Content Calendar: The Right Way to Curate [Free Template]

As a content marketer, if you are not using a content marketing calendar, you miss out on a lot of benefits. Its absence can be the cause of an inefficient execution, staggered marketing strategy, and missing out on targets big way. Need a savior in this situation? Get a content marketing calendar.

In this blog, we will discuss the benefits of a content calendar and how you can create one for your marketing needs. Get ready to see your marketing strategy perform up to its full potential.

What Is A Content Marketing Calendar?

First, let’s talk about the basics. A content marketing calendar is a tool that adds efficiency to your planning, organizing, and execution of any marketing strategy. It is a calendar-based plan that maps pieces of content you plan to publish. It is useful in giving a visual of how your content plan will reach the market out over time. In simple words, a content marketing calendar is a guide that tells you how to lay your content in order.

Content marketing, as you might already be aware, goes beyond blogs and social media posts. From landing pages to videos, content marketing covers various formats. A content calendar can do the job of managing and tracking all these formats from one place. Your content calendar or schedule can be simple or as complicated, depending on your business needs and resource availability at any moment.

Benefits of Using Content Marketing Calendar

There are several benefits of using the content marketing calendar, making it a necessity for digital marketers. The following are some of the top benefits of using a content calendar:

1. Save time by keeping process organized

Your social media, blogs, landing pages, videos, and other content marketing errands take a lot of effort and attention. Every day you will need to keep working and prepare a final draft for each of them before publishing. So, it takes a lot of time. How do you know which one to work on first and which can wait? Now there could be some revisions suggested by different stakeholders, adding more to the chaos.

A marketing calendar helps to plan, avoid multitasking, batch your work, and prioritize requirements. Using the calendar, you can easily prepare and schedule your posts beforehand, automate some processes, assign deadlines to stakeholders, and organize your content machine.

2. Adds consistency

Ask any marketing expert and one piece of advice that you are going to hear from everyone is – keep your content reach customers consistently. Posting content consistently is the key to gather more followers and increase your engagement. Whether it is getting subscribers on YouTube or followers on Instagram, you must always keep posting good content. Lack of content will not retain your audience to your website. Compelling and engaging content helps your organic reach to expand over time.

3. Reduce the chances of error

When planning your posts, you are safeguarding yourself from a lot of errors and mistakes by allotting the adequate time to various sub-processes. Copy-editing, proofreading, or even vetting it, is a lot easier if you can find out the errors earlier. A content marketing calendar with the team member’s approval feature will help you with this.

4. Target relevant events

Reaching out to your audience during important world events or occasions is very important. A social media calendar will remind you of all the worldwide events relevant to your audience. So, prepare the right content for the right global event. Your team can avoid a lot of stressful situations by planning the events much earlier.

5. Improve content quality

Making higher quality content should be your goal if you want to retain your customers and attract new ones. Lack of creativity, errors in content, or irrelevant posts can irritate your audience. Thus, creating a negative impact on the entire customer base. The calendar helps you save time, create relevant posts, schedule your posts, and do many other things. All of them contribute to higher quality content.

Are these reasons convincing enough for you to start with the build a content calendar? Let’s discuss how to create a content marketing calendar.

How To Make a Content Marketing Calendar?

Building a content calendar is easier than curating content. Here are some quick steps to help you with that:

1. Review your content strategy

First, you must review and check the entirety of your content strategy. Find out which platforms and content you want to use the most. Also, analyze how effective your content has been on each of the platforms. That will give you a fine idea of what you should focus on more. Always focus on particular platforms where your audience is the most active and engaging.

2. Know your audience

Understanding your audience is crucial for the success of your content marketing strategy. People use different platforms for separate purposes. For instance, a user may use LinkedIn for more professional reasons, while Snapchat or Instagram is flocked by people who are primarily in the younger generation.

3. Consider your resources

Self-analysis is important to figure out the potential of your content generation and publication. Depending on your team size and their available bandwidth, you need to chart out the number of content pieces that you can curate and take them on your website or other channels. Meanwhile, do not ignore the buffer time that’s needed for revisions, monitoring, onboarding, and leaving off of some workforce.

4. Plan the content

The real work starts here. Once you are well aware of the target audience, your content strengths, and the platform to use, you must start planning your content. Use a diverse range of social media content like videos, blog posts, tutorials, Instagram stories, etc. Consult with your team to find out which content pieces will intrigue a particular set of audience.

Content Calendar Template

When you are ready to start with your content plan, you use the content marketing calendar template and fill it with your requirements. Add the relevant content format against the date you want to publish it on the internet. Then, schedule your content to be uploaded at different times of the day or week. When the calendar is complete with the relevant details and information, you can share it with your team members for further discussion and review about changes.

This is how you will be able to create an efficient and working content marketing calendar for your business website right away!

Content Marketing Calendar: The Right Way to Do It