All you need to know about creating a content calendar (+ free templates)
My first time making a content calendar was a disaster.
I assumed the goal of a calendar was to fill it with ideas, with no regard for our audience’s needs, the brand’s vision, or even industry trends. So, I mindlessly copied ideas from our competitors, sprinkled posts for festivities and holidays, and submitted the draft. Of course, my boss wasn’t pleased and had to create one herself. This incident happened in the first year of my career, and since then, I’ve worked with different content calendars from clients and contributed to the creation of some.
A content calendar can be a game changer for solo bloggers and content teams struggling to stay consistent and organized, but only if it’s done right. Which is why I’ve put together this guide to help you build a content calendar that contributes to content success.
Table of content
Why do you need a content calendar?
Before going further, let’s consider the importance of a content calendar to its users. Here are some of the ways using a content calendar benefits you:
1. Gives content direction
A content calendar acts as a compass. It dictates how you implement content initiatives and provides a big-picture view of your content progress. Thereby ensuring you don’t repeat content ideas or overwhelm your audience by doing too much within a short time.
You’ll also need it when planning content formats, posting schedules, and choosing promotion channels. Otherwise, you’ll struggle to post as often as possible and fail to create content that hits the right metrics or resonates with your audience.
2. Prepares the content team
Having a content calendar allows your team to stay one step ahead. It informs them of their tasks, which enables them to beat deadlines, have enough room to revise their work, test content ideas before going full-scale on them, and even document results for the future. Or else, they’ll be left scrambling to figure out what to post daily and fail to see any tangible results from their theory efforts.
3. Makes collaboration easier
In most organizations, content creation is a team effort requiring input from other parties, such as the graphics designer and product marketer. A content calendar facilitates this all-hands-on-deck approach by enabling efficient brainstorming, task delegation, and work review from a centralized location.
With the right content calendar software, everyone sees how their roles contribute to the final result, can work independently with the goal in mind, and can send in contributions when due. You’ll be able to tag a team member to contribute or share task updates without going back and forth on messaging platforms.
4. Leads to better output
A content calendar serves as a productivity tool. It ensures every stakeholder dedicates enough effort, time, and resources to every piece of content. This, in turn, generates quality work and consistent output, which are part of the recipe for content success.
Moreover, the traffic, sales, and brand awareness you desire lie on the other side of consistency, which a content calendar enforces.
How to create a content calendar that works
Creating a content calendar is not a walk in the park for first-timers. You may find yourself obsessing over every step and how long it may take you, just like our community member at the Room did.
As the responses showed, making a content calendar depends on different factors. However, your focus should be on the quality of ideas and how well the calendar supports the team’s workflow.
To create an effective content calendar, here’s an easy-to-follow six-step approach.
1. Decide on the type of calendar
Start by deciding the type of calendar you need. Although social media content calendars are more common, blog calendars, event calendars, and even newsletter calendars are also a thing. However, you don’t need to stretch yourself thin by creating individual calendars for each channel, especially if you’re in a small team. You can even make a general calendar covering all platforms.
For instance, at Smarketers Hub, we use a general calendar to plan social media, blog posts, our monthly newsletter, and even schedules for our Slack community content. This way, we can create copy and visuals for our social media channels ahead of time to promote our blog posts.
Smarketers Hub content calendar
Thanks to our calendar, we can plan for different content types on the same day to increase traffic and engage with our audience on different channels.
Also, you don’t need to be active on all channels. Creating quality content on a few channels is better than showing up everywhere just to be seen, which could make you burn out and not get the results you desire.
2. Create a timeline
Next, decide on the content timeframe for the calendar. That is, if you should make a monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, or yearly calendar. Your resources, the strength of your content team, and the content ideas should be the guiding factors at this stage.
If there’s a set timeframe from previous calendars, work with that. Otherwise, get approval from your manager beforehand or create a solid case to change the calendar timeline.
3. Do a content audit
You analyze content across different platforms and evaluate their performance during a content audit. This gives you insights into:
What your audience enjoys.
What channels to double down or slow down on.
What content formats work for your brand on various channels.
How well your existing content has contributed to the business goals.
You can then use these insights to identify content gaps, gain inspiration for fresh ideas, and develop a plan for scheduling content.
4. Choose a content calendar tool
When you’ve gathered enough ideas and have a fair idea of how the content calendar should look, it's time to select the tool or content platform for hosting your calendar. This is an important step that can make or mar your calendar creation.
When choosing a content calendar software, consider the following:
The software’s cost.
The software’s ease of use.
Your team’s size (particularly the number of stakeholders involved in creating content).
Most people opt for a content management platform like Coschedule or a project management tool with inbuilt templates for content calendars like Notion. However, you can also settle for an Excel or Google sheet template, which does the job.
5. Fill in the calendar
Now that you’ve assembled your ideas and selected your tool, it’s time for the exciting part. Fill in the calendar by assigning content formats, topics, and post titles to their respective posting days, channels, and owners.
A standard content calendar features:
Date
Title column
Post status
Posting frequency
Distribution channel
Short description of posts
Content pillars and themes
Links to live posts and creative assets
Team member in charge of every task
Resources that will aid content creation
PS: You don’t have to fill out every section, so use discretion when you get to this step.
Every entry must match a business goal: increased brand awareness, audience engagement, or conversion. You can also mix the content types to keep things interesting. For instance, today, you can share a carousel on LinkedIn and make a poll for the audience to engage with the next day.
The content ideas should be based on current trends or themes (from your industry or based on a marketing strategy), topics the audience likes, and events relevant to your brand. This will also ensure you make fewer salesy posts about your product and service offerings.
6. Review and launch
Once you’ve created the content calendar, allow your manager to review it and give their stamp of approval. Then, you can launch it and grant the necessary stakeholders, such as freelancers, designers, and social media managers, access to the calendar. You can take it a step further by automating posts to go up when you like using content management software like WordPress or a scheduling tool like Buffer, especially if you want to be strict about posting times for more views and engagement.
Best practices for creating a content calendar
A content calendar can help you achieve your goals only if done right. Therefore, you need to adopt the following practices when creating a content calendar:
1. Align your calendar with a content strategy
Creating content without a strategy is like building a house without a foundation. Your ideas will need more structure or become one-hit wonders without sustainable results. That's why you’ll need a content strategy to bring cohesion to your ideas.
It provides themes from which your ideas and the content types will stem. It will also ensure your calendar covers the marketing goal for a selected period.
2. Work with the right tool
Your content calendar software can make or mar the calendar experience by slowing down collaboration and not providing a big-picture view. Hence, you should opt for a tool that:
Is easy to use.
Allows you to integrate other tools.
Lets you keep track of content ideas across different platforms.
Has a progress tracker that can highlight when a project is overdue or completed.
3. Have a content bank
A content bank is where you store or document ideas as they come in. It may be housed in a Google Drive folder, a notion workspace, or a project management software. Your notes app is also an excellent place to document ideas if you’re a solo-creator.
Although you’ll only implement some ideas in the bank, it’s great to encourage team members to document and update their ideas periodically. It gives you something tangible to fall back on when gathering items for the content calendar.
4. Stay flexible
Even though a content calendar keeps everyone on schedule, no rule says you must follow it to the letter. Be open to change, which can occur when your manager doesn’t approve a piece of content early, you run into roadblocks with the legal team, or any other issue that comes up (technical, algorithm changes, and more).
There should also be wiggle room for jumping on trends, communicating updates about products and services to your audience, and even engaging in banter with followers, which many brands embrace. Your content ideas in the calendar are not cast in stone, so be ready to dump an idea or pivot at will.
5. Make accommodations for creative assets
Your brilliant ideas need good visuals to convey a message and engage your audience. So, you’ll need to involve the design and product team in the early stages so they can provide input and create the brand assets beforehand.
Free content calendar templates
Working with templates gives you a headstart, allowing you to focus on brainstorming ideas and other non-technical aspects of building a content calendar. Some examples of content calendar templates you can try out include:
1. Smarketers Hub free content calendar template
Smarketers Hub is an online community of African marketers that offers resources and a network of professionals to help its members upskill and advance in their careers. Part of our resources is a free content calendar template, which makes content collaboration and creation easier.
Here’s everything you get in the template:
Notion and Google Sheet templates that you can customize.
Different views for different channels so that you can plan for various content types.
Sections for collaborating with team members by tagging them and highlighting the help you need.
Video tutorial walking you through how to use the template.
A recurring interval feature, which is super useful if you have a particular type of post that repeats often.
Customizable views based on your brand’s content goals.
Here’s what the Notion version of our free content calendar template looks like:
And here’s what the Google sheet version of our content calendar template looks like:
2. Jotform’s social media content calendar template
Jotform is a tool for building forms and collecting data online. The platform also features a range of free products and templates, including this easy-to-use social media calendar template.
3. Notion’s blog content calendar template
Notion is a popular project management software with many use cases and templates that help streamline workflow. Hence, many creators have used it to create free and paid templates for different marketing tasks, including this blog content calendar template by Rachel Meyer.
Set your team up for success with a content calendar
Ultimately, the goal of a content calendar should be to provide your teammates with enough visibility into upcoming initiatives and work progress over time. Thanks to the structure a template brings to the process, you’ll be one step closer to creating a calendar your team loves and can work with.
This is where the Smarketers Hub free content calendar template comes in. It offers a short video tutorial, multiple calendar views, and a progress tracker to keep all stakeholders accountable and efficient. You can visit our resources page to check it out.
How to create a content calendar FAQs
How do I create a simple content calendar?
You can create a simple content calendar using an Excel worksheet or notion template by:
Figuring out the type of calendar you need.
Creating a timeline for the content.
Doing a content audit.
Filling in the calendar with ideas in line with a content strategy.
What are the two main types of content calendars?
Two main types of content calendars are social media calendars and blog content calendars.
What is the best content calendar to use?
The best content calendar to use is the Smarketers Hub free content calendar template. It has calendar views that accommodate multiple channels and even a recurring content schedule feature for repeat posts.
What tool is commonly used to create content calendars?
Notion and Google Sheets are common productivity tools pros and beginners use to create content calendars.
If you’ve got more marketing-related issues you’re struggling to figure out, join us on Slack to interact, network, and upskill with marketers from different levels.
