If you want to streamline your content marketing, consider switching from posting spontaneously to creating an editorial calendar. This approach allows you to plan content production in advance, ensuring you have a clear, month-by-month view of what will be published.

The concept of an editorial calendar originally comes from journalism, where magazines have long published content schedules to help PR professionals align pitches with upcoming themes. Today, however, content calendars are just as essential in the world of content marketing.

Considering a marketing calendar to guide your content strategy this year? Here are several compelling reasons why it could be a smart move for your business.

How to create a free content calendar?

Creating a marketing calendar to organize your content doesn’t require a big investment—or any of your marketing budget, for that matter. A simple Google Sheet is a good start to building a content calendar. Alternatively, you can use project management tools like Asana, where you can easily drag and drop content across the task board as your plans change.

Most project management tools allow users to assign deadlines and designate team members for each task, making it easy for marketing managers to track the entire content workflow at a glance. Upgrading your marketing project management doesn’t require a financial investment—you can enhance organization and efficiency with these tools at no cost.

Keep Your Team Aligned and On Track with Content Calendars

If you’ve ever been part of a busy marketing team, you know how quickly competing campaigns and projects can overwhelm the schedule. Creating a social media calendar in this environment can be challenging, even under the best circumstances. If you’re tasked with organizing a set of marketing tools to keep everything on track, be sure to include a content calendar app or planner as one of your essentials.

Once you have a content calendar in place, it will help steer your team’s efforts and ensure that your content creation remains on a consistent schedule. The key to building and engaging an audience is consistently delivering high-quality content. By planning your content with a calendar, you make this much easier to achieve.

Create Content in Batches

With a solid content calendar and marketing campaign software to guide your efforts, you can quickly see what’s coming up on the production schedule. This approach is far more efficient than creating content on the fly and publishing as it becomes available, making it much easier to batch content creation and stay ahead of deadlines.

If you’re collaborating with agencies and freelancers to streamline the content creation process, a content calendar allows you to manage them more efficiently. For example, working with an agency may allow you to avoid costly monthly retainers by hiring resources only when necessary, rather than committing to long-term contracts.

Increase Transparency Across Your Team with a Content Calendar

While the marketing team will usually focus more on content marketing than other departments, it’s equally important for a marketing project manager to keep other teams and departments informed. Here are some of the teams and stakeholders who might be interested in seeing the content the marketing team has developed and planned:

• Product managers
• Sales team
• Communications team
• Executive team members assigned to set the overall strategy

Achieve Channel Alignment Through a Unified Content Calendar

If you have different team members working on areas like social media and your company blog, using a content calendar can help improve coordination and ensure alignment in messaging across the organization.

Content calendars and social media calendars can either be separate documents or combined into a single planning tool. Integrating a social media calendar template into a broader content plan helps ensure that posts across various networks align with the messaging and target audience reached through the blog and other channels.

Elevate Your Content Quality with a Strategic Content Calendar

As with many aspects of life, content is more effective when it’s planned rather than created on the fly. Marketing project managers should make sure they have the right tools, potentially exploring alternatives to plan content in an organized way and ensuring coordination across different channels.

For marketing teams with limited budgets, the good news is that many social media and content planning tools, including options similar to monday.com, are available at little to no cost. Well-planned and coordinated content is also more visible to other stakeholders within the organization, and better coordination leads to better results.