How to create a content calendar: 3 essential steps

A content calendar helps you map out your content plans, keep those plans on track, and stay on top of both the small details and the big picture. The most useful content calendars help your team execute more efficiently, and give your stakeholders and partners the information they need.

If you’re building out a new content calendar—or just refining an existing one for enterprise content marketing—read on for our step-by-step guide. Or use the table of contents to jump to a specific topic. 

What is a content calendar?

A content calendar is a source of truth for your production and publication schedule, built around key deadlines. Teams use content calendars to plan production and publication for both internal and external channels—like their websites, blogs, social media platforms, and more.

The terms "content calendar" and "editorial calendar" are often used interchangeably, but are rooted in slightly different meanings. Generally, editorial calendars are guiding frameworks (used to plan out themes in advance and assign writers), while content calendars guide production (including detailed task lists and production checkpoints). Many organizations actually combine the two into a single calendar, or (if you’re using a tool like Airtable), use different views of the same calendar to capture different needs.

Regardless, if you need to break your content into a digestible execution plan, a content calendar is your best bet. It’ll help you plan your content production timelines, resource allotment, staffing needs, and publication cadence. 

The relationship between content calendars and social media calendars

Social media calendars can exist in a vacuum—often because companies publish so frequently to their social platforms, it crowds out the rest of their plans. But that’s a miss—a siloed social media calendar makes it hard to align messages across your content, or to coordinate social promotion of key assets. When used in combination with a content calendar, social media calendars can help you plan cohesive content themes across your channels, and distribute your content through social media. 

Tip: Try Airtable’s social media calendar template to integrate social activities with your main content calendar.

What are the benefits of having a content calendar? 

In companies that are new to content production, it’s not uncommon to see teams running without a formal content calendar. Unfortunately, even if your publishing volume is low, you'll find yourself in hot water, fast—important reviews get skipped, messaging gets diluted (or becomes contradictory), and deadlines get missed.

Content calendars allow you to juggle content pipeline, writers, reviewers, editors, and new ideas.

• Keep deadlines on track — Even the simplest production workflows are more complex than they look. Just to get a blog post out the door, your team needs to align on an idea, write a first draft, review the content, and sign off on the final draft. That process has to happen like clockwork, or you fall off schedule. A content calendar helps align stakeholders around the tasks you need done to finish each piece. 

• Align different teams and departments — Your content contributors might include writers, editors, SEO specialists, legal reviewers, and more. A content calendar helps divvy up production responsibilities among contributors, and gives other stakeholders a view of what’s coming next. 

• Pace content publication — How often do you need to publish, and on which channels? Your content calendar helps you discover, and stick to, a consistent publishing cadence.

• Identify content gaps and redundancies — A content calendar shows you big-picture patterns, and can help you see what’s missing or repetitive. You can use your calendar to perform annual, or even quarterly, content audits—more on that in the next section.

Before you get started with your content calendar

It’s almost time for the fun part: envisioning the future of your content. But before you dive head-first into your content calendar, here’s some (also very fun, we promise!) pre-work to set you up for success.

1. Audit your current content catalog

Unless you’re just starting out (in which case, congrats!), start by cataloging the content your company has already produced. A thorough audit will help you avoid redundancy, unearth forgotten gems, weed out “expired” content, and get inspired for your next projects. 

If your company has a long history of producing content, but no legacy audits or DAMs, this could easily become a big project. Focus on what will drive action—cataloging everything intended for your current target vertical (maybe there’s something you could quickly refresh!), or taking a close look at content that ranks highly in search (maybe you should produce more on those topics).

And if you don’t have a DAM (or Digital Asset Manager), it’s probably time to start building one. Check out this article to find out how and why.

2. Align on your content’s audience

“Know your audience” is one of the golden rules of writing. You’ll want to brainstorm, write, and promote your content with your customer personas firmly in mind. Some organizations will have extremely detailed, deeply researched customer personas—others will be lighter-weight. Generally your personas should define the types of customers you’re hoping to attract, including things like demographic data, firmographic data, behavior patterns, and motivations. 

Once you have a clear picture of the personas you’re hoping to attract, you can design your content—and your distribution plans—accordingly. Be sure to capture audience information in your content calendar, even if you only have one or two personas to work with. The next time you conduct an audit, you’ll want to be able to quickly analyze how much (and what type of) content you’ve produced for each persona.

3. Determine a publishing cadence

How often will you publish on each platform? The answer will evolve and grow along with your team, but it’s crucial to set publishing benchmarks before you map out your calendar. Aim for a cadence that’s a) sustainable and b) helps you hit your content goals. It could look something like:

If you’re producing a lot of content—for example, if you’re running a blog or a YouTube channel—it might be helpful to decide on some themes, categories, or even serialized content before you populate your calendar. For example, at Airtable, we post “How to”s to our blog every week, and product updates every month. This predictability helps us meet our readers’ expectations, and also makes it much easier to plan.

Content calendar best practices

By now, you’ve mapped out what content you already have and what you need. You have a good idea where you’ll publish what, and how often. Maybe you’ve even started to sketch out the rhythm of your content calendar. As you develop and evolve your calendar, keep these best practices in mind: 

• Account for the entire content creation process — Content calendars are the perfect place to get into the nitty gritty of your production process. Mapping out your entire process—including seemingly obvious steps, like content staging, or sharing your new piece internally—will helps you stay organized as your calendar picks up. 

• Vet content before adding it to your calendar — Before you transfer ideas from your scratch pad to your content calendar, vet them with care. Ask yourself: does this speak to our target personas? Does it align with our overall content strategy and business goals? Will it be engaging on the platforms we have in mind? Many teams use a content brief to help them validate ideas before they get started.

• Assign a calendar “point person” — Content, by nature, includes a lot of stakeholders: from designers, to editors, to approvers, and many more. And with so many folks involved, confusion and redundancy is all too common. If you have a managing editor or editor-in-chief, that’s probably the right person to own your calendar—or, if you have a content operations person (or team!), the responsibility might sit with them.

• Track what works best — Content calendars are most impactful when they can track planning, production, and performance. If you can connect the three, you’ll see patterns emerge that can help refine your content calendar.

With those best practices in mind, the next step is to decide which elements to include in your calendar. 

What should a content calendar include? 

So what information do you need to capture in your content calendar? You’ll need to align with your stakeholders on the most important metadata to include in each item. This one might sound intimidating at first—but think about your calendar’s metadata as the next layer of description for each piece of content. What information do you and your stakeholders need to know? Define this before you start populating your content calendar.

In general, most content calendars include the following metadata:

1. Due dates and publication dates

This one’s pretty straightforward—when will the piece be finished, and when will it go live? Depending on the complexity of your calendar, you may choose to also include intermediary dates (such as when the first round of revisions, or the artwork, need to be complete).

Outline provided to writer by team 

↳ Writer creates draft

↳ Content manager reviews draft

↳ Writer makes changes

↳ Finished piece assigned to proofreader

↳ Design tasked with supporting assets

↳ Social media plans accompanying posts

2. Status

A status field makes it easy to see, at a glance, what’s on track. Most teams use statuses like planning, writing, editing, production, staging, live (published), on hold, or cancelled. 

3. Content type and channel

If you're producing multiple content types, or publishing to multiple channels, including this metadata will make it easier to filter views, map your workflow, and understand your team’s capacity.

4. Headline and links

A proposed headline will quickly give you and your  stakeholders a sense of topic and tone; once published, including a URL will make it easy to locate, update, or add to a DAM.

5. Content driver

Every asset may have multiple contributors, but only one driver. You could also specify collaborators at each stage of production, like: editor, writer, designer, legal, or web producer. 

Finding the right content calendar format and tool

There’s more than one way to lay out a content calendar, depending on the kinds of information you’re tracking, and the ways you expect to use it. Here are a few of the most common formats teams use to plan their content.

• A traditional calendar — A calendar view is simple, streamlined, and usable. This format makes it easy to see long-term content plans at a glance, which makes it ideal for sharing with execs, or quickly making adjustments to your cadence. A calendar format does limit the way you organize your content (only by due dates, vs data like driver, campaign, or status). 

• A spreadsheet-like grid — Grids allow the most granular, detailed level of organization. They’re perfect for dialing into the details—like looking at the step-by-step production plan for a specific piece. They can, however, be a bit overwhelming for those focused on big picture tasks (like editors).

• A kanban board — A kanban board is a great way to make a content calendar visual. For example, you can sort pieces by production status to understand where your production process is strained most. They do, however, lose more the granular details you might find in a grid.

Choosing a tool that suits you 

Often, content folks use a collection of tools to plan, design, and share content plans with their teams. But ideally, a content calendar should live in one universal, singular source of truth. 

A few things to look for: 

• Collaboration capabilities — Does it allow you to comment on threads, tag people on questions, and assign tasks to keep your team coordinated? 

• Rich field types — Does it give you the option to include field types like links, attachments, photos, and videos to let you store all of your related assets for each piece? 

• Smart linking and relationships — Is it capable of drawing relationships between each piece of content and other production details—like assigning each piece of content to a campaign or channel?  

• Integrations — Can it smoothly integrate into the tools in your existing tech stack, like Google Drive, Hootsuite, and Slack?

• Easy customization — Does it allow each teammate to tailor their view of the calendar to their needs? Can you customize and toggle the way information is shown to make it easier for your team to use? 

Using a platform with flexibility gives you more room to grow and change as your content programs do. The right content calendar tool should be both granularly organized, and easy to use for all of your teammates.

Get the best content calendar for your team

It’s hard to make successful content at scale without a solid content calendar. It’s equal parts strategy map, project tracker, communication tool, and organizer. The platform you use to create it is the foundation of this key tool—so choose carefully! 

Interested in building a content calendar on Airtable? Airtable allows for easy customization, rich field types, over 1,000 integrations, and tons of flexibility so you can tailor your calendar to your workflow (not the other way around).