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Content Marketing Calendar Must-Haves

The idea of creating and using a content marketing calendar isn’t new or revolutionary.

 
Yet it still seems to elude most content creators.
 
Take a minute to search for ‘content marketing calendar’ in Google and you’ll be served up more content than you know what to do with.
 
Complete with images, infographics, templates, and spreadsheets.
 
With so much available at our fingertips, why is it so hard for people to create a content marketing calendar and stick with it?
 
At the risk of sounding like an armchair psychologist, the answer is quite simple.
 
Most people overthink content marketing.
 
The two most important factors to any successful content marketing plan is finding what works for you and your audience, and then being as consistent as you can (it may take some time to find what really works for you. That’s fine).
 
The only way to truly create a content marketing calendar that works for you (and your team if you have one), is to do it. Then measure what worked, what didn’t, and course correct.
 
Ideally you’ll create a content marketing framework that allows you some flexibility for a content marketing calendar.
 
There isn’t a one-size fits all for content marketing but there are best practices and strategies that work better than others.

Who this is for

We’re going to walk through creating a content marketing calendar for a single entrepreneur or small team (less than 10 people). 

A content marketing calendar should be based on the exact same thing we suggest with the Content Creators Planner:

Your business goals.

The other key factor in creating a successful content marketing calendar is that it should also serve your audience.

There are way too many people out there preaching about set-it-and-forget-it marketing, but that serves you, not your audience. This is also why we’re firm believers in 90-day plans.

There are a handful of content calendars out there that will give you content for a year, but these tend to be surface-level, generic social media content based on holidays and the random special day on the calendar.

All this does is create more noise online and you’re going to get lost among all the other generic posts about ‘grandparents’ day (no offense to grandparents of course ????).

You should run your life, not by the calendar but how you feel, and what you’re interests are and ambitions.
– John Glenn

I’m going to assume you know you should be putting the content you create onto a content marketing calendar and scheduling them to repost based on how evergreen the content is.

This includes publishing content directly on your site as well as social media and other content publishing platforms.

Here are a list of things people forget to add to their content marketing calendar but are vital to the growth and sustainability of a business.

  • Opt-in offer (grow your list!)
  • Emails sent (published as posts or articles)
  • Webinars/training
  • Join your FB group
  • Sales page/product pages
  • Resources pages (great if you’re using affiliate links)
  • Newsletter pages (much like we’re doing with Creativity Published, these should be shared consistently).

How much do you think you’d see your email list grow if you were sharing a link directly to your landing page for your opt-in offer a few times a week?

If you were to add even two social posts a week based on the list above you’d be ahead of most people and you’d start to see significant growth,.

Don’t worry if this feels like you’re showing the same thing to your audience too much. The likelihood of them seeing these things every time you post is slim to none. All you need is for them to see it once.

You can even drive people back to the same page, just change the image and text of what you’re sharing.


Before you hit publish any of this, make sure you’ve set yourself up to get the relevant pieces that will help you measure the effectiveness of your marketing.

  • Google analytics
  • UTM codes (or some sort of link shorteners like Rebrandly or Bitly)
  • Have a Facebook pixel on all pages you’re driving traffic to (even if you’re not currently running Facebook ads, you can create a custom audience for later)

Context is key

Make sure that you are taking context into consideration when creating your content marketing calendar. What you share on Linkedin should be different than what you share on an Instagram story. Consider your audience and what type of content they consume on different platforms.

There is no one-size-fits-all when it comes to creating a content marketing calendar.

Your business, your audience, your products, and services should all taken into consideration when creating your content marketing calendar.

Circling back to the beginning, once you have your business goals clearly defined that’s when you can start creating your content marketing calendar.

Kim Doyal

Kim Doyal

Hi, I'm Kim Doyal: Entrepreneur, Podcaster, ContentCreator, Optimist. Over 13 years into this online business journey, I believe that #EverythingIsContent and we can all #JustShowUP. Creator of #FtheHustle movement and Co-founder of the Content Creators Planner.

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