A content calendar, also called an editorial calendar, is a customized schedule of when and where you plan to publish your upcoming content. Content calendars comprise upcoming projects, status updates, promotional activities, collabs, and updates to existing content.

Let’s see what a content calendar is and why you should use one:

Uses of content calendar

Content marketing is crucial to your marketing strategy and the ability of your brand to attract and convert your potential customers. But content marketing is a complex discipline. It has many avenues, central to which is planning, developing, and publishing your content through a variety of channels. A content calendar helps your content marketing team, often a melting pot of creative roles from writers to editors to strategists to digital designers, understand the modus operandi of each project.
And, one of the best tools you can use to keep it all organized is a content calendar. Using a content calendar could help bring punctuality and efficiency to your operations, improve the quality of your content—culminating in increased leads and profits. Continue reading this article to understand better!

A Smoother Collaboration

How do you currently capture your ideas? Are they scribbled down in notebooks? Or, do you have seemingly endless meetings related to the status of projects? Your organization could soon be in a disorganized state. To help you come out of this quagmire, a content calendar delivers a more comprehensive approach to your content strategy. It helps you spot and fill content gaps and also provides more oversight, enabling you to meet content deadlines!

Better Brainstorming

When your content is arranged by topics and your team has a clear view of what’s in the pipeline, it can often have them pondering about new ideas. Brainstorming can help boost your content calendar are essential to producing captivating content. You can create schedules within your content calendar for creating new ideas. You can mark an “idea” space that gives chance to anyone involved in the process to put ideas into a singular repository. They can then be discussed and rolled out as new projects.

Right Content on the Right Time

Using a content calendar helps you plan your projects well in advance, keeping in mind important dates and events that you can leverage to reach out to your audience and timely and accurate content. This will help in increasing your popularity and building a brand name.

Consistency in Content

A content calendar can become your favorite tool if you are aiming for consistency in your content. Regularly publishing new content will help maintain your visibility among your audience and retain your followers. Very often, the audience crosses over to other similar content creators when they are done patiently waiting for your irregular content. They will probably stick around if they know the schedule of your uploads.

Create a Blend

Finding a unique content blend requires time and planning, both could be under your control if you utilize your content calendar. Having your content schedule done in a neat, visual manner allows you to examine the types of content you are regularly putting out. If you’re only posting to increase revenue, rather than regularly engaging with your followers in a friendly, candid way, you’ll watch your interaction plummet. Instead, attain and hold the attention of social followers by offering a balanced mix of different types of content. It will seem more genuine and engrossing. Your mix will need edits along the way to ascertain what works best for your brand, so don’t shy away from getting creative.

Ways to Create a Content Calendar

Before creating a content calendar, it’s helpful to assess an audit of your current social media and website content status. This helps you see the grey spots and come up with better strategies. Here few steps for creating your content calendar:

• Demographics of your audience

Once you have the audit of your current efforts, you have to try and understand the demographic composition of your followers on each platform. It’s important as you can tailor to target better.

• Frequency of your content

The audit will give you a clear idea of your content’s frequency. You can decide if you should increase or decrease your posting schedule.

• What your Audience likes more!

Your content audit will show the genre and variety of content you have been posting. Matching this with your engagement stats will tell you what content gets the most engagement.

• Finally, Shape your content calendar.

In Conclusion

Time always flew fast but when everything’s digital it is flying faster. But, we need to do more than we were ever tasked with. With so much going on at a given time, it is only plausible to miss deadlines, especially as content creators. In such situations, content calendars come to our rescue and even help us unlock new possibilities which may otherwise be overlooked.