“You don’t need more time…you just need to decide.”
Seth Godin, the marketing guru, prides himself on this quote. Having written more than 8,000 blog posts a day and published 21 best sellers in 39 languages you must pay attention to what he is saying.
Godin publishes new blog posts every day. His secret? He writes his content in advance. The best way to do that? Having a content calendar planning that helps you produce the type of content you want and need, with the time you have.
Most content strategists, copywriters and social media managers are usually creative, smart and perfectionist people. The problem? We’re tasked with too much and usually work in a short-staffed team.
But here’s some good news: you’re not alone and we wrote this post to help fellows like you to be more productive, organized and creative. We crafted the best content calendar template for you!
What is a content calendar template?
A content calendar template is a framework that lets you plan and organize your content ideas in advance. The best types are the ones offered within a management tool, so you can easily track your blog and social media efforts. A content calendar template helps you monitor content creation progress, identify gaps, and measure performance against set goals.
Types of content calendar templates
There are different formats of content calendars, such as:
- Social media content calendar: focuses on the content strategy for different social media platforms. Pro-tip: Here’s a FREE social media content calendar.
- Blog posts content calendar: target the content creation strategy for blog posts only.
- Email marketing content calendar: centered in the email campaign strategy, for example for drip campaigns.
- Editorial content calendar: most common in media outlets and big websites, an editorial content calendar emphasizes the workflow of the content creation (brainstorming, drafting, editing, reviewing), includes deadlines, authors assigned to each content production, designers involved in the illustration creation process and content producers.
- Content marketing calendar: Think of this type of content calendar as the master of all, it includes the big marketing strategy in all different platforms, embracing social media, blog posts, website, email marketing, infographics and any other type of content directed to the same target audience.
You might also like to check other Hive’s templates for creative teams:
Social Media Content Calendar Template
Paid Marketing Campaign Template
Why do you need a content calendar template?
Your creativity can be better used to create actual content than wasting time figuring out what to post each day. A content calendar can save you time, stress and frustration by facilitating your content planning process.
What are the benefits of having a content calendar template?
Having a content calendar template will help you to:
- Boost efficiency and organization: know upcoming events and relevant content and the right time to create, schedule and publish them.
- Improve content consistency: keep your team focused on the big-picture goals when crafting content aligned with the marketing strategy.
- Strengthen collaboration with your team: facilitate easy communication and partnerships where everyone knows what to work next.
- Accelerate success with data-driven content strategy: track the results of your content engagement, identifying gaps and opportunities to grow reach, by adjusting your content plan.
The best free content calendar in 2024: Hive
Hive’s content calendar template is known by creatives to be the best schedule for content planning. It will save you time when brainstorming, planning, producing, designing and getting reviews and approvals of your final content.
With this template, your marketing team won’t need to scramble over Google Sheets to find content ideas to create and produce your blog posts. You can easily drag and drop assets, color code and label action cards, assign tasks, ping team members, ask for reviews, and see your entire content campaign in an organized editorial calendar view.
The Calendar view is the best starting place for this template, which will help teammates or collaborators see exactly which posts are going up over the coming weeks. Labels have also been applied to denote content location and type.
Hive Content Calendar allows you to outline content themes, set publication dates and times, and track performance metrics for each post, all in one action card. This content calendar also can help you to keep track of your content planning performance. In the Overview tab, you can see visual graphics and reports on overdue, incomplete and finished actions. If you are a freelancer or a marketing agency, use the billable hours budget view to make sure you’re running within the scope and expectations of your clients.
Another benefit of using Hive content calendar template is that you will have access to other key features that will assist in your content creation. For example, you can use Hive Forms to collect information from customers. You will be able to see it all in the overview tab under forms, in your content calendar template. Content strategists can also use Hive Forms to submit design requests to designers, photographers and illustrators. You will also be able to quickly chat or voice message with a teammate using Hive native-chat, an essential feature for highly collaborative teams. You can also spot risks and opportunities in your projects using Hive Analytics to keep tabs on your team’s productivity.
