Content calendars – the why, the what, and the how - Content Company, Inc. - Digital & Content Strategy Consulting for Content-Rich Websites

September 5, 2017
Hilary Marsh
content marketing, content strategy, editorial calendar
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I’ve seen a surge in questions lately about content calendar software. This blog post is by popular request.

Before sharing tool suggestions, I wanted to explore what we are actually managing with a calendar and what a calendar can and can’t help your organization achieve.

What a content calendar can manage: the “what”

A content calendar is really helpful. Organizations sometimes use a calendar for scheduling content for publishing on the organization’s site and sharing via a newsletter or on social media, or for recording content that has been published and/or shared, whether or not it has been scheduled/planned.

The right content calendar depends first on what kind of content you’ll be tracking.

Marketing content (blog posts, social media, etc.) usually:

is scheduled in advance (sometimes written in advance)
is produced by a small group of people with resources to create, test, and measure it
covers a specified set of topics
marches along with predefined frequency
has clear, explicit goals for action/conversion

Business content (program updates, new reports, advancements, press releases, news articles, etc.) usually:

happens with varying frequency
covers a myriad of topics
may be created by many people with different skillsets, with limited time to create it
is not tested
may not be measured
may have one of numerous audiences
may not have an explicit goal

Multimedia content (videos, podcast episodes, etc.) has special concerns:

may be connected with marketing or business content
may have a schedule
often produced by a central team or outside agency
has specific requirements and limitations

Because content varies so much, the calendar needs and capabilities are very different.

Some possible content calendar “requirements” – the “why”

Content calendars began in publishing. Magazines typically have editorial calendars, conceiving the themes for their issues far in advance, to help their advertising staff sell ads on those topics, as well as to establish a focus to use in their editorial planning.

Website management teams use content calendars, primarily to record the business or multimedia content they know they will publish, to “pencil in” expected content, and to record what they have published.

Marketers have started making extensive use of editorial calendars to plan and schedule marketing and/or multimedia content.

The vast majority of content calendar software is built for marketers, and for marketing content. Therefore, many of the online calendar tools offer functionality that serves the needs of marketing content: scheduling, recording metrics data, tracking SEO keywords, etc.

A web team managing business content will almost certainly have different content calendar needs than a marketing team.

When developing your content calendar requirements, you have some questions to answer:

Does our tool need to include the internal workflow for content: creators, fact-checkers, legal approvers, management, etc.?
How much content are we talking about?
How many people will populate the calendar?
How many people will use the information in the calendar but may not contribute to it?
Do we need to record our content plans?
Do we need to use our calendar tool need to incorporate metrics about content, post-publication?

The answers will depend on what other tools you already have and use in-house, as well as your “what” and “why.”

Tools, templates, and frameworks – the “how”

You might think that after defining what you’ll manage with a calendar, and your end goal, it would be relatively straightforward to choose a tool to help you do that. Unfortunately, it’s anything but simple. There are so many tools, and each one has a slightly different focus and set of features. I’ve done my best to list and categorize those tools. (Each category’s listing is in alphabetical order, not implying any preference on my part.)

For the majority of online tools, price depends on quantity of content and/or users of the system.

Please comment below with those not on the list, or your experiences with any of these.