The Ultimate Guide To Planning a Successful Content Calendar

Be honest: what does your content calendar look like? Is it color coordinated with content pillars or is it sparse and filled with irrelevant information? Content calendars are a valuable tool for digital marketing that helps you stay organized, coordinate your content with trends, and engage and grow your audience. But keeping up with what content to post on various platforms can be overwhelming. 

Fortunately for you, we’ve compiled The Ultimate Guide to Planning a Successful Content Calendar. This guide will provide you with everything you need to plan, track and manage your content – so that you deliver the right content at the right time. 

1. Define your goals

First stop: what is the purpose of your content calendar? Is the content meant to produce new leads, direct your audience to your website, or simply appeal to or inspire your audience? The set goals have a substantial effect on to whom, where and how often you publish content. It is therefore important that your team has a clear understanding of your goals prior to and during the planning process.

Pushing out content without a clear purpose will only waste resources, time, and energy, so be sure to have a plan of why you’re creating content. 

 2. Create a template for the calendar

Now that we have our goal for our content, we can move on to the next step: creating a template. While there is a myriad of content calendar programs available, it is essential to select one that can be easily integrated into your team’s workflow. In other words: keep it simple. Whatever system is most easily adaptable to your team’s needs is probably the most effective. 

Here’s a list of the most common content calendar tools:

• monday.com
• HubSpot
• Sendible
• Trello
• Hootsuite
• CoSchedule
• Google Calendar
• Loomly
• Asana

All these programs have different features and various functionalities that work better for different work environments, so it’s up to you. Some key features you should consider or keep in mind when selecting a content calendar platform:

• The channel in which the content will be published
• The topic
• The type of content
• The date and time for publishing
• The person in charge
• Follow-through: has the content been published according to schedule?

3. Add content pillars

Adding content pillars will help keep your calendar organized. If you need help understanding what content pillars are, check out our other blog post on it here.

Whatever content pillars you decide to go with, make sure they’re specific enough so that your topics can fall neatly into the categories. For example, for our content pillars, we stick to 6 different areas: client work, services, quick value, lead magnet, testimonial, and blog. So each element of our content fits directly into one of the content pillars. This makes it much easier to plan what we’re going to post. 

4. Recycle Evergreen content

Your evergreen content is key to turning out successful content posts. Remember to circulate your evergreen content occasionally, that way your loyal followers won’t get tired of seeing the same thing repeated too frequently, but your new followers will see your successful content that will be very valuable to them.

This can look like scheduling a blog post about organizing your pantry shelves. Everyone would benefit from this content, but obviously not on a weekly basis. Find the sweet spot in the calendar where it can be circulated to meet the needs of your new followers without seeming repetitive.

5. Establish posting frequency

How often should you post? Well, that depends. Different platforms require different posting frequency. We recommend posting 3-4 times per week on Instagram, twice per week on Facebook and Linkedin, and about once a day on Twitter. For TikTok, the more the better: post at least 3 times per day.

However, the increase in key performance metrics such as clicks and high quality engagements (comments and shares) is fundamentally due to whether a piece of content adds value to the reader. So focus more on quality over quantity. Whatever you decide your posting frequency is, make sure that it is consistent. Consistency is key. 

6. Assess strategy and adjust as necessary 

Once you have your content calendar strategy established and running, allow a few weeks to pass before you assess. You need time to build up to give you a clear picture of your full strategy in motion. Once a few weeks have passed, look at your analytics.

Your analytics will tell the truth about how well your strategy is working. What content is performing well? What is not? What times of the day should you be posting?

How frequently should you post? How is your engagement rate growing? Assessing your analytics is an ongoing process- you will need to check and record it at least once a week to ensure you’re hitting your KPIs. 

Content calendars are a great way to stay on top of content and to plan ahead. Benefits of creating a calendar regularly include the ability to plan content you need before you need it, so that you don’t have to rush and write new articles at the last minute. Also, it is certain that if you always have your calendar ready, you’ll never be stuck looking for ideas!

If you define your goals, create a template, add content pillars, recycle evergreen content, establish a posting frequency, and assess your strategy on a weekly basis, you can develop your content calendar to be a successful marketing tool.