Content planning has never been easier with these five best content calendar templates. Publish quality content consistently month after month!

Using content calendar templates is an easy way to plan your content marketing efforts.

What’s the most crucial aspect of every content marketing strategy? It is, of course, to ensure that your content is original, relevant, and valuable. However, if you solely focus on the quality of your content, your content production efforts won’t yield the desired results. Instead, you must build an actionable content plan to consistently publish top-notch content across different channels.

In other words, you need a lucid content calendar that steers your content strategy in the right direction. While most content marketers realize the importance of outlining a calendar, they often struggle to build one. The good news is that the internet is home to a plethora of useful content calendar templates to simplify this task.

In this blog, we’ll take a look at the most popular and widely used content calendar templates. But let’s first understand what a content calendar is and why it’s important.

What is a Content Calendar Template?

Simply put, a content calendar is a visual framework that defines your content publishing and distribution schedule. It outlines what content you’ll create and when you’ll publish it on various platforms. Additionally, it defines how you’ll repurpose various content assets across different distribution channels.

Here’s an example of a content calendar template used by Hootsuite:

The biggest advantage of using a content calendar is that it streamlines your content strategy. It ensures that every content asset you create takes you closer to achieving your end goals.

Moreover, it gives you an overview of content production for the upcoming weeks. This, in turn, helps you create a backlog of high-quality content and ensures that you never miss a deadline. It also helps you assign key responsibilities to different team members and keep them on the same page.

It’s now time for us to take a look at the best content calendar templates in 2020:

Best Content Calendar Templates

1. CoSchedule

Are you looking for a simple and customizable content calendar template to organize and manage content across multiple channels? Take a look at the following template offered by CoSchedule:

It’s a simple Microsoft Excel-based template that includes separate tabs for each month. Each tab includes all the days of the corresponding month. As you scroll below the calendar, you’ll find the “Project Checklist”, “General Notes”, and “Color Code” sections:

Use the “Project Checklist” to assign different topics to individual team members and monitor their progress. The “Color Code” section further makes it easier to organize your calendar according to different campaigns and teams.

You can download this template for free by submitting your email address and company website. You get a complete package that includes a social media calendar template as well as a printable PDF calendar template.

2. HubSpot

If you want to organize the distribution of your content on social media, HubSpot’s social media content calendar template is the right choice. It comprises multiple tabs including a color-coded “Monthly Planning Calendar”, “Scheduler”, and “Content Repository”.

You also get individual tabs to organize content on different social media platforms.

You can create a similar tab to manage and schedule your blog posts as well. You can download this template for free from HubSpot’s website.

3. Convince & Convert

Convince & Convert’s free content calendar template requires you to approach content production like television networks. In other words, you should start thinking of your content assets as TV shows. It’s a simple Excel-based template that categorizes your content into “Binge-Worthy Shows”, “One-Time Shows”, and “Regularly-Scheduled Shows”.

This is a great template for developing an overarching content strategy for the entire year. However, it doesn’t get into granular details such as deadlines, distribution channels, author/creator, etc.

4. ContentCal

This is one of the most powerful and robust content calendar templates. You can download it for free from ContentCal’s website. It organizes your content assets, distribution channels, and publishing schedule in a single Excel spreadsheet.

You just have to answer the questions on the left and the template automatically suggests the optimal distribution schedule. Thereafter, you can add individual topics to different days of a month. The only feature missing is the ability to assign content assets and topics to team members.

5. IMPACT

If you’re looking for a straightforward content calendar template to manage your blog posts, this is the right choice. It includes 15 essential columns to highlight everything your content team should know about each blog post.

The template is available in both Excel and Google Docs formats and can be downloaded for free from IMAPCT’s website. It’s beginner-friendly and can be customized to include other details such as distribution channels, repurposing schedule, etc.

Final Thoughts

Use a content calendar template to map out your big-picture editorial calendar and ensure your business goals are aligned with the content you plan to publish regularly.

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The content marketing experts at WriteForMe will help you develop your content marketing strategy. We work directly with you to map out your content to help you reach your business goals.

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