Content Calendar

In the ever-churning content marketing machine, consistency is king. To maintain a steady flow of high-quality content and avoid last-minute scrambles, you need a well-organised plan. This is where the concept of a content calendar comes in.

What is a Content Calendar?

A content calendar is a strategic roadmap that outlines your content creation and publishing schedule. It serves as a centralised hub, visually representing your upcoming content pieces, their target platforms, and planned publishing dates.

You'd be amazed just how many leading brands operate without a content calendar. In the short term, this certainly allows them to be more flexible and reactive, but over time it leaves brands with a confusing, mixed message, which is difficult for potential customers to register with.

What's Included in a Content Calendar

  1. Content topic: The main theme or subject of the content piece. The content topic is what should constantly be referred back to through any supporting collateral.

  2. Content type: This identifies what type of content you're creating, whether it be a blog post, infographic, video, social media post, email newsletter, or any other format you plan to use.

  3. Publishing date: Noting this down as part of your calendar allows you to plan accompanying marketing collateral, and also work backwards to ensure everything is ready for a timely release.

  4. Author: Whose in charge of which projects? For example, you would assign you blog post to a strategist, then the writer, then the thumbnail designer, then the website developer.

  5. Status: Adding this lets you track the progress of the content piece, allowing you to keep an eye on where everything is up to, and the bottlenecks that may arise.

Why You Should Use a Content Calendar

There are several advantages to incorporating a content calendar into your content marketing strategy:

Organisation and streamlining

It keeps your content creation process organised, ensuring a steady flow of content and preventing last-minute content crunches.

A content calendar allows you to plan out content months, sometimes years in advance, allowing you to set lofty long-term goals, and lay out the short-term objectives that will help you get there.

Improved consistency

A content calendar helps you maintain a consistent publishing schedule, keeping your audience engaged and anticipating new content.

If you know that the content calendar contains one instagram post every Friday, and a thought leadership article every Tuesday, you are much more likely to stick to those deadlines tha saying 'we need to do a few Instagrams and Linkedin posts this month'.

Editorial collaboration

Having a robust and detailed content calendar in place facilitates collaboration between content creators, editors, and marketers, ensuring everyone is on the same page regarding content plans and deadlines.

There's nothing worse in any role that feeling like work is getting passed to you and you have no say or input on the outcome. A content calendar offers a much more visual approach to your strategy, allowing team members to chime in with timely advice and queries.

Content diversity

A content calendar helps you plan a variety of content formats to cater to different audience preferences and marketing goals.

Sometimes it can be hard to link up the type on content you are producing across multiple channels, but by combining your social media content calendar, your blog post content calendar, and other content output, you'll find it much easier to create content that truly resonates across all platforms.

SEO benefits

By planning ahead and including relevant keywords, a content calendar can aid in search engine optimisation (SEO) efforts.

SEO has changed significantly in the last ten years, and to truly start ranking well on Google and other search engines, you need to be very particular about the content you produce.

You can't just write one killer article on the subject of pet food to rank highly any more. Instead, you need a detailed content plan that allows you to show Google you are an expert on the concept of pet food, and then execute it accordingly.

Building Your Content Calendar

Creating a content calendar is a straightforward process. Here's the approach that I like to take with my clients:

Find a content calendar template

I personally love tools like Canva and Miro, which offer a very visual style of content calendar for you and your team. However, others prefer more data driven options, such as Google Sheets.

Define your content goals

Align your content calendar with your overall marketing goals. Are you aiming to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive website traffic, or establish yourself as a thought leader? These questions will dictate the content you create in the short term and for your long-term goals.

Brainstorm content ideas

Once you've got your goals in place, it's time to develop a list of potential content topics that resonate with your audience. Tools like Ahrefs are excellent for discovering what your audience is searching online, plus what your competitors are talking about, but not everyone can afford their steep prices.

For those people, I recommend searching your ideal content pillars in Google, heading to the 'People Always Ask' section, and take those questions for inspiration.

Choose your content formats

Decide on the different content formats you'll use (e.g., blog posts, infographics, videos) to cater to diverse learning styles and preferences. When creating long-form content, try to think how that might be able to be cut down to suit shorter form content formats.

For example, podcast content can easily be cut into several TikTok or Instagram videos.

Schedule your content

Plan your publishing schedule, ensuring a consistent flow of content across various platforms. Keeping to schedule is great for productivity, but it's also a positive sign for Google, and makes it easy for your audience to react with.