You may have heard that content is king, but it only reigns supreme if it’s aligned with your goals and initiatives, and provides the information your target market needs. In other words, if you create content simply for the sake of it – and with no intention – it won’t help you. And one way to ensure you don’t do this is to create a content calendar.
A content calendar is your roadmap or guide. Its sole purpose is to help you produce and publish content that works for you while educating, informing or entertaining your target audience. It helps keep you and your team focused, on the same page and consistent with your content.
Before we dive any deeper, let’s back up and briefly discuss what you need before embarking on a content calendar journey.
A content calendar is not the same thing as a content plan, but a content calendar is part of your overall content plan. The content plan provides the overarching direction of your content, while your content calendar spells out specifically what types of content you will produce.
To create your content plan, you need to collect information about your target audience, like:
Who your audience is
What their challenges are
What it means to overcome them
Why they buy the product or solution you provide
You also need to do some self-reflection about your own business, like:
What your superpower is
Where your audience sees your content
What seasonality exists in your business
What goals or initiatives you’re focused on
What your competition is doing with their content
Why your customers buy from you and not the competition
The answers to these questions will help form the foundation of your content plan for the next six or 12 months. With it, you can determine what content you’ll create, for whom, when or how frequently you will produce it, and what you want it to do for you.
You may ask if you collect that information for your content plan, why do you need to also create a content calendar? The reasons are plenty.
As you create your content calendar, you are taking the information you gleaned from your content plan and mapping out what exactly you’ll create over a set period of time. And as you do this, you become organized with your content.
The content calendar spells out everything about every content asset you’re creating including who’s responsible for creating it, the deadline it’s due, the title, keywords, distribution channel and more. And of course, you also have the topic idea at the ready so you no longer stress because you don’t know what to write about.
A content calendar also ensures your content stays aligned with your goals and your customers’ needs. That’s because you’re taking that information from your content plan and applying it to your content calendar. This helps ensure you create content with intention.
In addition, a content calendar helps you stay consistent with your content, which is critical. Your audience can’t get to know, like and trust you if they only see your content from time to time. By mapping out what and when you’re publishing content, you are more likely to stick with it.
And finally, a content calendar also honors or commemorates any seasonality to your business as well as holidays, which can be good fodder for content topics. It also helps with collaboration with other teams while keeping everyone on the content team aligned about what’s happening.
Now that you understand what information you need for your content calendar, and why you need one, let’s discuss how to create it.
You can create your content calendar a number of ways. The key is to find the one that works best for you. A content calendar that’s difficult to use or inaccessible is just as bad as not having one.
You can use an Excel spreadsheet, calendar app, Word document, Trello board or other software or application. Don’t get too caught up in the design of your calendar but rather in the execution of it.
Once you determine the platform, determine what length of calendar you want to create. I caution against going any longer than three months because it’s difficult to plan beyond that. So, plan for a week, month or quarter.
Why?
When you plan for a shorter period of time, you have more control over the content you create. You ensure the content really is aligned with your audience and goals, and it also gives you the opportunity to better see what content is resonating and what isn’t. Then you can tweak and adjust as needed.
Which brings up a good point: your content calendar is not written in stone. It’s a guide that’s fluid and can be amended or updated as need be. It’s a starting point meant to help you succeed with your content.
Don’t bite off more than you can chew, and ensure the content you’re plugging into your calendar is timely, relevant and of value. With everything you create, you want to ask yourself these two questions regardless of what you’re creating:
What do I want this to do for me/my business?
What’s in it for my audience?
With the answers to those two questions in mind, you are ready to create your content calendar. Here’s the information to include:
Format – is this a blog, social media post, case study, email, etc.?
Objective – why are you publishing it? What does it do for your business?
Business Tie-in – what business goal is it aligned with?
Topic – what is it about?
Potential title
Keywords
Call to action – what do you want the reader to do next?
Distribution – where will it be distributed?
Deadlines – for each round of drafts
Owner – who owns it in the organization
Notes – anything else to note about it
Gathering this information will keep you focused and on track with your content.
As you go through the exercise and discover you have questions, please reach out. And if you’d like a free one-month content calendar template, please click here.