, whether it’s gathering job site photos, writing about electrical code updates, or sharing customer testimonials.
- Facilitate performance tracking: Easily visualise your content production over time and correlate it with trends in service calls or customer inquiries.
- Maintain consistent messaging: Ensure your electrical expertise and company values are consistently communicated across all platforms, from social media to your website.
How to Create a Content Calendar
If you decide to create your own content calendar, you’ll need to start by choosing a software tool. Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel are your best bets.
Follow the below steps:
1. Establish a Time Frame
Determine how far in advance you want to plan your marketing content. Depending on resources and time available, it would be best to plan out the year or quarter, but it is quite common to only plan one month at a time.
The further out you plan, the more you will be able to research and develop detailed content that resonates with the audience.
2. Decide on Your Marketing Channels
Specify what marketing channels you will use to distribute your content.
Your calendar can help you plan and publish relevant content consistently across your marketing platforms, allowing you to maintain contact with your audience without significant absences.
It’s very easy to get over-excited and decide you are going to use every marketing channel available (Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Email Marketing, SEO, PPC, LinkedIn, etc..), but this can be a big mistake and dilute the quality of your content as well as take up considerable amounts of your time.
The most important channels with the highest return on investment an electrical business should leverage are:
🔩 Highly optimised website (product and landing pages)
🔩 Google Ads
🔩 Social Media (Facebook & Instagram)
This does not mean that other platforms, such as YouTube and TikTok, cannot be effective. It just means they require a significant investment of time and resources to implement, and we all know how time-poor business owners are.
If you would like our expert team to manage your Website, Local SEO, or Google ads, fill out the enquiry form, and we will contact you to discuss how we can skyrocket your business’s growth.
3. Identify Key Content Topics
Plan out any relevant topics you can discuss in your digital content. Make sure all the subjects you discuss are relevant and highly informative so that they provide the most value to the customer.
An example topic would be “how to reduce your household’s electricity consumption” or “how to change the battery in a smoke alarm.”
4. Plan for Notable Events
Understanding and planning for holidays and special events helps you plan yearly promotions.
An example of a promotable date would be an End-of-financial-year sale (EOFY), where you could send promotional content via social media and email offering a discount to customers who purchase during a set period.
Below is our dedicated National + State holiday calendar for every state in Australia:
5. Defining a Posting Schedule
How often should you post content for your audience? The aim is to post enough to keep the audience engaged but not too much to become annoying.
Your posting frequency also depends on the size of your team and the resources you have. Regardless of the size of your team, a meaningful effort should be made to post consistent content week after week.
Assign each post a publication time and date. The content calendar will help you keep track of these posts so you can quickly decipher how much you post weekly or monthly.
If you’re a relatively new or small team, it’s common to share only a handful of pieces of content per month. As your business scales and you acquire more staff, these efforts must also increase.
How Often to Post on Social Media
Typically, we recommend posting to social media at least two to three times per week.
You can link your Instagram and Facebook accounts using free tools such as Meta Business Suite, which allows you to post the same content on both accounts.
We have found that posting on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays yields the best engagement rates, and the optimal posting time is between 6 and 9 pm.
You should always experiment with different posting schedules and times and find what works best for your business.
When to Post to Your Blog
Posting one blog article per week would be ideal in a perfect world. Posting every fortnight or month is also satisfactory while you are still scaling your content creation skills and resources.
It’s best advised to post super relevant information that provides as much value to the customer as possible and avoid posting for the sake of posting.
It’s also wise to consider seasonal times and avoid posting content such as information about “air conditioning units” going into the Winter period, as this is not very relevant to any issues your customer may be facing.
You can always share your new blog content to other channels, such as social media or via email.
When to Send Email Marketing
If you are targeting businesses, sending campaigns on weekday mornings would be best. The idea is that professionals are less likely to be busy or out of the office and more likely to be sitting in front of their computers.
However, if you are targeting everyday residential customers, it may make sense to send emails in the evening and on weekends so that the average person has time to sort their inbox during their free time.
If your email marketing platform allows it, use A/B testing. This will enable you to send content to half of your audience at one time and the other half at another, allowing you to decipher which times yield the best open and conversion rates.
As for email campaign frequency, it’s important not to spam your audience, as this can become annoying and negatively affect your bounce rate. We recommend sending no more than one email campaign per fortnight and targeting major sales events throughout the year, as seen in the image below (found in the content calendar template)
How to Generate Content Ideas
You now need to brainstorm relevant content ideas that will align with your business and audience’s interests and pain points.
Come up with a list of broad topic ideas related to your business so you can conduct keyword research.
You can use Semrush’s keyword magic tool for this. You get 10 free uses per day, but if this is not enough, you can sign up for a free 7-day trial, which will be ample time to conduct keyword research for your business.
Enter your topic idea, select AU and hit “Search.”
You will then see a list of keyword ideas with data points like search volume, keyword intent (the reason behind the query) and keyword difficulty (how hard it is to rank for that given keyword)
Look for keywords that are super relevant to your products and services. The subtopics groups on the left help filter this.
Furthermore, you can filter this information with the”Questions” button. This allows you to see question-based keywords, which are great topics for creating content.
List all the topic ideas you want to cover and repeat this process for other topics. Some topics may work best for blog articles, while others may be better displayed in video format on social media.
Scheduling Your Content
Decide how often you’ll publish each type of content. This will ensure your content schedule is consistent and has sufficient variety without taking away from your work or overburdening your team members.
If you dedicate some time, you can schedule up to a month of content at a time, saving considerable time during the week. However, this cannot be done for social media story posts, which only last 24 hours and are usually posted in real-time.
Sharing the Calendar With Your Team
You can now invite team members and collaborators to your Google Sheets content calendar, allowing for more efficient posting.
To do this, click the “Share” button at the top right corner of the page, enter their email address, and select their access restrictions.
Does this all sound a bit much? Let us handle your marketing. You’re in safe hands!