How To Create a Killer Content Marketing Calendar [2022 + Templates]

If you’ve done any sort of marketing online you’ve probably heard of or have already been doing content marketing. Content marketing is one of the most popular and effective marketing techniques for building long term brand loyalty. There’s a lot that goes into a content marketing campaign, but at the core of all of it is the content marketing calendar. If you don’t have a content calendar, or you’re not sure how to make one, you’re in luck; today we’re going to look at how to create a killer content marketing calendar and all the bits that should go into creating one.

Check Out My Template

Before we jump into it I wanted to give you the exact templates I use to manage the content and social media calendars for my brands. It is an Airtable template you can check them out here and take a copy if you like.

I personally love Airtable as their tool gives you a lot of room to customize and create views based on your content. In this template, I have one main view that hosts all of my content, and then calendar views that show my overall content pipeline and social media calendar. I added a Facebook calendar view, but you can easily create more to cover all the social channels you're targeting.

I’ll reference this template as I go through the details as I think it’s easier to visualize the process when you have something tangible in front of you to compare it to. I recommend at the very least having it open to look at as I go through each section so you can see how I create my plans.

Now, I do realize this template won’t fit everyone’s work flow or be the right style for everyone. If you find my template don’t mesh well with you feel free to throw it out and try something else. Hopefully, it at least provides some inspiration and context for one way you can create a content calendar.

What is a Content Marketing Calendar

Broadly put, a content marketing calendar is simply an overview of your content marketing strategy. Generally, it includes all the content you plan to produce, when you want produce, and your plan to distribute it.

I also emphasize heavily in my content calendars my social media plan. I feel the two are so closely related that it doesn’t make sense to separate them.

Creating a Social Media Calendar

While this is about creating a content calendar, social media is so intertwined with content marketing that we’ll look at it heavily here. A big part of my overall content strategy has to do with sharing and creating for social media, and I believe that yours should too. For example, a lot of the image content I produce is made specifically for Instagram and is posted on my site as well as shared there. I feel it doesn’t make much sense to keep my social and content calendars separate because of this.

You’ll see that with my template and how I plan my weekly social media is always something I consider. I don’t believe any content calendar is complete without a good social strategy to back it up, and that’s why we’ll be looking at doing both here.

Why You Should Have a Content Marketing Calendar

The next question I want to look at is why you should take the time to set up a content calendar in the first place. I’m a believer of having a content calendar, and I found the time I spend managing my sites drastically went down when I started using one. I use to think I could just wing it, but have seen a dramatic improvement in my results since I started taking the time to plan.

Helps Create an Overall Plan

Firstly, a content calendar helps you create an overall plan in how you manage your content. It helps you get a broad overview of where your content is going and how you’re utilizing it. It also lets you easily take stock of your overall message, and identify holes or off-brand messages. Think of this as your 30,000 foot that helps guide your overall brand.

Spend Less Time Managing Your Content

A big one for me, having a calendar cut down the time it took me to manage my sites. Without a calendar, I was always trying to figure out what content to post and when, and ended up wasting a lot of time. A content calendar takes all this guesswork out and let’s me focus on knocking out my plan each day. It also helps me keep all my thoughts in once place, which cuts down time jumping from site to site to track down all my stuff.

Keeps You More Consistent

It also helps keep you consistent and prevents forgetting tasks. Content marketing and social media marketing is all about consistency, and anything that helps with that is a positive. With a good calendar you will always have a view of what’s done and what’s not. I’m not forgetting to send out tweets anymore now that I have them scheduled which was a big problem before.

Shows You Gaps in your Marketing Efforts

A good content calendar is also going to show you clear gaps in your marketing efforts. If you notice that you’re having a hard time for example coming up with Twitter posts then you can clearly see this in your calendar. This is something that’s usually difficult to see without having things written down and easy to brush aside without clear data in your face.

Gets Your Social Under Control

Having a clear content calendar alongside my social calendar also really helps keep my social media in line. Before, I would often forget to make posts, and my engagement and growth suffered because of it. Spending some time each week to plan out my posting schedule really helps stay on track, which is ultimately the most important thing to social growth.

Keeps your team on the same page

Lastly, if you do have a team, a centralized calendar keeps everyone on the same page. I open my calendar up so the entire team can view it, and this helps everyone know what each other is working on. This is important as it helps everyone focus on what they need to do and prevents people stepping on each other’s toes.

What Should Go Into a Content Calendar

With the reasons to build one hopefully clear, it’s important to understand all the pieces that go into a good content calendar. The below items are all things I personally find important, but others may disagree. I’d generally consider the below to be the bare minimum, and anything else extras that certain people might consider important.

All Your Current Content

The first step is to create a document that details all of your existing content and planned content. This should be in one location so it’s easy to get a broad overview without having to search for it.

The template I’ve provided is simple and provides what I feel is a sensible way to organize my content. It gives a single view that shows me all my content and gives me a view of the status of all of it.

For some brands, it might be useful to create a separation between written and visual content. Airtable makes this super simple, and I'll usually just create a "type" field that gives me the ability to sort my content on that field. Then, I can create a separate view that filters out by type so I can see my content broken down what type it is.

I’ve tried to keep my template a bit barebones so it doesn’t make any assumptions about how you want to track your content. It’s probably a good idea to add any fields that you feel are relevant to tracking your content. Some things you might want to add:

• Categories
• More content types
• Any publishing pipeline you have
• Anything else relevant to your content

The point being that everyone is a little different in how they want to track things, and you can and should be molding these templates to fit your style. I usually add on to the template, but use it as a base that I can add to. I encourage you to do the same to match your workflow.

Plans For existing Content

Once you have compiled your existing content, you’ll also want to create a space to record future content ideas. This will help you fill out your calendar later, and also lets you know how much of a backlog you have. Once you start getting low on content you’ll know it’s time to go research some more which prevents situations where you’re scrambling for ideas.

This should be in an easily accessible place so that you don’t have to spend a lot of time adding to it. I like to put all my content in one place, so I just add on to the same sheet that has my current content and use a field to denote unpublished or scheduled content. Other people like to keep this separate and will often create two separate sheets for upcoming and past content.

In the template provided I use the "idea" and "in planning" options under the status to denote content like this. Here I can see all my content that I can potentially pull from to build out my calendar. I also include a separate tab for content and graphic ideas that I don't have fully fleshed out yet. This gives me a space to capture quick ideas that I can go back and refine later.

The core idea is that you should have a wide range of content to pull from when creating your content calendar. It’s easier to build your calendar when you already have a good amount of content ideas to pull from than to be trying to come up with them on the spot.

Social Media Posts

I also like to heavily intertwine my content calendar with social media. My first step after creating most content is to push it to social media, so it makes sense to me to keep the two closely related.

To accomplish this, I include a social posting schedule for the week as part of my overall content calendar. This is part of the template, and we’ll talk more about it later. Suffice to say, social media is a key part of any content strategy so it’s very important to take the time to make sure you’re doing it right and on a consistent basis.

A Revision Schedule

Another big thing that I keep on my calendar that’s a bit different from others is my revision schedule. I always keep track of my old posts, and make sure to consciously go back and re-evaluate them every few months.

This helps me make sure that all my content is delivering the best possible information, and gives me the opportunity to update outdated content or add new details. This keeps my content fresh, and is an often overlooked part of a content strategy. A piece of content is never truly done as you can always improve on it.

I do this by adding a "last updated" field to my content that I change whenever I edit my content. This lets me easily see stale content and which articles haven't been touched in a while. You can take this a step further and build out a few that only shows content that hasn't been updated in a certain amount of time, say 6 months.

Content Creation Pipeline (optional)

I add this as optional here as I don’t feel all people will find a ton of use in creating a content pipeline tracker. I also wanted to show an example of one of the extra things certain people might find the templates lacking.

This is generally useful for larger teams, or those with complex creation processes. I personally don’t have a very complex pipeline, and find this to be extra overhead, but some teams will greatly benefit from it so I figured I’d include it here.

Basically, you want to define the steps and deadlines for the various pieces of content. It might look something like

-Research and Outline (10 days from publish)
-Article draft written (7 days from publish)
-Graphic creation (5 days from publish)
-Editing (5 days from publish)
-Revisions complete (3 days from publish)
-More edits/revisions (1 day from publish)
-Publish Date

This is just an example, but shows how a team might schedule out the entire process of creating large or complex content. I often see gantt charts used for this time of dependency management, but you could just as easily add it as extra fields in your content spreadsheet.

If this is something you or your team finds valuable, then you should absolutely add it into your content marketing calendar. The point of your calendar after all is to be able to see your content’s status from conception to publication. The great thing about Airtable is that this is really easy to add, and you can get as complicated as you like. Some teams might just add it as a field to their content, while others might create new views to see content at every step of their pipeline.

Taking Stock Of Your Content – Existing and Future

Content is the core of a content marketing strategy, so I thought I’d add a brief section in getting organized with your content. This goes for both existing and future content as it all ends up in the same place at the end of the day.

Organize Your Content

The first thing I encourage you to do is to create a sensible way of organizing your content. How you’ll do this depends on your strategy and goals, so I’ll talk about how I do it and you can hopefully take inspiration from that.

Firstly, I like to organize my content by type. My core strategy generally focuses on articles, images, and video, so this is usually how I break down my content. Each of these has specific goals so it’s important for me to see which content is what at a glance.

I also like to organize by topic. This helps me better target my marketing efforts and present content to readers in a sensible way. For example, you might have a 5 article series about Instagram marketing with each article taking a deep dive into one specific aspect. I’d make sure to group these together in some fashion so that I know I probably want to do these as a batch. It makes much more sense to publish them in order than to randomly post related articles disjointly. I feel it provides a lot more benefit to the reader to have them in sequence, and benefiting my reader is always my end goal.

In Airtable I'll achieve this by adding a "campaign" or "tag" field to my content and giving like content the same value. This way I can easily find all content that is closely related.

I also group together any differing content types that are related to each other. For example, I’ll often create 2-3 shareable marketing graphics for a given article. I make sure that these are linked back together to each other so I easily know which graphics go with what other piece of content. The same goes for any video content I produce.

Templatize When You Can

Another big thing I’m always thinking about and keeping track of is content that I can create a repeatable format for. You see this often with things like graphics of quotes where you can easily swap out the text to create a new piece of content. I do this with a gardening site I run where I have a template of care instructions for common things like water and sun. I can easily swap out the content and add a new image and have a new piece of content created in only a few minutes. It’s also branded how I like it and looks consistent with my other graphics.

Templatizing what you can will greatly speed up your work and help you create more. You obviously can’t do it for everything, but where you can it’s a powerful way to save time.

Somewhat related, I also like to have a sheet dedicated to brand guidelines. This includes things like colors, fonts, sizing, logos, and whatever else you’ll have to reach for often. This once again saves time as it’s a single place I can go to get all the design assets I need. It’s also incredibly helpful if you ever hire someone to do any sort of marketing work. You can quickly hand over your brand guidelines and they’ll have a clear place to start and rules to follow to stay on brand with your existing content.

Action Item

By the end of this section you should have a list of your current and future content. Make sure you're tracking all your existing content, and have a decent sized list of ideas that you can use in the future.

Figure Out Your Posting Schedule and Platforms

Once you’ve got an idea of your content, it’s time to figure out how often and where you want to post your content. There are some general guidelines here for best practices, but it really does vary quite a bit in practice. The goal is to find a happy medium where you’re posting enough content but maintaining a high quality. The most important thing though is consistency. It’s better to post once per week, for example, than to randomly skip weeks and post twice the next one. Part of the goal of a content calendar is to give you a set schedule to help enforce that consistency.

On Your Site Or Other Owned Properties

The first thing to figure out is how much content you want to create for your properties. This is often in the form of blog articles, but some marketers might be posting videos to their site, creating downloadable PDFs, or other forms of content. No matter the type, you want to make sure you figure out how often your owned channels should be updated.

It's okay if this is different per content types as well. Maybe you want to make a blog post 2-3 times per week, but create a video only once per month. That's perfectly fine to have variance there, not everything needs to be produced at the same rate and probably shouldn't. It often takes much more work to create a video than an article and it would be difficult to maintain the same schedule for both.

On Social Media

Next you want to create a plan for the core social channels you’ll be using. Of course you also want to figure out which platforms are best for you to target as well. The amount of posts here varies, so make sure you figure out the best practices for each channel while keeping in mind how much time you have.

I often think of this as a function of how much content I am creating. For example, it’s pretty easy to take a 1,000 word article and create 5 tweets from it. If I create 3 such articles in a week I’ll have a much easier time creating my Twitter schedule than if I was only creating one. That’s not to say you can’t have a perfectly good strategy with low amounts of content, I just find it easier when you create more.

On Other Channels

You also want to consider other channels you might be posting content to. There are 100’s of sites that don’t necessarily fit into the buckets above, but they can be just as important for your overall strategy. Many times these will be niche sites that are specific to your market. Don't ignore these as the audience there is likely more receptive than the wider one on most social channels.

In Newsletters

If you’re marketing with newsletters I often include my plan for that here as well. Many times the content you’re producing directly impacts the newsletter content, so I think it makes sense to keep the two closely related.

Action Item

By the end of this section you should have an idea how much you want to post, both on your site and on others. This will act as sort of a goal in the next section where you line up your content with how often you want to post.

How To Setup Your Content Calendar

Finally, with all the prep out the way we can start actually setting up our calendar. This section will detail one way to go about that, and hopefully give you the tools you need to set your own up.

This is How I Do It

I want to start by saying that this is personally how I set up my content calendar and if it doesn’t work for you that’s okay. Everyone is different and has a different way of thinking about things.

My suggestion is to give my method and try and see if it meshes with your work style. If it doesn’t, then don’t feel bad throwing it out and getting something new.

Do spend some time though and figure out why my process doesn’t work for you. Maybe it’s not granular enough, or maybe you have a complex content pipeline that it doesn’t fit well with. Whatever it is, find and use a method that fixes these issues.

Start With a Monthly Content Plan

First, I start with a monthly content plan. I sit down and plan all the content I need to create for the month and assign it to deadlines in my calendar.

Go back and look at your content production goals and build your calendar based on this. If you want to write 1 article per week then it’s pretty easy to plan out a month. Working backwards like this is how I plan out all my content tasks for the month.

This is my high level overview that shows me what I want to complete this month and when I need to have it done by. I work best with clear deadlines, so this really helps me prioritize my work.

I like to do a month at a time as it’s long enough to give me a decent overview but not too long that small changes throw off things too much. A month gives me a solid overview while also maintaining a lot of flexibility should things change.

If you’re using my template you’ll also note that I have a column for Facebook at the end. This checkbox signifies that I want to share this post on Facebook on that date. In my real templates I expand this to cover all my social channels so I can start knocking those out as I plan my written content.

I also have a "last updated" column that I use to see old content that might need a refresh. When I plan out a month I look over these and see if any content is past its expiration date. I generally start this at about 6 months, but you can make it more or less depending on your content. Some types of content might need to be update more or less frequently than others to stay relevant.

The cool thing about Airtable is all of these dates assigned here will show on my content pipeline view. This is an actual calendar, so I can see at a glance the current week or month and what I have scheduled. This makes it easier to see what's upcoming than the total content view.

Create a Weekly Posting Schedule

Next up, I then go through and plan out how I want to handle each week in terms of content distribution. Once again, you can look back at your goals and plan this out. If you want to make 5 Twitter posts and 1 Facebook post each day then you have a clear view for your weekly workload.

Usually when I do this I try to focus on promoting the content I’ll be pushing out that week. If I’m writing a new article with a marketing graphic then that’s the first thing I put into the calendar.

Once I have my new content scheduled, I take time to look at my other options. I’ll often look back at my older content, as noted by the dates above, and figure out if any of it can fit into my week. One thing I like to do is match up old content that is related to the new content. So, if I’m writing an overview for social media marketing then bringing up an older Instagram marketing article makes sense. This helps keep a cohesion for your readers.

If I still need more than I think about some of the extra content methods I’ve come up with. This is where having templates can save you a lot of time. For example, I’ll often keep a “quote” template that can be used to quickly create images. Then I’ll pull powerful quotes from my content and viola I have simple graphics related to my content. This is why I emphasised building a template base before, it can help you quickly related pieces of content to fill out your calendar. Quotes are an easy but often overdone idea, so get creative. Short excerpts from a long form video for example are a great way to generate new Instagram video posts.

My template includes a separate calendar for viewing my social media plan as I like to separate this from my content plan. This allows me to still view my social media schedule, but also add social specific items that won't clutter up my main view. I'll also sometimes create a new "Social Posts" view that is similar to my main content view but only for my social posts. This keeps everything organized and easy to view, but separated enough so like content stays together.

Keep Track of Quality Posts and Past Posts

Lastly, it’s important to keep track of posts that both over and underperformed. This can help you grow your strategy overtime, and helps you learn what content your readers want.

I always tag the best posts in my content breakdown so I can remember which posts resonated the best. This is great for when you need to revise content, but is also a great way to generate new content. If a particular article did well then creating related content is often a good way to create more great content.

I also keep track of underperforming articles. The important thing here is to try and understand why it underperformed. If it’s something like missing reach (maybe I used poor hashtags) then that’s a good candidate to repost later and try and get it right. Other times people might have just not liked the content which can further help you refine your strategy.

Action Item

By the end of this section look to have a working content calendar. I do a month at a time, but if you're having trouble aim to get a week done. That's only step one though, the most important part is you stick to your schedule and actually do the posting that you plan. Stick with it, the effort is well worth it!

Some More Tips

I wanted to finish up with a few broad tips for creating your content calendar that really didn’t fit anywhere else. These are things you should keep in mind when you set out to create your own.

Don’t Be Afraid To Iterate

Your content calendar shouldn’t be a static document but a live one. It’s okay to change it and pivot, especially if you have evidence something new will work better than what you planned. Don’t feel like you’re locked into a plan.

Listen To Current Events

Building off the above, listening to and working with current events is a great way to generate a lot of buzz quickly. You never know what’s going to happen tomorrow, so always be ready to pivot your strategy to cater to what’s hot. Holidays are another place where you can get some easy wins that should factor into your overall strategy.

Create a image/resource Database

Another important thing I make sure to do is ensure that all my image assets and other content resources are easily accessible. This is both for my benefit as well as the rest of my team.

My personal strategy for this is to set up a Google Drive folder for each of my projects, and drag any assets in there. That way, I can easily access them on all my devices. I’m generally designing my graphics on my desktop, but then do a lot of my posting on my mobile device. This lets me quickly access my image library and other assets between devices without skipping a beat.

This becomes even more important if you have a team. Everyone should practice good organization, and make everyone else able to reuse, update, or post the content others are creating. Having a centralized location to share all of this is key and keeps you from getting bogged down having to email attachments.

Make It Accessible To Your Team

I mentioned this before but want to re-emphasize it, your calendar should be open to your team. This builds a collaborative environment, and helps everyone see the overall strategy you’re trying to implement. Having everyone on the same page is a powerful way to keep everyone productive and working towards a common goal.

Explore Other Tools

Lastly, as your grow building and posting all this content can be a lot of work. Luckily, there are a number of great tools out there that can speed things up. For example, tools like Later can make scheduling out tons of social posts across different platforms much easier. While they're not essential, they can greatly reduce the time you spend on these tasks.

Creating Your Own Content Calendar

I want to end this article by challenging you to go out right now and start making your content calendar. Don’t fall into the trap of saying you’ll bookmark this and do it later, because face it, you never will. It doesn’t have to be perfect or even complete on the first pass, but take some time to put what you learned to good use and make the time you spend reading this count for something. I can almost 100% guarantee that if you’re not using a content calendar and you start using one you’ll see a dramatic improvement in your marketing efforts. Don’t waste anymore time without one!