Plan, schedule, and organize content and marketing projects by using our content calendar template.
If you’ve been creating content for long enough, you already know the benefits of using a content calendar for your blogs and social media posts.
With a calendar view, you can plan what content you’ll be creating in advance, which will give you more time to research, draft and refine your content with more details.
You can also meet deadlines and hold yourself accountable to finish the work and get a clear direction on where to head for the week.
In this post, you will learn how to organize and manage your content calendar effectively. Plus, we’ll give you the exact template you can use for this.
How To Use Your Editorial Content Calendar
Know Your Content Objectives
Find out what types of content you’re currently creating and where you will publish them.
Whether you want to increase your traffic, increase engagement, grow leads, or grow sales from your organic channels - identifying your goals will help you get clear on what types of content to create.
Brainstorm Content Ideas
Come up with ideas that you want to write about and that will resonate with your audience. Make sure you have plenty of content on your pipeline to create valuable content on a consistent schedule.
Your entire marketing team can have access to this spreadsheet, especially if they’re familiar with your brand, your business goals, and your target audience personas.
Some places to find ideas for your content:
- Go through support tickets
- Read questions in the comments of old blog posts
- Go to industry forums, surveys, blog posts written in other sites
- Read questions asked by participants after a webinar or an event
Decide On Your Publishing Schedule
You’ll want to determine how often to publish your content. The frequency depends on the resources you can dedicate to content marketing. Coschedule has published links to different sources on how often to publish content on different platforms. You can look into data if you aren’t sure yet.
Understand Your Target Persona
Who are you creating content for? Keep your audience on top of your mind while creating content. Everyone on your team should understand your audience. A great place to find info about your audience is through target persona research.
Doing Keyword Research
The main goal of keyword research is to figure out what people are searching for on Google and other search engines.. We recommend using KW Finder to discover new keywords. You can also look into what keywords your competitors are ranking for to get more ideas. If you haven’t done your keyword research yet, you can check out our Keyword Research Template and learn how to do it in the right way.
Setting Up Your Team
Get clear on who will be responsible for what. If you’re the only one working on a project, you can outline the different steps of the writing process.
The content creation process can look like this:
- Coming up with an idea
- Content planning
- Doing keyword research
- Setting a publishing date/deadline
- Writing an outline
- Writing/editing
- Graphic design
- Optimize your content
- Publish the content on social media and WordPress website
After you have a solid idea of what your content is about and when you will be publishing it, you can now put it on your calendar workflow.
Decide On Your Distribution Channels
After you’ve created the content, you have to publish or promote your new content on different social media platforms. It’s important to track where you are sharing your social media content.
Setting Up Your Editorial Content Calendar
There are many tools such as Asana, ClickUp, Hootsuite, Trello that allow you to make and organize your content calendar in different formats. Alternatively, you can start with a simple Excel/Google Sheets.
Your content calendar should include the following details:
URLs: Add your URLs for future content audits and backlinks.
Keywords: If you want your writer to include specific keywords, tell them upfront. It’s easier to write content that sounds natural when you know what to include (instead of trying to add it later). You can also include your list of secondary, accessory, and LSI keywords.
A written description: A short description to give direction on what you expect to see in the article. You can include an outline or subheadings.
A rough title: Add a title to give a general idea of what the content will be about.
Author: The person responsible for writing the content.
Target Personas: Enter here the target persona you will have in mind when creating this piece of content.
Status of the content: To let the team members know the progress of your content. The status can be to-do, pending, or published.
Publication date: Include the date to publish your content. For example, maybe you’ve planned to always release a podcast episode every Friday or post on social media every two days. Publishing dates will help to make sure you don’t miss your schedule or important dates.
Due date: Set this at least two days earlier than the Publish Date. Doing this will give you flexibility in case any of the elements are still a Work in Progress (e.g: the article is ready, but you are waiting on the design team to finish up the graphics).
Call to action: Include your call to action to ensure all your content is driving you closer towards your marketing goals.
Having a content calendar in place helps your entire team save time. From the SEO to the content team, everyone will have a clear idea of what should be published next.
Following the steps and tips described in this post will bring a lot more organization into your life so that you can focus on really creating world-class content strategy.
If you are ready to create a clear, organized plan to create content, then check out our content calendar template below!
