Social media is integral to any digital marketer’s inbound marketing strategy. Every social media marketing campaign requires careful consideration, organization and planning, and a content calendar helps you with exactly that
A content calendar lets you plan what, when, and where you are going to post on various social media platforms. It provides a system to organize, schedule, and manage your posts. They can be a simple spreadsheet, specific project management software, or a dashboard to plan campaigns.
A content calendar is different from an ideas backlog. An ideas backlog is where all content ideas and opportunities are listed. A content calendar, on the other hand, is where your planned or work-in-progress pieces go. This can be explained at two levels:
- At the macro level, the calendar provides a broad overview of the content that will be published within a specific timeframe.
- At the micro level, the calendar provides a detailed view of every content piece, including its topic, status, author, contributors, channel, format, and due date.
4 Reasons to Use a Content Calendar
A content calendar is crucial to time and organize your marketing efforts when your campaigns are spread across several social media channels. Marketers use a content calendar for their content creation and content marketing needs, given its many benefits.
- Plan your work
- Align teams and contributors
- Create a repeatable content process
- Manage content in a single location
1. Plan your work
A content calendar lets you plan content in advance. You can chalk out the date and time, the kind of content, and the materials required to go with every post. All your content marketing plans can be smoothly operational when you have the time and resources to make things happen. Content calendars also allow you to integrate ad-hoc content in case of a strategy change or a sudden event. You can manage and organize work ahead of time and get the best out of your content marketing initiatives.
2. Align teams and contributors
As a content creator, you must be aware that every post involves several elements. The content post may involve an illustration, custom images, or a carousel. A designer designs the images, animations and carousels.
Digital marketers or content creators write captions or text to accompany the image. The SEO people focus on the reach, while the marketers promote the post once published. It becomes an additional task to gather and align content if freelancers and guest authors are involved.
That’s where a content calendar comes in. It helps you break down each post component, delegate the responsibilities, and bring the content together as a single piece to be published at the designated time.
3. Create a repeatable content process
A content calendar helps in aligning actions into a repeatable process. This helps in managing posts and campaigns.
Every time you need to post new content, the content calendar has all the steps put together and arranged in a logical sequence. You save time, and the calendar helps you fully leverage the creative resources at hand. It also lets you know how much time a task will take to execute and that every step is followed.
4. Manage all content at a single location
The content calendar provides a top-level view of the posts for your social media channels. It also provides a step-by-step breakdown of every post. All this content is managed in a single place, and you have a content pipeline at hand. It also lets you see the scope of content marketing and whether your efforts need scaling either way.
A content calendar also allows sharing of information with every team member and stakeholder. Everyone can access the information at all times and senior managers can track the team’s progress by looking at the calendar.
How to Create a Content Calendar in 4 Easy Steps
You can use a content calendar to manage all kinds of content – blogs, videos, social posts, etc. You can use the calendar to organize all posts in one place and align the marketing efforts of all your team members.
Creating a content calendar is extremely important and useful. But it is not the only criterion for a successful marketing campaign. Before you enter the execution stage, you must give your content creation strategy some thought. Content creation strategy involves deciding what kind of content will serve your marketing goals. Here are four simple steps you can follow to strategize and plan your content creation using a content calendar:
1. Examine your content strategy to determine priorities
Your marketing plan should attract the right audience and build customer retention. You need to create high-quality content consistently to build reach and attract customers. Additionally, the content you will put in your content calendar will depend on the marketing strategy you come up with to promote your brand and products.
For example, if you seek to inform your audience on work trends or HR, you must find topics your audience is searching for on Google. Once you’ve selected your topics, the content development should focus on ranking on Google to gain visibility, target specific customer segments, and grow incoming traffic coming to your website.
Your content strategy should also concern the channels you have decided to focus on in order to tailor-make the content to appease specific audiences. A simple way to do this is to use a keyword explorer tool like Google Trends or Ahrefs for keyword research. Then, check the traffic potential of those keywords and prioritize only those keywords that have business potential.
Once you shortlist the keywords, decide on the topics that will cover those keywords and also cater to your product-led strategy. Once the topic is finalized and a team member starts working on it, it is added to the content calendar.
2. Create a calendar
A content calendar can be created using a simple spreadsheet or project management software like Asana, Trello, etc. It is up to you to choose the medium for setting up your calendar.
A content calendar may have only a title and due date, but you can add as many fields as required to get the content creation process streamlined and well-functioning. For instance, you can consider adding fields like goals, status, author and contributors, user persona, type of content, etc.
3. Add information to the calendar
Once you decide on the structure of your content calendar, you can start populating the calendar with content ideas and details on the upcoming pieces. You must keep the content marketing goals in mind while filling out the calendar. For example, long-form content is not as frequently published as social media content, which has to be posted several times a day.
The calendar should be prepared to help you have a comprehensive overview of the content pieces and collective strategy of your campaign. As a best practice, add the kind of formats you are working on to avoid overlap. Don’t forget to add the optimization tasks, such as upgrading the old blogs to maintain clarity and keep the content pipeline moving smoothly.
4. Include appropriate subtasks
Your content calendar will have content pieces in different formats. Each format will require different steps and multiple team members to complete. It is recommended to break down each content piece into relevant tasks to be assigned accordingly.
As a guide to help you break down tasks, consider any previously published posts as examples. Think of the steps taken before the piece was finally published, and then use this information to plan your content pieces. You can also list down the tasks in a separate sheet to keep the calendar immediately readable.
6 Examples of Content Calendars from Content Marketing Experts
Every business is unique, and so is its content marketing strategy to woo customers and drive sales. Your content calendar should be built to serve these unique needs. You can get inspired by content experts or the wide variety of content calendar templates available for download. Or… you can build your calendar structure from scratch.
Below we list down a few content calendar examples from content pros and marketers from across the globe.
1. A useful spreadsheet for a one-person team
Hiba Amin from Hypertext uses this content calendar template to manage her one-member content team. The calendar covers eight main fields, including:
- Publication date
- Content little
- Content type
- Funnel stage
- Partners
- Focus
- Status
- Audience persona
The spreadsheet is simple to understand yet highly functional. This format can be used in various permutations and combinations to have a clear overview of what’s happening on the content marketing front.
2. A color-coded social media schedule
This one is by Lani Assaf of Elpha. The calendar tracks all social media activity and related tasks. Lani uses a color-coded system to categorize the content into four categories listed as pillars. These pillars are:
- Product
- UGC
- Trends and news
- People
Any team member accessing the calendar can view the listed topics categorized and color-coded. The calendar also lists important holidays and dates to feature content and coordinate the workflow.
3. A Trello Kanban-style calendar
This Trello-style calendar is designed by Dom Kent, who works at MIO. Each card in a list represents a content piece and has all the details related to that piece added to the card. The cards get moved across the board until they reach the final ‘Done list’. Trello boards are great for visual clarity and if you are working with small teams. Trello also allows unlimited cards to be added under each list or the creation of entirely new lists and boards. This allows room for integrating unplanned content ideas.
4. A Todoist Kanban-style calendar
Doist’s Fadeke Adegbuyi uses a Kanban board to plan and break down social media and blogging tasks for her team members. The calendar is accessible to every member of the team. The members can get clarity on the newsletters and blogs scheduled for a specific duration. The comments feature on the board can help writers jot down their queries, inspiration ideas, and resources. This kind of calendar template is great if you want to track the campaign’s progress and how members are performing individually during a given week.
5. An Asana calendar with tags and comments
Taru Bhargava at Genbook uses this content calendar to color-code every content piece listed there. Each calendar entry has threaded conversations between her and her team members regarding the content piece in question. She plans six weeks to stay true to her commitment to posting publications twice weekly. She can review all tasks and update the calendar every week to track progress. If you are into publishing your content more frequently and working with a team of contributors, this content creation example can help you chart out your calendar strategy.
6. A table with many tabs
Justin Dunham from Ercule uses a multi-tab calendar to track all marketing activities. Dunham tracks events and webinars and overviews the calendar output based on the content that goes into the sheet. The calendar output auto-populates in real time. If you are taking care of complex marketing projects involving creating multiple assets, you can take Dunham’s content calendar example and work on your own.
Conclusion
Content creation is a layered process involving several procedures, processes, and people. Content calendars can be your saviour during the planning and implementation of marketing campaigns. Always start with a functional template and move to a sophisticated system as your content needs grow.
Be sure to keep a buffer while populating the calendar. This can be done by identifying the potential bottlenecks and leaving room for delays and revisions. Instead of overpopulating your calendar to paint a busy picture, choose quality over quantity.
These tips will be useful while designing a content calendar for your marketing campaigns. Calendars help design the blueprint of any content creation effort and must form a part of your content creation.
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