Saying that an excellent content calendar is the cornerstone of well-organized content production is an understatement. Creating a good calendar involves more than just using the right tools. What should you consider when creating a good content calendar?

After developing a well-founded content marketing strategy, a content calendar is one of the most tangible tools to get your content production on track. In most cases, the strategy dictates that a company will distribute content across various paid and owned media. To prepare this well with inspiration and maintain a cadence that generates a recurring audience, a content calendar is truly essential. However, since companies are not editorial offices, creating such a calendar is not an obvious task. Help from an external content provider is recommended in this case to logically combine the following elements with the outlined strategy.

1. Publication cadence

A digital content marketing strategy not only determines what content you will distribute to which target audience across different channels but also how frequently you want to do this as a company. The content calendar is based on this cadence. How many blog posts do you want to publish each week? Does this include a Twitter or Facebook update each time, and how much additional content do you launch daily through these media? In a content calendar, incorporating rhythms will result in fixed slots.

2. Important dates

You can then align these fixed slots with the production and distribution of information around important (sector) events. When creating a content calendar, it’s best to immediately include all important and relevant dates. These are both the holidays and vacation days of your company (and your target audience!) and significant events. An annual conference, an in-house seminar, the launch of a new product, etc. Ensure these moments remain visually prominent and build the content production around them.

3. Big ideas

Once frequency and key dates have found their way into the calendar, you can plan the stack of ideas that result from brainstorms or other inspiration into the content calendar. Do not do this randomly. Generally, there are two important factors to keep in mind when spreading and scheduling good ideas. The first is variation in labor intensity. For example, creating an on-location online video followed by editing and publishing is quite time-intensive. Ensure sufficient time spread to maintain quality. Secondly, it is important to spread the content according to the target audiences. Provide something for everyone within a fixed period (a month, for instance). Catering to one buyer persona intensively for a month and neglecting another entirely (and vice versa the following month) is obviously not a good plan. Therefore, set up the content calendar according to the needs of all segments in your audience.

4. All channels

Regularly serving all buyer personas also means taking into account the channels through which you reach them in the calendar. Ideally, these channels are already linked and integrated from the start, as the content calendar is built on their publication rhythms, but ensure they also stand out visually. Indicate whether it’s paid, owned, or earned media, as this can help with later calculations of the efficiency per media type.

5. Who does what

Content management typically involves multiple people. An internal manager, an external strategist, a production company, a journalist, etc. Indicate on the content calendar which tasks everyone is expected to do and at what time. Writing, editing, finding illustrations, posting, promoting, following up, etc. Tasks are distributed clearly, and no tasks are left unassigned.

Plugging in the content calendar

In its rawest form, you can create a content calendar in a spreadsheet, but you can also use more specialized software if desired. Think of software like ContentRockr. This content management software offers an extensive content calendar combined with many handy features.