How to Create a Content Marketing Calendar: Best Tips and Templates
Published on: March 21, 2023
Updated on: November 13, 2024
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- Content Marketing
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One question that every marketer asks is how to constantly create interesting, informative, relevant, and engaging content for potential customers.
The ongoing creation of fresh relevant content can occasionally feel like a daunting endeavor, even when you have creative writers and tech-savvy professionals. The answer you're looking for is a content calendar.
Companies are frequently driven to produce and distribute more information, but a lack of time and resources frequently is a roadblock. A content calendar can be used as a cheat sheet. You can schedule content in advance and keep up a smooth flow of high-quality content. A content calendar is a fantastic approach to provide your audience with cohesion in messaging and high-quality material, whether you're preparing a week, a month, or a year in advance.
The creation of excellent content calendars could be as simple as using Excel. Moreover, it is much better? To get you started, there are several readily usable templates accessible.
In this article, we are going to discuss the content calendar, the benefits of content calendars, tips for creating a content marketing calendar, and some amazing templates to use right away.
What Is Content Calendar?
In essence, content calendars are time management tools that divide your workload into daily or weekly segments. You can stay organized and centered on generating quality content with a content calendar.
The planning of campaigns across several channels, such as blogs, articles, email marketing, social media post, and social networks, is done by marketing teams using their content calendars. It is their right hand when it comes to organizing and producing a consistent stream of top-notch content.
Tips to Create a Content Marketing Calendar
Set Goals
When you begin creating your calendar, decide exactly what your company hopes to achieve with its content. All of your objectives should be listed, along with an order of preference. Every firm will have a different take on this.
Understand what is the main goal of your content, does it mean to:
- Generate fresh leads
- Point viewers toward a webpage
- Increase the number of visitors
- Brand awareness
The targets you establish have a big impact on who, where, and how frequently you create new content. Your staff must be aware of your objectives both before/during the planning stage.
Setting goals should be the first step in marketing content calendar creation. Each project or engagement on the calendar must clearly understand the specific goals of the team working on it.
Choose the Right Tools
When it's time to develop and distribute the calendar, you'll need to decide on a tool or template. Remember to share the calendar with all pertinent stakeholders.
You only need to figure out which solution suits you the most out of the numerous available choices. Choose a calendar that enables a drag-and-drop option to make rescheduling simpler. If you're organizing content with the entire organization, the calendar needs to feature a share button.
Your content needs to have the following:
- The subject
- Topic and type of content
- Time and date of publication
- People concerned with the topic
- Follow-through
- Where to distribute content on a channel
The content tools and templates are tremendously helpful for tracking conversations and documents since you can access all of your planned activities in one location.
Add Content and Requirements
After you have the right framework in place, you need to fill up your editorial calendar with all the upcoming tasks, published tasks, to-do lists, etc. The goal is to ensure that your rhythm is perfectly aligned with your content strategy.
If you are creating long-form blogs or articles, or ebooks, it might take you twice a week to publish the content or if you are creating social media posts you might publish it multiple times a day.
The objective is to have a thorough picture of everything that you and your team need and would be working on, so you should include:
- All formats like blogs, newsletters, social media posts, etc.
- Both new and old content.
You could find it helpful to color-code items in your calendar if you publish a variety of content types to make it simpler for readers to skim.
Plan Ahead
Decide how often you'll publish the content and how far in advance you want to compose your articles as you plan up your postings. Your capacity may be determined and your content development process will be optimized if you are aware of your frequency.
It is also the perfect moment to expand your resource library if you haven't previously.
You need to ask yourself:
- Do you need to routinely publish new content?
- Where do you get your inspiration from?
- What do you need to get on with the content?
Apart from creating content, you need to have graphics in hand. So, if you work with a design team, setting up your posting periodicity might assist you to make requests in advance rather than bombarding them with work. Nevertheless, building an asset library might make it simpler to find photos and videos if you use stock footage.
Best Content Marketing Calendar Templates in 2023
Semrush
The content marketing platform from Semrush provides a ton of content management capabilities with an SEO focus. With an emphasis on search engine optimization, you can schedule and plan your content using the content marketing tool.
Marketers prefer Semrush who are concerned with SEO performance and don't mind posting in several tools.
HubSpot
The free Social Media Content Calendar from HubSpot is quite adaptable. Just insert the month and year and change the template to reflect your brand. You can put your various forms of content here, along with an intriguing bit of information. Having a database of this kind handy might also aid in preparing content.
You will benefit from planning your content since it will make it easier to organize various marketing activities, from developing a brand strategy to determining what to monitor and evaluate.
Trello
Trello gives you two options for seeing your board as a calendar: a portal/dashboard for plans starting at Standard and up, and a power-up for free plans. Both alternatives use a calendar to display the tasks within the app. You can easily check the description, to-do list, and persons accountable for a task, click on it.
If someone is searching for a budget-friendly content calendar with collaborative features for content planning, then Trello's calendar solutions may be useful. Prices for monthly plans range from nothing to $17.50.
CoSchedule
Whether you are a start-up or a highly established firm looking for the ideal content marketing calendar, CoSchedule is the best. It is ideal for WordPress blogs as well. This intuitive marketing content calendar is easy to use with easy drag-and-drop features.
CoSchedule offers seamless integration with WordPress, Instagram, Twitter, MailChimp, and many more.
HootSuite
Hootsuite is a free and downloadable Google spreadsheet that comes with five tabs to manage your content. These include strategy, instructions, weekly view, monthly view, and content library.
It is a simple-to-use and intuitive template that is perfect for professionals who have experience using Excel. Plus, this is a free tool, so SMBs can manage their content without hampering the budget for paid tools.
Backlinko
Backlinko is a free content calendar that can be accessed through Google sheets or Microsoft Excel. Companies trying to start a brand new content strategy or plan blogging can make the most out of this template.
It includes a content list, workflow, and monthly templates that are however basic. The content workflow sheet offers a comprehensive view and stepwise assembly line to help you manage the deadlines.
Airtable
Airtable can be seamlessly integrated with Slack and Email. This automation provides you with regular updates on your content and posts. In addition, this content marketing calendar template can help multiple data fields without complex calculations and formulas.
You can get a complete view of your projects (upcoming and ongoing) in a grid, calendar, or kanban form. Companies with large teams can make the most out of this marketing template.
Conclusion
The best way to maximize your content marketing strategy is to prepare, plan your pieces, and monitor what gets results. You may distribute high-quality pieces on pertinent and significant occasions with the aid of a content calendar and evergreen content curation. The following phase is to get viral and attract visitors.If you are planning to set up a content marketing calendar, then our experts at Growth Natives can assist you from start to finish. Reach out to us at info@growthnatives.com.
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Frequently Asked Questions
A content marketing calendar is important because it helps organize and plan content creation, ensuring consistency, timely publication, and alignment with marketing goals. It also aids in managing resources and collaborating effectively with teams.
Templates simplify setting up a content calendar by providing a structured format, saving time, ensuring uniformity, improving team collaboration, and helping to streamline the tracking of content deadlines and key marketing events.
You can track content performance through a calendar by aligning it with analytics tools, setting KPIs, and monitoring metrics like engagement, traffic, and conversion rates for each piece of content, helping assess effectiveness and optimize future content.
Common mistakes include overloading the calendar, not accounting for flexibility, ignoring analytics data, lacking clear goals, failing to collaborate with stakeholders, and needing to update the calendar regularly to reflect changes or insights.
A content calendar improves ROI by ensuring consistent, strategic content delivery, enabling better resource allocation, optimizing content timing, aligning with key marketing campaigns, and using data to refine content strategies. This leads to higher engagement and conversions.
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