A content calendar, also known as an editorial calendar, is an essential tool for anyone who needs to manage their content for their website, funnel, marketing campaigns, social media, blogging, and more.
Bloggers often use this process to pre-plan topics and articles for publishing. On visually based platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, you can have a spread of photos for publication in the future; if you’re feeling so inclined, you might even have the caption prepared with each image. Even podcasters can use a content calendar to keep track of their audio topics for the week.
In essence, a content calendar is a set of scheduled posts ready for publication. They can often be fully constructed in advance and saved as drafts. Depending on your platform, you can even set them to automatically post on a certain date and during your peak hours for social media posts!
The content calendar is also a great way to keep track and communicate theme topics with team members.
It does not need to be complicated. It can be as simple as a spreadsheet with topics category breakdowns.
How you maintain and organize your content calendar is up to you or your team lead, and it’s fully dependent upon the way your company operates.
The amount of time you plan ahead is up to you. It’s generally recommended that you have at least a few months queued up. This way, if something happens, you’ll still have a steady stream of content until you can refocus.
The primary goal of a content calendar is to ensure that you’re always putting out content. Algorithms favor pages and accounts that are active. By having posts ready to publish, you’ll never find yourself without any content to push out. This consistency ensures not only your algorithmic standing in peoples’ feeds but also the overall engagement your company gets.
Another benefit is planning the marketing campaign engagement that drives the desired action you want the content reader to take. By having a content calendar, the team, including designers can plan for what’s coming up to be posted and edit or rearrange as appropriately.
