Today I want to talk about a tool that has made my life and clients’ lives so much easier. I simply could not do my job without a content calendar. In this blog post we’ll talk about what a content calendar is, why you need one, what elements make up a content calendar, examples of content ideas, and what tools to use to build your content calendar. 

What is a content calendar?

A content calendar is a critical piece of any communications plan. Think of it as a unique guide that helps you determine what content you will create, when you will share it, and on what platform(s) you’ll share it on. 

Why do I need a content calendar? 

A content calendar streamlines the content creating and sharing process for you and your team, saving a ton of time, energy, and stress. In addition, since it allows you to see the big picture of your communications plan, it helps to ensure that your content is consistent in brand and messaging as well as in frequency. 

Overall, it will make your marketing and communications materials much stronger. 

And as an added bonus, you’ll be asking yourself “What should I post today?” way less often. 

What elements make up a content calendar?

The framework of your content calendar should have, at a minimum, the following elements:

• The date you plan to publish or send

• Relevant calendar item (more on this below)

• Overall topic or content pillar

• Specific content idea

• The platform the content will be shared on (such as e-mail, blog, Instagram feed, Instagram story, Twitter)

• Status (such as in draft, needs review, scheduled, published)

After that, you can get into even more detail if you would like and if applicable:

• Depending on the platform, you can get more specific and draft the social media caption(s) (it’s useful to see them all at once since they are often different for each platform!), the email subject line, the email preview text, etc.

• The audience, if it differs by platform (for example, if you’re running an ad or sending out a marketing email) 

• Hashtags you plan to use

• Associated link (this is useful to have handy for link in bio on Instagram!)

• Other accounts to tag (this is useful for Instagram, when you can tag someone in a photo in addition to mentioning them in the caption)

• Associated visual (such as a graphic or image. I like to drop the image in my content calendar just so I can visualize it all together, even if I will grab it from elsewhere in my files to upload into the final communication. You can also include the link in your content calendar to where it’s saved in your cloud.)

What do you mean by relevant calendar item?

This element is the spark of inspiration for the rest of your content calendar. By relevant calendar item, I mean anything happening on the calendar that is at all related to your business or organization and could be used as inspiration for content. These are a combination of events that are specific to you, such as a fundraiser or founding anniversary, and something external, such as an awareness month or a national holiday.

Remember, just because it’s on your content calendar doesn’t mean you need to create content about it, but it’s better to have too many options than too few! You definitely want multiple calendar items for each month of the year so that you are not scrambling for content ideas. 

These items will be different for every business, so I’ll provide some sample calendar items that these example organizations or businesses may want to include in their content calendar. 

Example 1: Nonprofit with a mission of eliminating food insecurity

• Annual fundraiser date

• Weekly on Monday, delivery day at the food pantry

• Weekly on Tuesday, food pantry is open for drop-ins

• Thanksgiving 

• Giving Tuesday 

Example 2: Book store

• Gift-giving holidays

• February, Black History Month

• February 14, Valentine’s Day

• March 2, Read Across America Day

• March, Women’s History Month

How does all of this help me create content?

Let’s take another look at the above examples, but with specific content ideas included:

Example 1: Nonprofit with a mission of eliminating food insecurity

• Annual fundraiser: this provides many days of content, such as:

  • Save the date

  • Tickets are on sale

  • Spread out the announcement of speakers, guests of honor, entertainment, sponsors, etc.

  • Photos from previous years

  • Behind-the-scenes preparation

  • Day-of-event content

  • Post-event thank you and recap

• Every Monday, delivery day at the food pantry:

  • Photos or videos of fresh food being delivered 

  • Volunteer or vendor highlight

• Every Tuesday, food pantry is open for drop-ins:

  • Details including when, where, who, what, both in advance and on the day of

  • Recap of the day

• Thanksgiving:

  • This tends to be a time of year many people are thinking about fighting hunger, feeding others, volunteering at food pantries, etc., so is a great opportunity to share more about your mission, how people can get involved, or how people can receive help.

• Giving Tuesday:

  • and several other days leading up to it, gearing your audience up to give!

Example 2: Book store

• Gift-giving holidays: a time to promote your books and other products for customers to give as gifts to their friends and family. 

• February, Black History Month: this is a great time to promote Black authors.

• February 14, Valentine’s Day: the store may not want to do anything special for this day, but it’s useful to have all holidays on the calendar as a reminder so that it doesn’t pass you by without at least considering the content opportunities!

• March 2, Read Across America Day:

  • Favorite books for kids

  • Staff favorites

  • Pictures of customers reading your books (create a hashtag or have them tag you so you can reshare! User-generated content is so helpful.)

• March, Women’s History Month: this is a great time to promote female authors

See how much inspiration we got from just a handful of events? Imagine a full year of that! 

To fill out these calendar items, I recommend starting internally by looking at your own calendar. Do you have upcoming specials or promotions planned? Will you be planning any events? Will you be hiring? Do you have any press planned?

Next, look externally. Start with major holidays, which are the easiest. Then, do some research on awareness days and months, or national day of [fill in the blank], as I’m sure you’ll find some that are related to your work. Remember, it’s better to have them on your content calendar just in case!

How often should I look at my content calendar and how far in advance should I plan?

I recommend creating the framework of your calendar for 6 months to a year out. This will mean a lot of blank spaces, but the relevant calendar items along with the associated date or month must be in place.

From there, I recommend looking at your content calendar every month to plan out your upcoming content (meaning, filling in the rest of those blanks!). This way you start to see all the pieces coming together, how spread out the content will be, how you’ll implement the same topic across different platforms, and what you need to do in order to create and schedule the content, whether it’s draft the copy, take new photos, or design an email.

By working on your content in chunks, you will also streamline your energy, rather than piecemealing it together in between other projects, resulting in stronger and more cohesive content.

Any time a relevant new calendar event comes up (a new event planned, an article being written about you, a holiday you didn’t know about), make sure to add it to your content calendar framework so you can work on content ideas for it when it’s time to plan.

Let’s put it all together

Now that we have all the elements we need, let’s look at a fuller example of one day in your content calendar.

• The date you plan to publish or send: March 2

• Relevant calendar item: Read Across America Day

• Overall topic or content pillar: Behind the scenes

• Specific content idea: Ask staff to share their favorite books as kids and today as adults

• The platform the content will be shared on: On Instagram and in a marketing email

• Status: In draft, needs remaining photos and answers from staff

With the framework of a content calendar in place, you will be well aware in advance that this day is coming up, so you should have plenty of time to plan accordingly by asking the staff to submit their answers, taking photos if needed or asking staff to submit their own, writing and drafting the content, and ideally even scheduling it! So, when March 2 rolls around, you can focus on selling books.

What tool should I use to track my content calendar?

So, where do you even build this thing? The short answer is, whatever works for you. I recommend electronic over paper, as you will be moving things around often or needing to make room for new ideas. Plus, you most likely want other team members to be able to easily review or edit. Here are a couple of suggestions:

Spreadsheet

Whether you use Google Sheets or an Excel spreadsheet, this may be the most basic option for building and tracking your content calendar, but it does the trick and works perfectly well! 

In this case I would create a column for each of the above elements and any additional information that I want to capture. Each individual row would reflect one date, topic, and platform combination. For any plans to share content on an additional platform on the same day, whether about the same topics or a different one, I would add a row just underneath, to keep it separate. Play around with what works for you so that you can easily and clearly see all the details of your content.

A quick Google search will provide some spreadsheet templates to start you off, if you need more inspiration! 

Project Management Tool

A project management tool such as Asana, Trello, or Monday.com provide much more functionality. This works especially well if you are working with others on your communications strategy.

With tools like these ones, you can assign other people to tasks, add deadlines, add dependencies, upload files, and drag and drop tasks and calendar items around in your content calendar. Most of these have paid features, but you may be able to get away with a free basic plan, or at least test the platform out with a free trial. 

Bonus! Visual Planning

While this only applies to planning out your Instagram posts, the social media scheduling tool Later allows you to preview your grid of published and scheduled posts. This is so useful if you’re going for a certain aesthetic on your feed. You may notice two posts don’t look quite right next to or above each other, so you can either make those design edits and upload the new graphic, or you can quickly and easily drag the posts around (assuming they are not time sensitive!) to other dates in order to achieve the look you want. 

Need help with your content calendar?

A basic calendar is part of my audit service, and I also offer a full customized content calendar as a separate service.