Managing a Content Calendar

Managing all of your content can feel overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. Planning out your content calendar in advance, as well as scheduling what you can, can take a heavy portion of the burden off your shoulders. The goal of a content calendar is to make managing content less overwhelming. Let’s dive into some tips on how to put one together.

What is a Content Calendar

A content calendar is a schedule outlining when and where to publish upcoming content. It is also considered an editorial calendar or a marketing calendar. You can be as detailed as you want to be, usually including the content platform, purpose, schedule, who is responsible, and the deadline.

Why Have a Content Calendar?

A content calendar helps you stay organized, encourages consistency in your content, and lets you plan strategically. With a content calendar, you can space content out, assign deadlines, focus it on keywords or certain calls-to-action, as well as plan different format types per platform.

• Consistency: You’ll be able to establish a routine for content creation and a regular posting cadence.
• Organization: You can use a content calendar to organize content by theme or topic, where it will be published, how it will appear, and maintain a consistent presence with your audience.
• Alignment: By planning a content calendar, you can make sure everyone on the team has a direction to follow and align with your overall content strategy.
• Collaboration: A calendar helps you communicate content plans with distribution partners and collaborators.

Setting Up Your Content Calendar

Everyone has different preferences on what will work for their content planning. Part of setting up a content calendar will depend on the content manager’s preferences. Some rely on spreadsheets, some on calendars. After you decide on your format (we use Asana’s calendar feature), you’ll want to include a few key elements:

• Dates
• Content Purpose
• Content Theme
• Channels
• Target Audience
• Goals/KPIs

Additionally, you may want to be able to assign deadlines, word counts, etc. It will depend on your content needs to meet your target audiences.

Planning Your Content

Once you have the format down, brainstorm ideas. It’s a great team activity. Brainstorm what kind of blogs or social media posts might resonate most with your target audience.

Some brands will tie into seasonal or timely events. For example, Black Friday sales and holiday shopping. You can also begin building a content theme or pillar, making sure to establish enough content for the pillar to become a leader in that theme.

Creating and Scheduling Content

Once you plan out content, it is time to write, design, and schedule it. For some, scheduling a time to draft out content works best for saving time. Based on your content needs, you may need to write blogs, design social graphics or other visuals, as well as editing content to refresh old material.

Once you have the content written, edited, and designed, you can save yourself some stress by going ahead and scheduling the content to publish on the planned platforms.

It can also be beneficial to have some evergreen content that can be repurposed. It can be easy to reintroduce your older, timeless articles and blog posts by adding links in new content pieces. Timeless content can save you at times when there are delays in your schedule. Make sure to add a place to keep timeless content ideas for your content calendar.

Managing and Tracking Your Calendar

It is important to regularly review and update your content calendar. It’s not set in stone. Things come up and mess up that schedule at times. You’ll also want to monitor the performance metrics of your content. Maybe a content series has fallen flat. It is best to review what is wrong to change the series or update the content to perform better.

Content marketing requires you to be agile and adjust your schedule as needed.

And while things may not always go as planned, it is still important to plan ahead to boost your consistency, organization and strategy. Let’s get started on your content planning!

Looking to become a content marketer? Check out WVU’s fully online M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications and be sure to take the Content Marketing Elective!

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