9 Reasons You Need a Content Calendar for Your Content Marketing

Your content is a crucial part of your brand. It enhances your brand’s visibility and credibility. It also helps you attract your target audience and convert them into repeat customers. Basically, content is king.

That makes content marketing a vital part of all other forms of marketing. You need content for everything – ranging from posting articles to sharing videos on your blog and your social media platforms.

But as powerful as content marketing is, it can also be tasking. There are a whole lot of areas to consider, including:

• Content research and planning
• Content creation
• Content publishing and promotion

One of the best ways to stay organized in content marketing is by using a content calendar. In this article, we’ll explain what a content calendar is and why you need one.

What Is a Content Calendar?

A content calendar is a tool that helps you manage your content marketing efforts. It shows you the processes involved in each stage of content marketing. Your content calendar allows you to collaborate with others in meeting your content marketing goal.

Essentially, a content calendar shows you what you have done, what you are doing, and how much you have left on your task list. It also outlines the deadlines, tools, resources, and individuals responsible for different aspects of your content marketing process.

With a content calendar, your content team (writers, editors, researchers, and graphic designers) can understand the workflow of each task and know where they come in.

Is a Spreadsheet a Content Calendar?

We hate to burst your bubble, but a spreadsheet is not a content calendar. For small teams, you might be able to get by with a spreadsheet. But you will run into issues as your content increases, and you add more people to your team.

A content calendar should be both scalable and sustainable. Whether working with small, localized teams or multiple teams working remotely, a content calendar allows you to organize your efforts and boost productivity.

Your content calendar helps you streamline for the long term. It provides a comprehensive picture of your content marketing and how it is going.

Thankfully, many great marketing tools also offer content calendars as part of their features. We will make a few recommendations so you can get started in a quick time.

Why You Should Use a Content Calendar

A content calendar can help you translate your content marketing goals into reality. Here are some reasons why you should use a content calendar.

1. A content calendar helps you to stay organized

Content marketing is an organizing process. You need to source ideas, plan content, and evaluate the success of completed projects.

A content calendar allows you to source ideas and arrange them. It helps identify gaps, provide status updates, and avoid unnecessary multitasking.

Whether posting daily, weekly, or biweekly, a content calendar keeps you organized and on track.

2. A content calendar helps you to save time

A content calendar allows you to plan. You can develop, optimize, and schedule content to go live in the future. Your team members know the tasks to work on and deliver based on the deadlines.

Content calendars also come with automation tools that allow you to push content to multiple platforms simultaneously.

3. A content calendar can help you with new ideas

A content calendar shows your team the available ideas and gaps in your content marketing strategy.

This information will get their brains fired up in the right direction. Therefore, there is no overlap in ideas while creating a clear outline of the gaps to be filled.

4. A content planner will help you maintain consistency

You need to be consistent in your content marketing approach. Consistency requires a definable brand voice, a well-spaced publishing schedule, and content quality.

If your content seems haphazard, it will be hard to grow your audience. If you are posting on social media, you must post frequently and regularly.

A content calendar sets the publishing standard and frequency to ensure your team produces quality, timely, and entertaining content that helps your brand stand out.

5. A content planner helps you to stay on topic

The best approach to content marketing is to become an authority in a specific niche. Without an organized schedule, you might end up picking topics at random. This approach will make your channels look disorganized.

A content planner helps you to arrange topics based on your preferred niche. It allows you to stay true to your themes, so you can quickly earn the attention and trust of your target audience.

6. A content calendar keeps you in sync with the trends

With the bustle of every business activity, it can be tough to keep up with all the special events happening around the year.

But not taking advantage of festivities can result in a significant loss in your revenue. These periods are opportunities to attract new audiences, retarget old customers, and sell more.

A content calendar allows you to plan for these special times of the year. You can then connect with potential customers by relating to what is happening in their world.

7. A content calendar helps other departments

Although content marketing might be the job for a small team, it takes the collaborative work of everyone in the business to pull it off.

A content calendar ensures that everyone is on the same page. It also improves the relationship and communication between teams.

Product managers, salespersons, and marketing officers can follow the status of content efforts and sync their activities to achieve the overall result.

8. A content calendar prevents big mistakes

Whether you post on blogs or social media platforms, spontaneity can cause more harm than good. You could push out content with misleading information or bad spelling and punctuation without a review and editing process.

A content calendar provides a process that allows other team members to review posts before they are published and promoted.

9. A content calendar helps you to measure content marketing

If you are serious about growing, you must track and measure your content marketing efforts. A content calendar allows you to track all completed projects and their performance. It can provide insights to determine which content is doing well so you can duplicate it.

Recommendations: Content Calendars

BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a content research platform that also comes with a content calendar. You can use this tool to develop content ideas and tips to help you grab your target audience’s attention.

Furthermore, you can combine BuzzSumo with AI writing tools like Jasper (formerly Jarvis) to quickly create compelling content.

SocialPilot

SocialPilot is a content marketing tool with a content calendar feature. This content calendar allows you to manage your planning, scheduling, and publishing processes from one dashboard.

You can use automated publishing tools to publish content on social media platforms over a long period with the click of a single button.

Wrapping up…

Content marketing can be a challenge for many small businesses. Knowing what and when to post requires insight and patience.

Your content calendar can help your brand plan your content and develop processes to help achieve your marketing goals.