Content calendar planning aligned with your content marketing strategy is a critical part of any successful marketing plan. Learn how in this guide.

Once you decide to invest in content marketing and develop a content strategy, there’s one more important step to take before you can start churning out all of that dazzling new content: building a content calendar.

A content calendar will bridge the gap between idea and execution, helping you achieve your desired outcomes. Here’s how to do it successfully.

What Is a Content Calendar?

A content calendar is used to plan and schedule all details of upcoming content including when and where it will be published, who will create it, the content’s latest status update, and so on.

It can serve both as a general bird’s eye overview of your upcoming week, month, and even year in content, as well as a more detailed tracking device for individual pieces of content.

Your team should ultimately decide what works best for you in terms of your content calendar’s organization, whether that is an actual monthly calendar, a list, or something else.

Purpose

Content calendars are a critical tool for implementing a content marketing strategy for a variety of reasons.

Organization

Being organized is absolutely key to the success of any initiative, team, or project.

Content calendars are an intuitive way to organize every single piece of information relevant to your content strategy. Keeping things all neatly laid out in an editorial calendar is the best way to make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

An organized content calendar will immediately make it clear to you if you accidentally forgot to schedule a post for a particular day or if the blog article you wanted to publish next week hasn’t been assigned to a writer yet.

This way, your content will be so well-planned that you can run your content strategy like a well-oiled machine with no need for last-minute scrambling.

Collaboration

Most often, quite a lot of people are involved in executing a content strategy: executives, managers, content creators, and freelancers. Having an editorial calendar is an effective way to make sure all of these people are on the same page, receiving all the information they need in order to do their jobs properly.

The Big Picture

When you’re in the weeds with content on a micro-level every day, thinking closely about each character of every tweet, you can miss an important bigger picture. Content calendars allow you to plan initiatives, prepare larger themes, create content relevant to holidays and current events, and avoid publishing repetitive content.

Content Calendar Creation

There are several important steps you don’t want to miss when creating your team’s content calendar.

Choose a Format

First, you’ll want to choose a format. Ask yourself:

• Do I want to use a list? Or a calendar? Something else?
• Will we plan a year in advance? A few months? One month?
• Will I drill down to the level of each week? Each day? Each piece of content?
• Which platform will I host my content calendar on?

Choose What to Track

Once you have a format in mind, you’ll need to decide exactly what information you’ll include in your content calendar. Here are some possible items to choose from:

• Date
• Time
• Platform (Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/blog, etc.)
• Title
• Copy
• Visuals
• Relevant links
• URL/slug
• Creator
• Status
• Notes

Suggested Reading – How to know if you need a content calendar or an editorial calendar: Content Calendar vs Editorial Calendar: Here’s Why You Need Both!

Create a Content Library

It’s highly recommended to keep a library of the content that you create as part of your content plan.

Ideally, every image, video, and post will be stored, saved, and tracked somewhere for both record-keeping and reusing purposes.

Track Future Content Ideas

Finally, consider creating a place easily accessible from your content calendar (perhaps another tab in the same spreadsheet) in which you can list and brainstorm ideas for possible new content.

That way, as you’re planning out content for the upcoming week or month, you can easily review previous content and past ideas for inspiration.

Content Calendar Examples

One of the best ways to decide what you want your team’s editorial calendar to look like is to look at other companies and decide which elements you like and want to adopt and which you can do without.

For your inspiration, here are just a few real-life examples from companies with a successful content plan.

Content Calendar Implementation

Once you have thought about everything listed above, it’s just a matter of finding or creating a content calendar template and filling everything out. Naturally, this process will include some trial-and-error as you figure out what works best for your business needs.

After you’ve done the groundwork of creating your content calendar, you can start crafting posts, publishing content, and carrying out that brilliant content strategy of yours.

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