5 Reasons Why You Need a Content Calendar

You have never-ending hectic days worrying about many urgent matters, the last thing you probably want is to run around last minute before publishing something and fail to notice you have already discussed that topic a few weeks before or that the topic itself is too boring to warrant any type of response.

That is exactly why you need a content calendar, but first…

What is a content calendar?

A content calendar, also known as an editorial calendar, is an organisational schedule for all your content, not only its creation but its publications and distribution as well.

It can be an app, a spreadsheet, or any other means of visually organising the entries that represent your content.

These are the 5 main reasons why we always recommend our clients consider implementing content calendars:

1. Keep Your Audience Engaged

Content marketing is a long-term strategy, and keeping your audience engaged is key.

If you start creating and publishing content in a regular, predictable manner, your audience is far more likely to expect your content and interact with it.

Moreover, content calendars also help to plan a cohesive story and share relevant content that will resonate with your audience, which is key to gaining more organic traffic and positive interactions.

2. Maintain Consistency

These calendars are ideal for planning content in the mid to long term. This means that they are great for planning your next weeks or months of content.

This foresight allows you to carefully dedicate your time to ensure the quality of every single publication because you have an already set workflow that does not have to waste time coming up with new ideas on the fly.

You can take your time to decide and prune those ideas that are below par or that simply are not as great as others seem to be.

3. Align Goals

When the entire team is on board and knows exactly what the game plan is, everyone can start pitching in their own ideas and exchange their views and opinions on certain topics, approaches, styles, etc.

This way, you can make sure there is one unified vision and message, from the creation of the texts, images, or videos, to the marketing, platforms, and even tone and attitude of those sharing it.

Presenting such a unified front helps project the image of a solid, well-established company.

4. Keep Track of Performance

This is another key aspect of content calendars regarding your internal organisation: keeping track of your performance.

You can monitor how long certain pieces take you. The added benefit, in this case, is that it is great to improve your time management and resource allocation skills.

In addition to tracking your current performance, you can also review your performance across time and pinpoint different areas of improvement, lack of content in certain topics, platforms that could do with some extra content, etc.

Calendars offer a bird’s eye view of your entire team’s performance and evolution in time.

5. Reduce Everyday Stress

If you feel like everything is always due for last week and you are running on fumes, the last thing you need is to come up with a brand new, witty piece of content that summarises your marketing strategy and engages your audience. It’s just too much.

This may very well be the biggest benefit/reason to use content calendars in the first place.

As we have mentioned before, they organise your weeks, months, or even year of content. This means they also relieve you of having to constantly stress out about the content you need for that day (because that content was thought out, created, reviewed, and approved days or weeks in advance).

A great example of how content calendars’ scheduling helps reduce stress is with public holidays. It’s so easy to forget holidays when you have such hectic days, and no one would blame you for remembering them just the day before.

Content calendars avoid that issue altogether because by the time the holiday is near you would have already researched, recorded, and created any relevant content you wanted for that particular date, that’s it!

Do you have a content calendar? Would you like to learn more about them ad view some examples? Let us know about any questions or doubts you may have about your upcoming projects; we can’t wait to help you.