Creating an effective content calendar for digital marketing

A structured content calendar is key to a successful digital strategy.

It helps you plan, organise, and execute your content marketing efforts efficiently, ensuring that your audience receives consistent and high-quality content.

It is a visual representation of your upcoming social media posts organised by date and time and should include all that is needed to schedule the post easily. With a content calendar you can plan out posts weeks and months in advance! 

In this blog post, we'll walk you through the steps to create an effective content calendar.

Benefits of having a content calendar

A content calendar, can help with making your content easier to organise campaign creation, boost productivity, scale your social media marketing efforts and help with improving reach and engagement. Allowing more time in advance for content creation can also lead to better-quality content.

With improved organisation, you can also plan your content around the needs of your business, for example, allowing you time to plan content around an upcoming event. It can also help manage deadlines and be transparent with other stakeholders, which can improve collaboration among teams.

Additionally, a content calendar can help you track what you’ve posted and learn what works best with your audience allowing you to focus less on trial and error.

Step 1: Define your goals

Often in marketing it’s important to begin with defining your goals. Understanding what you aim to achieve with your content will guide the entire process. Just make sure your goals are SMART. (Smart, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant and Time-bound)

• Identify Objectives: Determine your primary goals, such as brand awareness, lead generation, customer engagement, or sales.
• Set Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Choose specific metrics to measure success, such as website traffic, social media engagement, email open rates, or conversion rates.

Step 2: Understand your audience

Knowing your audience is key to creating content that resonates. You can understand you audience by conducting audience research and creating buyer personas. You can find out about your audience by:

• Talking to employees in your business who are regularly in touch with your customers.
• Interviewing your current customers.
• Analysing customer feedback and reviews to identify common themes and preferences.
• Utilising social media analytics to see what content engages your audience.
• Conducting surveys to gather insights on customer needs and interests.
• Monitoring online forums and communities where your audience interacts.
• Reviewing website analytics to understand user behaviour and demographics.
• Engaging with your audience through polls or Q&A sessions on social media.
• Observing competitors to see how they connect with their audience.

• The topics they’re interested in.
• The channels they use.
• The formats they prefer.

Ask questions referring to those points and you will generate a deeper understanding of what resonates with them.

Step 3: Audit existing content

From this content audit you should be able to find out the content that works best, so you can create similar content in the future. It will also help you find content that is outdated and needs a refresh:

• Review your past content and your competitors.
• Check key metrics that align with your goals, such as reach, CTR (click-through rates), engagement rate, conversion rate, and impressions.
• Look for gaps in your existing content.
• Decide what types of content you want to produce a variety of content types are best, such as blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts, and email newsletters.
• Review competitors content.
• What types of content are they posting.
• How often are they posting content.
• How engaged is their audience with the content they are posting.

Step 4: Collate existing content into themes

From your content:

• Identify recurring themes. As you review your content, look for recurring topics or subjects that appear frequently. These will form the basis of your content themes. For example, if you're a fitness brand, you might notice themes like "nutrition tips," "workout routines," or "fitness motivation".
• Create theme categories. Once you've identified the recurring themes, create broad categories to group similar content together. This categorisation will help you easily locate and repurpose content in the future.
• Tag and organise content. Assign relevant tags to each piece of content based on its theme and category. This tagging system will make it easier to search and retrieve content when needed.
• Identify content gaps. While organising your content, you may notice gaps in certain themes or topics. Make note of these gaps as they represent opportunities for new content creation.

This will help you create a content repository to fill your content calendar with.

As your inbound marketing strategy grows, you’ll accumulate a vast amount of content so you'll need to keep it well tracked.

Step 5: Choose your platforms

What channels are effective for your business, it is recommended that you pick the top 3-5 performing social media platforms.

• Evaluate platform features. Each social media platform has unique features and content formats that cater to different types of engagement.
• Focus on performance metrics. Analyse the performance of your existing content across various platforms. Look for data on engagement rates, reach, and conversion metrics to determine which channels have been most effective.
• Consider content types. Tailor your content to fit the specific characteristics of each platform. For instance, short, engaging videos perform well on TikTok and Instagram, while informative articles and professional insights are better suited for LinkedIn.

Step 6: Create your content calendar

Many online templates exist for free and you can use software you already have, such as Google sheets or Excel. Make sure to include key information needed in separate columns. 

You can also have a separate tab in your content calendar where you list content ideas and track the progress of content creation and another tab where you record how content is performing so you can get an idea of what your audience likes or if you are attracting the right audience with your content. 

Once your content calendar is created, fill it up with content ideas and get feedback from the wider team. Continuously review and improve, as well as track progress and performance.