How to create a content calendar
Creating a content calendar sounds simple enough. You’re just supposed to write down the topics you’re interested in creating, right?
But what most people don’t realize is that the content you want to create isn’t always aligned with what your audience wants to consume. The best content creators out there spend more time than you might imagine studying what their audience wants, studying what their competition is doing, and understand the true needs of their audience before they create one piece of content.
If you’re running into roadblocks or other challenges of creating a content calendar, this is the guide for you.
After you’ve read this guide, you’ll know:
What your audience truly wants to consume
How to create a yearly content calendar
The tools to use for audience research, and competitive analysis
How to organize and templatize your content creation to make it easy to manage
1) Lets start with a template.
Your template needs specific info that you will then go and populate with relevant information.
Sample info:
Titles
Themes
Due dates
Live dates
Responsibility
Resources
Links
Key info points
Goal of each piece of content
Speakers / panelist / host names
[link to spreadsheet template lead magnet]
The template should assist you in organizing your content. It will be the “single source of truth”, so that your entire team can see it. Airtable is great for this, as is google sheets. But it needs to be accessible for everyone.
2. Topic research.
Now that you have a template to populate, its time to research topics.
2.a Start with what worked for you in the past.
Look at your traffic and engagement data to figure out what performed the best. What sparked people to comment, like, or share? What created the most content downloads? What Linkedin post drove the most traffic to your website? Write these down, but not in your template yet.
2.b Next, competitor research.
Which topics are your competitors repurposing in their conferences or webinars each year?
Go to their conference websites, and identify recurring topics. This will give you an idea of what the perennial seller topics are. This shows that people showed up at the conference and view this topic every year.
Expert tip: use AHREFS to understand what topics are popular on their websites.
(AHREFS info about contentmarketinginstitute.com)
This shows you how much traffic they have on a monthly basis (102,500 page views), and how much traffic goes to pages on their site(26,000 visits to “what is content marketing” page).
You can see the blog posts that get the most traffic, and the top keywords (content marketing, CMI, etc.) that their site is using.
Action item: Take note of the topics you are able to create content on.
3. Customer research
Now we know the successful content our competitors creating.But, we are still speculating. So, next we research what our customers want to hear about.
This isn’t as easy as asking them “what do you want to learn about?”. It may not yield any quality information, because it will be from the top of their head.
Instead, we ask them what their challenges are.
But we do so in a very specific way.
The Mom Test, a book by Rob Fitzpatrick, outlines how to ask questions that yield good answers.
Imagine you have an app. You ask your mom if she will use it, and tell you what she thinks of it. Of course she will love it - she loves you and doesn't want to hurt your feelings!
But this isn't the type of feedback you want.
In the mom test, you ask not about whether they liked a piece of content, but general info about their past workweek.
You need to figure out how your solution (content), will fit into their daily pain points ("I don't know this, but I want to learn about it".).
Rules of thumb for asking questions of clients, according to The Mom Test.
Talk about their life instead of your idea.
Ask about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future.
Talk less and listen more.
Take notes on the conversations you have with clients. These will inform your content.
4) Begin to craft your calendar
Ok, you’ve analyzed what your content has done, done industry research, and spoken with customers. It is now time to craft the content into a calendar.
Identify the broad themes of the content you’ve written down. Refine these into 4 themes that you can use throughout the year. Having 4 themes will help you create content for each quarter. These 4 themes should inform your monthly and weekly content as well.
5) Create sub-topics using questions.
Now that you have your broad themes, you need to identify questions your audience has about these themes.
Do this by analyzing the questions people asked on a webinar or in your calls with clients, by scanning social media (Quora is great for figuring out which questions people are asking). Or you can use Answer The Public to figure out what people are asking about your topic.
If your content is Retirement, type that topic into Answer The Public. You'll be able to to understand the Who's, What Why, When How, and Versus content for the topic.
Your content will answer these questions throughout the year.
If the question is “how to create a retirement plan?”, that is the title of your blog, webinar, or youtube video.
Tools to create questions:
Another way to understand what questions to answer is to use Chat GPT, Google’s Bard, or other generative AI tool. A good prompt would be “What are questions people have about [your topic]. See what it comes up with, and edit as needed. Use your judgment and cross-reference with research to identify which topics are relevant to your industry.
7) Refine your template.
Now, that you’ve identified which topics your audience wants, its time to templatize.
Continue to fill in the details of your template. With more rich information, your final template will begin to take shape. In this stage estimate how long each process will take: 3 weeks to write, edit & publish a blog post? Re-verse engineer what you will need done and when.
Once you’ve put in the dates, consider the holiday schedule for your content. Are you running up against thanksgiving or the holiday party? Adjust as needed. Here is a good list of holidays. Also consider the industry “days” or “months”. Is Tax day big in your industry? Consider this when planning your themes as well.
Finally, if your content is serial, put it in order.
8) Calendarize
Now that you’ve written out your template, it is time to calendarize.
This means putting it in YOUR calendar to get the work done. It does not men to print off the calendar from google docs.
To help yourself achieve small milestones, hold time on your calendar to do the work.
Include milestones so that you stay on track. Revise if you consistently run into a problem when creating your content.
Creating a content calendar is often a daunting task, especially if you are starting with a blank slate, or if you aren’t really sure what your audience wants.
But by using a template and following a simple process, you can make a well-planned content calendar that is filled with content that has been proven to engage your audience.