Creating a content calendar adds strategy and growth to your business. Last post, we covered why it’s important to create one.
But a content calendar functions as a living, breathing document. It grows your content strategy (and business) through improving organization and relevance.
Managing one is a never-ending process.
It can help you stay on track with your tasks if you’re working by yourself. Or it can support your team’s ability to collaborate and keep track of assignments.
Calendars keep track of everything’s status. For example, a writer finishes an article and moves it to ‘ready-for-editing.’ Or an editor completes the review and moves it to ‘needs graphic.’
Everyone can keep track of interview schedules, editorial reviews and publish due dates. They can see the big picture of what the strategy is trying to achieve.
Keeping track of articles is vital – especially when you have several phases to keep track of. This way nothing gets lost in the cracks, and nobody is scrambling at the last second.
Using your content calendar goes hand-in-hand with creating and formulating ideas. It is a great tool to supplement your meeting to discuss, strategize and brainstorm.
When planning, themes are a great way to package content. Calendars track themes and series, and how your message fits together. They make it easy to group together in-depth topics with a chain of posts.
Also, it showcases what each team member needs to contribute at which phase. It has the order of each task and who will do them.
Basically, it serves as a to-do list.
It can help track which customer profile you’re trying to reach with each piece of content. Calendars provide a great place to remind the target audience for each article.
They can also include a section on where you post each piece of content. Maybe you have one specific article for LinkedIn. You would note to only publish it to LinkedIn.
Creating a content calendar is all about finding the best way of organizing that works for you.
Also, we’ve created a template for you to use to keep track of your day-to-day content strategy. Just be sure to mold it into whatever strategy works best for you and your organization.
You can download the template here: Content Calendar Template