Are you looking for ways to simplify content creation, scheduling, and other tasks? If so, build and use a content calendar to improve your content strategy. Good news: You may be able to rely on a calendar template to kick-start the process, saving you time and energy. Many platforms even offer a variety of free content calendar templates to choose from.
In this article, discover the top reasons for using a content calendar, learn how to go about creating one, and view some best practices. Click on any of the links below to see specific elements:
What is a content calendar?
A content calendar is a resource that makes it easier to plan and publish upcoming content and marketing projects. This structured approach allows your content team to share and visualize content activities—such as articles, videos, and status updates—more effectively. By relying on this type of calendar, you can manage various content types across several channels and platforms, potentially using an editorial calendar to focus on the types of content you’ll produce and a social media calendar to plan out your social media posts.
Why use a content calendar?
Using a content calendar offers numerous potential benefits:
- Saves time and energy: The calendar allows you to plan and stay on track with your content strategy. In doing so, you consolidate the time and energy your team spends planning and sharing content.
- Reduces the chance of mistakes: With a content calendar, your team becomes more organized in planning future content. This gives you the time to check facts more thoroughly so you’re more likely to reduce the appearance of errors in the content.
- Promotes effective collaboration: Critical elements such as status updates keep stakeholders informed about new developments, content roles, and due dates. This makes handling content creation, scheduling, and distribution easier and more efficient. Company executives can also do top-down monitoring of progress to determine whether planned activities align with business goals.
- Highlights content gaps: With the calendar, you also gain a new perspective on how to schedule content and project management. It allows you to look at the bigger picture and detect critical content gaps that you need to cover to ensure a more comprehensive content strategy.
- Identifies areas of improvement: Regularly monitoring performance and conducting content audits helps you gain valuable insights and identify areas requiring improvement. Over time, you’ll enhance the quality of your content marketing initiatives, boosting the appeal and performance of your content.
9 steps to creating an editorial content calendar
To create a content calendar that helps save time, promote collaboration, and minimize errors—among other benefits—consider following these steps:
- Audit existing content
- Define your goals
- Check competitors’ content strategies
- Determine the right types of content
- Establish a publishing schedule
- Specify a workflow
- Choose the right platforms
- Monitor your content’s performance and trends
- Publish the content
Step 1: Audit existing content
To leverage a well-polished content calendar, it’s important to audit your existing content and understand how well it’s doing on social media and other places where potential customers might view the material. Doing so provides a determination of whether you have the right content to achieve your marketing goals. You may notice gaps at various stages of your content creation and distribution.
A content audit is likely to focus on assessing content samples, publishing channels, and other key aspects of content creation. From this analysis, you can identify high-priority tasks in areas where improvements are needed.
An audit will reveal pages or platforms with the least amount of traffic or engagement. As a team, you should also identify content that’s no longer relevant and requires replacing or editing. So, build in regular audits to reassess both traffic and the need for removal, replacement, and editing.
Step 2: Define your goals
After completing the audit, set aside time to think about your content marketing objectives. This planning step can help ensure your long-term efforts are successful. The best way to approach the process is by linking your content targets to your overall business goals.
Examples of relevant goals include improving search engine optimization (SEO), establishing an authoritative brand voice, boosting conversion rates, or enhancing audience engagement. Just make sure they have a clear purpose and won’t waste resources. Your team should be able to visualize the results.
Step 3: Research competitors
When refining your content strategy, don’t shy away from researching your competitors. Doing so makes it easier to discover which content ideas work or don’t work and determine practical ways to help your brand stand out. Your team’s fresh eyes and creative efforts can put new spins on the most engaging content ideas.
For instance, if your competitor publishes a popular infographic, you might cover the same topic as blog content, a quiz, a webinar, a podcast, a case study, or another content type. The best part is that SEO tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush make it easy to perform a competitive analysis of keywords used by competitors in your industry.
Include checks on content published on multiple channels, including social media platforms, blogs, and websites.
Once you’ve defined your content strategy goals and researched competitors, you’re ready to begin brainstorming content ideas.
Step 4: Identify your types of content
The type of content you choose to publish can make a difference in driving engagement. It’s important for the content type you pick to match your target audience’s viewing practices.
Then create content that appeals to a particular audience and helps you achieve your specific marketing goals. For instance, a product description video or blog could be the right option when targeting audiences in the awareness and evaluation stages of your marketing funnel.
The right content type allows you to achieve your marketing objectives and stand out from the competition. Consider brainstorming content ideas with your entire marketing team.
Content types to consider include:
- Blog posts (long- and short-form)
- Quizzes
- Product pages
- Podcasts
- Social media posts
- Newsletters
- Contests
- Infographics
- Videos
- Webinars
- Ebooks
Depending on the number of channels you’re targeting, your editorial calendar will incorporate one or multiple types of content. Keep in mind that people consume online content differently, irrespective of your target channel, so it’s important to publish diverse content.
Step 5: Map out a publishing schedule
To identify a great starting publication schedule, evaluate your target audience’s content needs or consumption patterns. For instance, you may choose to publish one email newsletter weekly and from three to five social posts in the same period.
A key advantage of mapping out a publishing schedule is that it may help you tie into crucial marketing opportunities, such as periods leading to a peak sales season. Also, you can schedule social media posts at specific dates and times to match your audience’s online activities or content consumption patterns.
Be aware, though, that publishing too much content in a short period might leave your audience swamped and unable to keep up; look for a good balance.
Creating a rolling scheduling plan for three months at a time is a content marketing best practice.
Step 6: Establish a workflow
This stage calls for spelling out the details of your workflow, including important dates, content creation roles, and other critical elements. The workflow plan covers key details, such as the ideal time to post for each channel involved. This determination of the ideal posting frequency and timing will come from a review of your analytics data.
Additional workflow components to consider include brainstorming new content, communication processes, content approval steps, and the content ratio (frequency of different types of content).
Step 7: Choose the right platforms
When hosting your content calendar and distributing content, choose a platform that offers the right features to meet your workflow needs.
For instance, some tools offer integration with a wider variety of apps, like Slack and Google Calendar. These integrations can help boost collaboration and efficiency within your team.
Hosting tools available to your team include:
These content calendar tools make it easier to take your digital marketing campaigns to the next level. If you opt for EditFlow (a WordPress plugin), for example, you’ll likely benefit from its simplicity. In addition, the platform is available free of charge.
Meanwhile, Oktopost comes with helpful content scheduling features and integrates with popular marketing tools such as Salesforce and HubSpot. It also provides access to advanced reports to help you determine the effectiveness of your content and social media marketing campaigns.
Step 8: Monitor performance and trends
Successful content marketing campaigns require regular performance reviews and trend analyses, so put in place good metrics and a reliable monitoring process. From this assessment, plan for ongoing optimization of your calendar for better results. Depending on your findings, you may need to switch or experiment with new types of content. For instance, if your audience is less receptive to text, you may want to try podcasts or webinars.
Examples of metrics for tracking the performance of your content strategy include:
- Overall engagement
- Brand awareness
- Lead generation capacity
- Changes in search engine rankings
- Page views by location
- Page title bounce rates (visitors leaving a page without reading further)
- Conversion rates
Step 9: Publish
You’ve taken critical steps to prepare for the distribution of your content and monitor your progress, so now it’s time to start publishing content. Depending on the number of posts and channels involved, you may need to rely on a content calendar with a scheduling function. Managing the feeds this way can eliminate some of the manual work.
Content calendar must-haves
A well-composed content calendar incorporates various items to help your team be organized and efficient. These must-haves include:
- Social networking platform
- Publishing date
- Title
- Content-type
- Main topic
- Status update
- URL
Social networking platform
This content calendar feature allows your team to list key details about your social media content plan. These details include social channels, posting frequency, and the type of post.
Once you identify channels used by your target audience you’ll find it easier to determine the right pieces of content to publish so that you attract their attention. Social media platforms like Instagram and Pinterest are ideal for publishing images and videos. At the same time, Facebook hosts a broad mix of surveys, images, articles, and videos.
Publishing your content on multiple channels can benefit your overall social media strategy or marketing efforts. Doing so widens your reach, boosting the effectiveness of your social media strategy.
Publishing date
Without a target publishing date, it’s easy to forget key content marketing events. Establishing this target helps you post social content in tandem with your audience’s online activities. Timing can make a difference in social media marketing campaigns. Articulating this firm date makes it easier to determine if a particular task is on track to hit target completion or needs some special attention.
A practical way to plan your content more effectively is to highlight key events throughout the year and publish content around those dates. Examples of key events might include Black Friday, holidays, and product launches.
Title
A meaningful title is a key element of a content calendar because it helps you distinguish one post from another. Drafting the title also allows you to evaluate its suitability before publishing.
Brainstorm creative titles around specific keywords, making it easier to show up highly ranked in searches based on different queries. Consider conducting thorough keyword research to come up with the best titles based on your target audience.
Content-type
A good content calendar should also allow you or your team to use tags or colors to label content according to its type. That way, if you need to publish a certain number of content pieces in a month, you can use tags to find pieces that are ready to be published. You can also use category tags to help you see which content you can easily put together.
Main topic
An important aspect of your calendar is the main topic, which should have a dedicated tab. Consider listing it as a content pillar. This focus will motivate the team to determine a theme and niche for a particular content campaign.
Having the main topic section of your content calendar can also help draw links between multiple subtopics (clusters), allowing your team to keep track of which content pieces belong where.
Status update
Content or social media calendar should incorporate a status update line item to inform your team members about the status of each specific task.
The status update indicates whether a task is unstarted, in progress, or complete, allowing team members to make informed decisions about the workflow and their contribution. Manual or system highlights of the status update and other line items using different colors add clarity. Color-coding makes it easier to distinguish between various elements of the content calendar, enhancing overall content management.
URL
A URL is a key component of your content calendar that shouldn’t be taken for granted. This element allows you to share relevant links to your website, including text or visual elements. Your calendar should also incorporate a UTM parameter (a string of tracking code) to help track the performance of your posts.
Content calendar best practices and recommendations
Make the most of your content calendar by embracing important best practices. Leading content creators:
Post frequently
Posting new content frequently is a good way to keep your target audience engaged. The number of posts you schedule will depend on various factors, though, such as your target audience’s content needs or consumption trends.
A well-chosen routine allows each post to attain maximum organic reach before publishing the next post. In doing so, you avoid bombarding your audience with too much content in a short period.
Consider evergreen content
Evergreen content should also play an important role in your marketing strategy. This type of content remains relevant to readers over months or years because it doesn’t contain time-sensitive information, allowing you to maximize your organic reach for longer periods. An evergreen approach makes it easier to build a comprehensive collection of high-quality content that continues to drive traffic to specific landing pages for many years.
Depending on your industry, you may need to take a hybrid approach to your content strategy by publishing both seasonal and evergreen content. The latter typically attracts an ever-increasing number of backlinks, boosting the visibility of your posts on search engines. As a result, your content generates a constant flow of leads.
Use templates
A content calendar template can help eliminate inefficiencies, saving you time and energy. Without a template, your team may grapple with confusion about timelines, content goals, and roles.
Every team member fully understands the process, content rules, publishing schedule, types of content, deadlines, content objectives, and personal task responsibilities. As you might expect, templates help simplify even the most complex content strategies. They also typically come with drag-and-drop functionality.
Some free content calendar templates include:
- CoSchedule: CoSchedule offers three different types of content calendar templates, including an email marketing calendar template, a content calendar template, and a social media content calendar. But because the templates are pretty simple, CoSchedule might be best for businesses focusing on blog content.
- HubSpot: You may have used HubSpot for other marketing tasks, but it also offers a free social media content calendar template. With it, you get specific tabs related to scheduling, monthly planning, a content repository, and tabs for specific social media account updates.
- Airtable: Airtable’s content calendar template comes with features like built-in alerts and customization email notifications, multiple calendar views, a way to invite relevant approvers, and the ability to publish straight from the calendar.
Set up a content library
When preparing content, your team is likely to benefit from a content library, which gives all team members access to all content in one place. Consider using storage platforms such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and Microsoft OneDrive.
Alternatively, content files can be stored on your internal network. Platforms like Hootsuite provide access to library features with integrated calendar functionality for your convenience.
Make the most out of your content strategy
To make the most of your content marketing strategy, you need someone who knows what they’re doing. That’s where engaging experienced content marketers via Upwork can help. They’ll be able to develop a content calendar that works for your team and come up with high-quality content that keeps your target audience’s attention.
