How to Create a Content Calendar

If you’re starting out small in content marketing, you may wonder how to create a content calendar. For that matter, you may wonder why you even need a content calendar.

I’m going to answer both of these questions. Then I’ll provide you with a downloadable calendar that will help you schedule your work and maintain focus.

But before we discuss how to create a content calendar, let’s talk about why you need one.

Why You Need a Content Calendar

If you’re a solo practitioner, you might think you can just keep your plan in your head. If you’re leading a small team, you might think you don’t need much infrastructure either. Email and a Slack channel are probably all that’s needed.

Yet the more you learn about a content calendar, the more its benefits seem to grow. A calendar:

• Is an excellent organizational tool.
• Provides a quick reference to your content plan.
• Keeps all your deliverables in plain view.
• Helps your team communicate, keeping members aligned and accountable.
• Provides a prompt for further planning.
• Provides an inventory of content assets.

This brief list of benefits might already be enough to convince you of the need for a content calendar. But if you’re also looking for social proof, consider this fact: 77 percent of the best marketers—referred to as foxes in this Curata post—use a content calendar. And who doesn’t want to be a fox?

Building Our Content Calendar

Before I describe how to create a content calendar, I’d like to review the planning tools we developed in previous chapters. These tools will serve as the building blocks of our content calendar.

While a calendar is essentially a scheduling tool, I also like to incorporate my planning information directly into it. That is, I talk about the how and why of a piece, as well as the when. This information helps solo practitioners and teams maintain their focus on the original purpose as they develop their content.

Aligning Funnel Stages with Objectives and Metrics

You might recall from an earlier chapter, Setting Goals, Objectives, and Metrics, that we began our content strategy with a simple table that aligned funnel stages with objectives and metrics. For convenience, I’ll reproduce that table here:

Adding Content Types

Next, in Optimizing Content for Your Audience, we developed three tables for planning your content.

The first table provided a means to align your content to the stages of your marketing funnel. It also suggested content types that were suitable for particular stages of the funnel. It looked like this:

Addressing Audience Needs

The second table extended the first to consider audience’s needs—the thoughts, feelings, and concerns you have to address to make your offering persuasive. It looked like this:

Adding Audience Personas

The third table extended the second to consider three audience personas—those with beginning, intermediate, and advanced knowledge of your subject matter. It looked like this:

Adding Keywords

If you were doing keyword research while you read How to Do Keyword Research, this would be a good time to add those keywords. Let’s do it now.

Finalizing Our Content Calendar

Our table is a powerful tool for content planning. First, it provides a convenient place to write all the decisions we make about content—the audiences we will serve, and the metrics we will use to measure the effect of our work.

Second, it keeps all this information in plain view. That helps prevent what I call “content drift,” which is the natural human tendency to slowly veer off course.

But there’s one more thing we have to do—add columns for the information we need for scheduling and accountability. This information will vary for each organization. In this example, however, I’ll add four columns on the left-hand side:

• Publication date
• Channel (website, social media network, etc.)
• Writer
• Title

There you have it—a content calendar that will help you schedule content production, align your team, and keep your entire content marketing effort on track.

Download the Calendar

If you like this calendar, why not download it?

Click the button below to download the calendar as an Excel spreadsheet. Then use it as is or customize it.

Add separate worksheets for each product or service you offer. Add a column for keyword planning. Convert it to a Google sheet and share it with your team. Use your imagination—the possibilities are endless.

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