How to Manage Content Calendar – Step-by-Step Process

You know a calendar is your periodical reminder by which you can be organized, track, and go ahead with your strategic tasks when you’re thinking about scheduling your posts, building strategy, and connecting with your audiences to measure and track results. A content calendar gives you an effective way to grab your audiences with planning and execution.

You can use different types of content calendars and tools to avoid eleventh-hour panic and keep your content updated and engaging. Here’s a discussion about content calendar tools, settings, and key elements with measuring performance. Let’s drive.

What is a Content Calendar?

A content calendar is an appealing strategic tool that helps you to set schedules for crafting content and targeting demographic audiences. A content calendar helps you organize deadlines, select topics, target people, and implement SEO that optimizes your content to meet your target audience’s expectations.

This calendar records and notifies you on when and where to write blogs, publish on social media, email management, and optimize publishing plans, and analyze the outcomes. Your content calendar sets goals, and visuals address your audience’s pain points. This will help you build a consistent brand presence across all channels that are connected to your audience goals.

What Are the Types of Content Calendar?

Considering the tasks and nature of work needs, you can broadly categorize calendars into the following types:

Event Content Calendar: Focusing on the Event calendar— your upcoming scheduling notifications regarding events. The content event calendar gives you a complete view of your marketing plans across different channels, including multiple platforms for blogging, social media publishing, and sending email newsletters within the time frames. For example, You can use Google Calendar to schedule your content.

Dedicated Content Calendar: This calendar focuses on your scheduling for daily/weekly content needs, such as a blog editorial calendar or social media calendar.

• Blog Editorial Content Calendar: This blog editorial calendar gives you details on planning and scheduling blog posts, including details on publishing dates, author names, keywords, and set content outlines.
• Social Media Content Calendar: Another effective social media calendar is designed to manage your social media content across different platforms, including post times, hashtags, and visual components. Also, social media marketing strategy includes setting measurable goals, identifying target audiences, selecting platforms, and considering platform strength.

Marketing Calendar: This calendar provides you with a broader range of content types and channels, including coordinating email campaigns and content marketing, as well as events and product launch notifications.

Campaign Calendar: When you need to focus on tracking activities related to your specific marketing campaigns, likely from content creation to campaign execution and analysis.

The Key Elements of a Content Calendar

A content calendar focuses on creating and distributing tasks through relevant and consistent content calendar notifications to your team members.

Tips for setting the calendar: From Content topics/titles to Visual elements (images, video, graphics), links to the content calendar, including content status, publish date and time, and targeting platform to publish, review, or revise. This is a calendar-linked Google Calendar with Calendar Events Creator from add-ons.

• Content topics/titles: When you create a content calendar, you should include clear and concise titles that accurately focus on your content subject with topic ideas. This will help you to keep your content focused on creating relevant content for your audiences. This calendar keeps your content organized and easy to track.
• Publication dates/times: Include specific dates and times for publishing your content—consider Perfect posting times and audience availability. This calendar maintains a consistent posting schedule, which is essential for your audience’s engagement. During the time of scheduling, consider the best times to post on each platform as per your team’s target and capacity to create and manage content.
• Content formats (blog, video, social post, etc.): Format your content calendar and specify the types of content you need to create. These contents are blog posts, videos, social media updates, infographics, etc. The content formatting type helps you to plan for your resources and time for effectiveness. This also allows you to create a variety of content that is engaging and connected with your audiences.
• Target platforms/channels: When you’re planning for a variety of content published in multiple platforms or channels, including social media platforms, websites, or email newsletters. This calendar ensures your content reaches the action audiences.
• Authors/Contributors: The Authors or contributor calendar shows who’s responsible for each part of the content creation process. This process includes writing, editing, and publishing for every item of the content. Also, this content specifies your responsibility for creating, editing, publishing, reviewing, and promoting the content.
• Status (draft, review, published): A content calendar helps you track the status of every piece of content you want to keep at the top of your work. You can add a collusion for different stages such as “Ideation”, “In Progress,” “Ready for review,” “Revisions needed”, and “Published.” These columns help your team to be aware of their responsibilities.
• Keywords/SEO information: For search engines, include a keywords calendar to optimize content. This will help you find content for people who are searching for information on topics. This calendar ensures your content is connected to your overall Search Engine Optimization strategy.
• Call to Action (CTAs): This calendar should have a clear purpose of driving traffic to your website, generating leads, or promoting a new product. CTA calendar ensures the success of your content. These specific actions bring your audience to take after engaging with your content.
• Visual elements (images, video, graphics): The Visual element calendar includes your links to the visual elements that go with each piece of your content. This can be graphics, images, or video content. This calendar links your calendar and provides an easy approach for your team members to find and use the right visuals for each post.

What Are the Key Steps to Managing a Content Calendar

Tips to set the calendar: Whenever you set your content, this calendar focuses on key stages to manage your calendar. This setup will provide you with goals set up to monitor campaign performance insights.

You can consider your content calendar’s strategic value that will help you to plan and schedule your content creation to publish across multiple platforms and provide you a smooth and organized method for crafting content. This is important to provide a roadmap and prevent your anxiousness for rushing to create content and balancing with a regular schedule. Regular review and adjustment of your calendar-based performance and feedback give you a dynamic and valuable tool for updating your content strategy.

Set clear goals

• You must connect your business objectives with your content calendar tool
• Define your specific needs that are measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals for your content.

Identify your target audience

• Choose your convenient content calendar tool, such as the HubSpot editorial calendar, Loomly, Sprout Social, or ContentCal.
• Understand your audience’s demographics in detail, as well as your choices and online interaction; this will help you to customize your content accordingly.

Brainstorm content ideas

• For brainstorming content ideas, you need to choose relevant tools which are helpful to mind mapping, word charts, and other online tools like Lucidchart, Coggle, Miro, MindMeister, Scapple, and Bubbl.us.
• Generates multiple content ideas connected to your goals and vibrates your audiences.

Choose content platforms

• Overview of different tools like Trello, Asana, Google Sheets, etc.
• You can select the platforms where your target audiences are active and have the most valuable impact.

Plan your editorial calendar

• How to brainstorm and organize content ideas.
• Plan for scheduling your content in advance, considering ideal posting times, key events, and your team’s capacity.

Assign roles and responsibilities

• Defining roles (writers, editors, designers, social media managers).
• You should clearly define who is responsible for every stage of the content creation process.

Utilize content management tools

• Content batching and repurposing strategies.
• Optimize your tools like Google Spreadsheets, project management software, or dedicated content calendar platforms to smooth your content publishing tasks.

Monitor performance

• Measuring engagement, reach, and conversions.
• Track your metrics to access the effectiveness of your content and identify areas of improvement.

Adapt and iterate

• Managing last-minute changes and trends.
• Review regularly and adjust your content calendar based on your performance data and audience feedback.

Conclusion

A content calendar is an effective tool that helps you from creating content to publishing with tracking and measuring performance through analyzing your content structures. Also, correctly measure your audiences and demographic interactions with a complete roadmap for your content marketing efforts. You become busy with your core business strategy and tracking the complete steps of your company.

You may need an efficient and skilled person to set a content calendar strategy for your business. YesAssistant has skilled and trained people who can manage your content calendar effectively and add value to your business and relieve you of setting a calendar. We have more than a decade experience providing virtual assistant support to businesses.

Please book an appointment today; we have the best pricing packages for you as per your business size, requirements, and models.