What Is a Content Marketing Calendar: 5 Ways to Use It

What is a content marketing calendar? A content marketing calendar is not just a tool to keep your marketing efforts organized, but it also helps keep you on track towards achieving your goals. Let’s dive more into what is a content marketing calendar below.

How Do Content Marketers Stay Organized?

Content marketers need to be organized in order to keep up with the demands of their job. A content marketing calendar can help you stay on top of your efforts. Content marketers, like many others, struggle with getting their work organized.

They know what they should be working on but time and other responsibilities often take center stage in their busy lives. Content marketers have a tough job as it is which makes staying organized even more difficult.

An easy way to stay on top of your efforts to create original content for your website is to create a content marketing calendar. A simple spreadsheet or even a word document will work for this purpose.

Content Marketers need organization in several aspects of their jobs, but let’s take a look at one way that it can make your job easier.

What is a Content Marketing Calendar?

A content marketing calendar is a tool that is used by marketers to organize their content. This tool includes both the tasks and the deadlines for publishing content. The power of this tool is that everything can be scheduled in advance and it will tell you exactly what needs to be done each day.

The purpose of a content marketing calendar is to maintain organization throughout the whole process. This tool will help marketers stay focused and prevent them from getting overwhelmed by the many different steps involved in creating, proofreading and editing, publishing, and promoting content.

Being organized before you start (also known as “pre-planning”) reduces confusion over what needs to be done next once your idea has been created or when editors are working on writing drafts for an article. It also allows marketers/editors to focus on one feature at a time rather than juggling multiple posts to add to their blog or website.

Benefits of a Content Marketing Calendar

Planning out your content in advance is the best way to prevent confusion. A content marketing calendar will take away the need for multiple editors to coordinate with each other regarding what needs to be done next in regards to post creation, editing, and publishing. Having this organized can reduce stress over deadlines, due dates, and when certain tasks are completed.

A content marketing calendar is beneficial by saving time as well.

• It helps you manage your time more effectively which means you won’t have much free time wasted on switching between different assignments/tasks
• Without all the clutter, it’s easier to focus on one assignment at a time rather than juggling multiple posts or articles that are due at the same time.
• This tool will help a marketer or editor to be better organized and know exactly what needs to be done each day.

How To Use A Content Marketing Calendar?

A content marketing calendar is pretty simple and easy to use. It’s based on the following steps:

Choose Your Publication Date

Decide when you want your post/content to go live, for example, within one month. Check with your editors first before finalizing this date so that they can plan their schedules accordingly.

Put in All of the Required Tasks into the Calendar

Now you have an individualized task list created for each of your editors (if you have more than one). Give them enough time but not too much time to create their content so that it can be published on the selected date.

Fill in All of Your Post Ideas

Now you have the basic structure of what each will include. You can use this as a base so that when you write them, it’s easier to put together more content for an article because each section has already been planned out. This calendar tool is great for creating continuity within all of your publications/posts.

Create a Running Schedule

Once you have drafted and sent it off to your editors, it’s important to continue following up with them without being overbearing. The goal here is for everything to be completed before its due date.

Test Your Post

As soon as editing is done (if possible), see if there are any errors with the formatting after uploading or reviewing possible spelling mistakes.

Check Web Analytics

After you’ve published your post, it’s important to see how effective the marketing tool has been. Look at web analytics such as Google Analytics and see how many people have looked at your blog/website or if there were any problems with loading time, broken links, etc.

Plan Your Next Content Marketing Calendar

Once you are done promoting this first article, take a look at what went well and what didn’t go so well. This will allow for better planning in the future for all future posts/articles. Since your first content marketing schedule is finished (you should always try to do this), now you can use these templates or create new ones in order to keep track of future posts/content.

The best part is that everything else goes into the content marketing calendar template except for the editor’s name and publication date.

5 Ways to Use Content Marketing Calendar

A content marketing calendar will help organize all of the tasks needed in order to create high-quality material that will surprise and delight company/website visitors. Here are a few ways businesses can use their content marketing calendars

1. Marketing Planner Calendar

This tool is used by marketers to get organized before they start creating blog posts or website updates. With this tool, companies can prioritize what kind of content they want to be created on their site. For example, if they want to focus on topics that are most popular with their target audience, then it’s easy to see which blog posts have been the most read and shared by readers.

2. Content Calendar

This is a special tool for editors who must create different types of content depending on what season it is and what kind of theme will connect well with readers. For example, if you’re running an event in your community, then this tool can be really helpful by letting you know all of the details such as where you will need to advertise/host the event or post blogs about guest speakers for seminars.

3. Social Media Schedule

Since social media accounts are important to companies today from creating brand awareness to staying current with what is happening in the world, a social media calendar can help organize all of the timing for tweets and posts to be released. If you have a large company (with lots of employees), this can be really useful so that you don’t overlap while also making sure that everyone does their job on time.

4. Email Marketing Plan

Sometimes companies create marketing plans that focus more on email marketing campaigns because it’s easy to achieve target goals (such as growing your subscriber list). With an email campaign planner tool, you’ll get four essential benefits from using this tool: increase productivity; increase brand awareness; increase conversion rates and finally reduce costs.

5. Market Research Calendar

It’s important to stay up-to-date with the current trends and preferences of your target audience as well as knowing what is happening in the world that might affect consumers. A market research calendar tool will help you stay on top of everything so that you can create content/material for your site that will not only be relevant but also increase your sales.

Conclusion

Content Marketing is a critical component of any online marketing strategy. This includes creating and publishing content, analyzing its effectiveness, then determining what you need to do next. The Content Calendar template will help with these tasks as well as the other tools mentioned in this blog post which may be helpful for your own business needs!