Coming up with content is an integral part of a digital marketer’s work, but it may be highly challenging. First, any company may invest heavily in creating the content that never finds its audience, addresses no specific need, replicates, is irrelevant to the business, or appears in random periods. A content calendar is a must for any modern marketer because it serves as a powerful tool that helps build regularity in publishing. The marketers can plan their content better, scheduling the creation of blog posts, social media content, newsletters, video content, promotions, and other types of content marketing. In addition, a content calendar helps build the content that will matter to the audience, address a particular need, and help meet specific objectives. A content calendar should not be viewed as a simple list of content topics and corresponding dates but should be seen as a strategy that aligns the content with the target audience, marketing campaigns, business goals, and metrics.
What Is a Monthly Content Calendar?
A monthly content calendar is a document or an electronic tool that helps a company organize all the material they are going to create and post during a specific period. For example, it might have blog posts, social media content, video scripts, podcast ideas, email marketing content, infographics, case studies, webinars, ads material, and many other types of media. The calendar usually contains the column with a topic or a brief description of the content, its type, and the date when a piece should be posted. Additionally, information about what marketing channels to use, who the target audience is, what content category it falls under, who is assigned to work on the task, the current status of the content piece, a call-to-action section, the target keyword, and a publishing goal helps plan the creation and publishing. Small companies might design their content calendars in Google Sheets or Excel or Word while bigger teams might want to use a project-management tool or a social media scheduler with publishing approval. The role of a content calendar is not to fill all cells with content but rather help an organization put out quality material without stressing their marketing team too much.
Start With Your Marketing Goals
The first step in developing a monthly content calendar is defining what you want to achieve with your content. Articles should not be created randomly because the business needs something to publish. Each month, the publication has concrete marketing goals that must be related to a particular objective of the company. For instance, the business may set an objective to drive more organic traffic to the website, generate leads, promote a new service, raise awareness about the brand, grow the email list, educate the audience, and boost sales. It is essential to prioritize these goals and select one primary and two or three secondary objectives. Having multiple goals will make the calendar unclear and confusing. It is also necessary to
ensure the goals are measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely-bound. For instance, if the marketing team wants to increase traffic to the service pages, they should set aside a specific number of publications that will promote these web pages. Instead of stating that they want to get more traffic, the companies should identify the exact percentage that they want to increase.
The team may plan to grow website traffic by 15% within three months by publishing four search optimized articles and sharing them via email and LinkedIn. The goal will dictate what the company will do in its content calendar. If the marketing team wants to focus on lead generation, the content calendar will involve case studies, downloadable content, comparison articles, webinars, and landing page campaigns. On the other hand, if the marketing team wants to build brand awareness, the content calendar will comprise how-to guides, educational articles and videos, interviews, and shareable content.
Understand Your Target Audience
A company should develop its content marketing strategy based on the target audience. Before choosing the topics that the content calendar will cover, the marketing team should understand who its audience is. The company can start with researching its customers’ questions, requests,
and pain points. The marketers can also look at the frequently asked questions, customer service interactions, website data, blogs, social media comments, reviews, and buying patterns. The company will be able to find relevant topics for the content calendar by looking at the questions its prospects ask before purchasing or when searching for solutions on the company’s blog. The marketing team should also consider what the audience does not know and what they are afraid of. It will also help if the marketer looks at the social media channels where the target audience spends the most time and the type of content they engage with. Some audiences are more likely to respond to long-form articles while others prefer short videos, newsletters, image carousels, and checklists. For instance, a digital marketing agency that targets small businesses will learn about the problems these companies face when running their marketing campaigns. The marketers will realize that their audience is afraid of failing to maximize their budget, lack the know-how to utilize social media strategically, and do not know how to optimize their campaigns. The content topics may include how to market their business on a small budget, how to develop a weekly social media plan, and what digital marketing metrics to track. The audience will be more likely to engage with content that is useful to them.
Select Your Content Pillars
Content pillars are broad topics your brand focuses on. They help you organize your ideas, stay on track, and build brand recognition. Each business can usually have between three and five content pillars. For instance, a digital marketing company may select search engine optimization, social media marketing, email marketing, content strategy, and marketing analytics. Your content pillars should represent your audience’s interests and reflect your expertise or products/services. A content pillar should be broad enough to offer several ideas but specific enough to form a basis for your content. Having chosen your content pillars, you can now allocate your monthly content between them. For instance, you may decide to use 30 percent of your content for SEO education, 25 percent for social media marketing, 20 percent for case studies, 15 percent for services/product promotion, and 10 percent for industry news. This way, you avoid having the same content type every month and ensure that the focus is not
solely on promoting your business. The best content calendars tend to combine educational/nutritious, inspirational, entertaining, community-oriented, and promotional content.
Review Your Existing Content
Before developing a list of content ideas, it is important to go over the content you have already published. A content audit will enable you to learn from your successes and failures and ensure that you do not repeat the same mistakes. Go over your recent content, including blog posts, social media contents, emails, videos, and landing pages. Tick the topics that performed well, drove traffic, engaged your audience, and increased your sales/conversions. On the other hand, you should also highlight the underperforming topics, those with little traffic, irrelevant or out-of-date information, poor headlines, and no clear call-to-action. Do not always blame the topic or angle for a content’s poor performance. Sometimes, the distribution channel, promotion, headline, or value proposition may be to blame. You may consider repurposing your high-performing content for new audiences and formats instead of starting afresh. One blog post, for instance, can be transformed into a LinkedIn carousel, video, email, infographic, podcast episode, and social media posts. Repurposing enables you to add more value to your audience and save time and effort.
Add Important Dates and Campaigns
Now that you understand your goals, audience, content pillars, and existing content, it is time to start populating your calendar with important dates and campaigns. Some of the key events to highlight in a content calendar include product launches, discounts, webinars, conferences, holidays, seasons, company anniversaries, awareness days, and key business deadlines, among others. It is a good idea to begin by adding your key promotions, product launches, and events. This way, you will always have space for important dates and ensure that they are not overlooked. If your company intends to promote a new product or service on the twentieth day of every month, for instance, you may want to develop a series of contents leading up to that day and use the following dates for other purposes. A campaign to promote the product may consist of a teaser post or article, educational blog post, email, product demo, testimonial, reminder post, and a final CTA. The above contents can begin a few days or weeks ahead of the day of launch and should not fill up the whole month. Avoid highlighting every awareness day in your content calendar simply because it is there. Ideally, you should only include a date if it is relevant to your brand, audience, or even the topic. It is also a good idea to leave some room for breaking news, customer feedback, or even industry developments. A content calendar with no space for improvisation may become overwhelming for your team and may not be easily adjusted.
Choose the Right Channels and Formats
Some contents are better published on specific channels, so you need to choose the right channels and formats for your content. For instance, a long-form educational article may only be published on your website, whereas a marketing tip may take the form of a short video or social media post. Your content calendar may contain blog posts, social media posts, case studies, LinkedIn posts, email newsletters, webinars, podcasts, infographics, videos, downloadable guides, testimonials, and advertisements. However, it is important to only pick 2-3 social media channels and stick with them. It may also be a good idea to limit your content formats unless you have enough resources to sustain a wide range of posts. Finally, you should avoid over-posting simply because you can. At this point, you should be able to determine how much content you can consistently create and upload without diluting the quality, relevance, and value of your work. A company, for instance, may decide to publish one blog post, three LinkedIn posts, two Instagram posts, one email newsletter, and one video per week. This is only an example, for different businesses require different volumes and frequencies. As mentioned earlier, the quality, consistency, relevance, and value of your content matter more than the quantity.
Create the Calendar
With the topics, channels, formats, and dates decided, the next step is to build your content calendar. Start by adding the campaigns, promotions, product launches, and events. Fill the rest of the space with evergreen content. A good content calendar should have a publication date, the topic or title of the content, its format, intended channel, target audience, marketing goal, content pillar, responsible person, status, and call to action. You might also include the target keyword, caption, design instructions, approval date/time, publication time, link to the final content, and measurement. For instance, your content calendar may have a blog post titled “Beginner’s SEO Checklist” on the third day of the month, a LinkedIn carousel to promote the article on the fifth day, and an email newsletter about marketing mistakes on the tenth day. A customer testimonial, on the other hand, may be published on the seventeenth day. Status tags are also important, especially if you are working with a team. Some of the tags to consider include idea, brief needed, in progress, draft completed, reviewed, approved, scheduled, published, and needs updating. You can also use colors to make your content calendar more appealing and easy to read. The colors can be used to indicate the content type, such as using one color for blogs, another for emails, and a third for social media.
Balance Your Content
A good monthly content calendar should have a mixture of content types and marketing purposes. One of the easiest ways of balancing your content is by using the marketing funnel as a guide. Top-of-the-funnel content, for instance, is designed to attract new visitors. It can take the form of a beginner’s guide, education-focused blog post, industry news, checklist, or video. Middle-of-the-funnel content nurtures the audience and educates them on potential solutions. It can be in the form of a case study, webinar, product comparison, tutorial, expert interview, or FAQs. Finally, the bottom-of-the-funnel content is aimed at encouraging the audience to make a purchase or fill out a form. It can take the form of a product demo, testimonial, service page, consultation, trial, or special offer. Many businesses tend to make the mistake of only publishing promotional content or failing to include any promotional content at all. The truth is, your audience members want to learn and engage with your brand. Avoid skipping the nutritious/educational content in favor of promotional content and vice versa. You should also
strive to have a balance between evergreen and timely content. The former is evergreen, informative, and always relevant, whereas the latter focuses on current events, trends, holidays, and seasonal demands. Evergreen content is important for the sustainability and consistency of your content marketing, whereas timely content keeps your audience engaged.
Build an Approval Process
A content calendar is only as good as the people involved in it. Ideally, the entire team should understand their roles and the expectations of the content calendar. Most likely, your content will go through several stages before it is published. A simple approval process can begin with a content manager adding the topic and brief, a writer adding the first draft, a subject matter expert reviewing the accuracy of the information, an editor improving the language and structure, a designer adding the design, and a marketing manager approving the content. The content can then be scheduled by the publisher or social media manager. Set realistic deadlines, and always allow enough time for the editing process. If your content is due on the twentieth day of the month, for instance, you may want to ask the writer to submit the first draft by the tenth day. The editing and designing process may take until the thirteenth and fifteenth days, respectively. Finally, you can ask the marketing manager to approve the content by the seventeenth day. Avoid setting up multiple people to be responsible for the same task. Doing so can cause confusion and slow down the whole process.
Measure and Improve Performance
It is important to take time to measure and analyze the performance of your content marketing at the end of every month. Different content types have different success metrics. For instance, blogs can be measured using organic traffic, impressions, ranking, time on page, and conversions. On the other hand, social media posts can be measured using reach, engagement rate, comments, shares, saves, profile visits, and link clicks. Measure your email campaigns using their open and click rates, unsubscribes, and conversions. Finally, videos can be measured using views, watch time, and audience retention. With the right metrics in place, you will be able to determine whether a particular content type is worth investing more time and effort into or not. Avoid comparing individual content successes or failures against one another. Instead, look at the trends and see which content has the potential to perform or underperform. For instance, you might discover that tutorials drive more traffic, case studies generate more leads, video content gets more shares, and email newsletters have higher conversion rates. Use the findings to tweak and optimize your content calendar.
Conclusion
A content calendar is one of the most powerful tools in digital marketing. It enables businesses to plan their content strategically and consistently throughout the year. The process will begin with the establishment of your goals and audience understanding. From there, you can choose your content pillars, review your content, set important dates, choose your channels and formats, populate the calendar, and measure the performance of your content. A successful monthly content calendar should have a mix of content types, be balanced between
nutritious/educational and promotional, highlight key audiences, and leave space for improvisation. It should also have a deadline, responsible person, topic, content, format, channel, marketing goal, and measurement. Above all, it is important to remember that the best content calendars work with the team rather than against it. You do not need to use some fancy tool to develop a content calendar. A simple spreadsheet will suffice as long as it is used consistently and has a realistic scope.
