How to Build a Content Calendar
For any person or organization with some sort of content included in their marketing strategy, a content calendar is a key tool that’s often overlooked as either unnecessary or too complicated. However, a content calendar can not only provide value to decisions regarding marketing and business strategies, but it can also optimize your content creating process, saving time and delays.
So what is a content calendar exactly? What can it do for you? What does it look like? And how can you begin building one? Read more to find out!
What is a content calendar?
A content calendar is a schedule of contents to be posted on various channels, with important details such as promotion strategy, channels, timing, ownership, content making process/schedule, and any other essential information for the content to be created and shared on time.
What does it look like?
A content calendar varies widely in form. There are services and products out there that offer convenient and easy-to-use content calendars, ready for immediate use. However, if you’re on a tight budget or you’d like the flexibility to customize to your needs, content calendars are not difficult to make on an excel sheet or Google Sheets.
For example, Apher Consulting uses Google Sheets for our content calendar, which looks like the below:
The flexibility of a DIY content calendar is hard to ignore. If we decide as a company that we want to expand our content into another channel, or hire a partner to help with our content strategy, this calendar has the ability to become a content making process map or a collaboration tool.
As such, there are pros and cons to hiring a content calendar service vs. creating your own. Obviously, the latter will include more initial work, but it may prove to be the better option if you plan to use content increasingly and consistently throughout your career and business. Alternatively, you can buy a product that is set up for you as is, with perhaps less room for customization. Or, perhaps best of all, you can hire a service (like us!) to create a flexible, customizable content calendar for you!
What can a content calendar do for you?
The purpose of a content calendar can vary depending on who’s building and using it. For an organization, it can be a project management tool. For a freelancer specializing in content creation, it can be their entire day’s schedule. For a small business, it can be a simple, all-in-one schedule for social media and blog posts.
In addition, a content calendar can:
Keep an effective schedule: One of the most important factors of a content strategy is to post consistently. Planning ahead and putting down deadlines will keep you accountable and your content platforms lively!
Analyze data efficiently: What type of content gets the best engagement? Which ones get the worst? Which posts performed well and should be expanded on? Which ones shouldn’t be repeated? There are also other types of data, such as best time to post, that you can gain from using a content calendar.
Identify existing gaps: Are there opportunities you haven’t identified yet? Are there inefficiencies in how content is being created? Are they types of content you haven’t tried that looks like it would complement and accentuate existing content?
How can you start building one?
As stated above, there are several ways to build a content calendar. If you’d like to build one from scratch, begin by identifying what your goals and objectives are. Is it just to keep track of what you’re posting, or do you want more out of it, such as data for future decisions or a content making process and schedule?
Then, decide where this content calendar will live. Make sure it’s accessible and easily editable by everyone who will be involved in the content creating and sharing processes.
Finally, look forward to what your future content strategy might look like. This should also play a role in how your content calendar is first built, to ensure that it is scalable and customizable. Your content calendar can be as simple as it needs to be at first, but you wouldn’t want to start from scratch when an upgrade is due.
With these key decisions, your content calendar will be well-shaped to guide your content strategy not only immediately but even as your business and areas of focus grow. If you’d like additional consulting regarding content and strategy around it, contact us at apherconsulting@gmail.com.
