How to create a content calendar: 10 steps + template

Creating content can be fun, but staying on top of each content project can be overwhelming—here is where creating a content calendar comes in handy.

There are lots of different content formats, channels, stakeholders, and campaigns to keep track of. But the right content calendar processes and tools can keep you organized and focused on what matters most: creating content that educates, informs, and inspires customers and prospects.

How to create a content calendar

This step-by-step guide will help you create an effective content calendar.

1. Define your marketing goals

Before you create a content calendar or even get started on content creation, first outline your content goals. What do you want your content to achieve—brand awareness, leads, sales, community engagement, or support for a product launch? Clear goals will shape your content strategy and editorial calendar. For more on content planning, check out this guide to content strategy.

2. Identify your target audience

Understand who you’re speaking to, and ensure you’re aligned with stakeholders on the core audience for each piece of content. A B2B audience on LinkedIn will need different content than a Gen Z audience on TikTok. Executives and practitioners consume different content formats on different channels.

3. Audit your existing content

A content audit can help you identify content gaps, supporting more efficient content workflows and smarter content marketing operations.

First, review existing blog posts, posts, or videos. What types of content performed well? Which content formats performed well on different channels? For example, some content pieces might drive lots of traffic when included in social media posts, but other content pieces might be more effective as a downloadable guide behind a lead-generation gate. Furthermore, content has a lifecycle—what content could use a light refresh vs. a complete revamp? New product features, new branding, or new company messaging are all reasons you might want to revamp or refresh content. Some pieces of evergreen content might still resonate with your audience, too. You will likely find that you don’t need all new content to meet your goals.

4. Choose your content channels

Identify where your content will live—whether that’s social media, blog posts, newsletters, or a mix of all three. Don’t forget, you can maximize impact by repurposing content across multiple platforms to get more value from each piece.

You can use a social media calendar template to stay on top of your social media strategy. For extra efficiency, look for calendar software that comes with social media scheduling tools so your posts can be published automatically.

5. Select content types

Mix up content production with articles, videos, infographics, podcasts, and case studies to keep your audience engaged. Color-coded assignments can help differentiate content types for teammates creating content and stakeholders viewing the calendar.

6. Establish a publishing cadence

Map out your publishing schedule, providing visibility into how often you will post, due dates, publish dates, timelines, accountable content creators, future content coming down the pike, and more. For example, your cadence might be daily for social, two or three times per week for blog posts, and monthly for newsletters that support email marketing efforts.

Regardless of your cadence, ensure you set expectations with internal stakeholders and set realistic expectations based on resources and relative impact to the business. A stakeholder may request a blog series and 10 social media posts, but that may not always align with the content strategy or content marketing best practices. Content creators can play a powerful role by advising stakeholders in these instances.

7. Brainstorm content ideas

Save time to brainstorm content ideas tied to your goals, audience needs, and seasonal trends. Keep a running list in your calendar and schedule regular time in a month or quarter to collaborate as a content team or across the marketing team. The content team might be responsible for the content calendar, but other stakeholders might have great ideas and say in what gets created. To keep responsibilities clear, use a RACI to identify who is responsible, accountable, consulting, or informed about each content project.

8. Assign responsibilities

If you’re working with a team, identify who is writing, designing, editing, and publishing each piece of content within the content calendar. Collaborative and specialized tools for content marketing software make this step much easier. Some tools can even automate some of the tasks. Many of these tools enable team members to view all project stakeholders and workflow steps at a glance or schedule posts ahead of time.

9. Build your content calendar

Use a tool, like Airtable, to map out dates, channels, topics, and owners. Make it visual and easy to update with a ready-made content calendar template. It might be tempting to adapt Google Sheets, Google Calendar, or other calendar tool for your content calendar, but a robust calendar that accomplishes everything we’ve discussed calls for a specialized project management tool—far beyond Excel spreadsheets. For example, more sophisticated tools come with integrations and integrations with your social media accounts and social media content calendar.

10. Review and optimize

Track performance metrics against your goals to optimize your content operations. Common content performance metrics include consumption metrics like traffic, time on page, and SERP ranking for SEO content. Common conversion metrics include downloads, signing up for a demo, or signing up to speak to sales. Based on these metrics, optimize your content strategy and refine your content calendar over time, producing what resonates most with your audience across channels and content types. This helps ensure that only high-quality content makes it in front of customers and prospects.

Content calendar best practices

The content calendar is a dynamic resource supporting digital marketing efforts for a business. It can get overwhelming when it’s not organized properly. To get the most out of your calendar:

For scaling teams, explore enterprise content marketing strategies.

Get started with the Airtable content calendar template

There’s no need to start your content calendar from scratch. We’ve created a ready-to-use template you can customize for your own content marketing needs to streamline the process. It’s designed to help you stay on track, collaborate easily, and keep your content pipeline full and visible.

Get the template.