Content Calendar Template
Establishing a great marketing strategy for your business is a key first step, no matter which market you operate in. Whether you’re marketing a product or service, knowing exactly how and why you’re going to show it off to the world is an essential step to achieve long term health and growth. At Hive, we believe in doing everything we can to support those ambitions, and hopefully you’re well on your way to a strong, robust marketing plan utilizing our suite of management tools. The next step on that path is to start looking at the practical implementation of your plan. When do you want to see it implemented? Can it be broken down into smaller, bite-sized chunks that can be organized individually?
To answer those questions we’ve built a custom content calendar template to help you ensure a smooth transition from concept to reality. Because Hive is the perfect platform for developing a strong content calendar, you’ll find this template easy to implement and use — it minimizes fuss and maximizes results. Using our tools you’ll be able to break your marketing plan down into its component parts, assign them specific categories and sort those categories by status so you know exactly what is ready to be rolled out and what you might need a little more time to develop. These categories are easy to use and work directly with your in-project calendar to keep you on track to hit that important deadline.
Once you’ve set your categories, you can populate your calendar with specific content items that need to be achieved at specific times. From there, when you have a general timeline established, you’ll be able to assign each task to help your team know what they need to focus on. The “Ideas”, “Research” and “Promoted” sections will help you structure your plan in a way that makes sense to everyone that has a stake in the project, and concepts assigned here can be tagged for easy reference, assigned to authors directly, and even broken down further into sub-actions so you have total control over the project pace.
When your team gets started, be sure to make good use of Hive’s chat functionality to keep everyone connected directly with the project, without having to tab between programs. This not only enables team members to coordinate with each other quickly and easily, but also encourages creative collaboration with the various drag and drop actions available. Want to know what a co-worker thinks of your work? Drop it right into the live chat to talk it over without having to leave your desk — you can stay totally dialed into the task at hand.
If you want to keep an eye on how your team is progressing and potentially fix any resource allocation problems, don’t forget you have access to the team view, which provides a heads up display of who is doing what, and when. This works great with Hive Chat — you can quickly and efficiently pull up what every member of your team is doing and discuss it directly with them using the chat functionality. This makes it quick and painless to organize any progress reports that you might need to collect.
Staying on top of so many moving parts can be difficult, especially across a large project timeline. Timelines can also change, and output can shift depending on factors out of your control. A skilled people manager will understand the importance of talking to your team to try and correct any issues, ensuring not only their happiness but also the overall health of the project. Hive chat makes that kind of outreach easy, but to spot when and where it’s needed you’ll want to take advantage of Hive Analytics to keep tabs on your teams productivity and output across the timeline of your project, so you can spot and correct any problems before they have a negative impact.
There are a few perspectives you view your content calendar template through to make sure you’re getting the most out of it. Here’s a rundown of the important viewing modes to utilize so you always know what is going on:
- The Gantt Chart is a simple, but incredibly effective way of laying out long term goals. Using this on a template like the content calendar is vital, as it makes establishing your timeline and laying out actions and deadlines incredibly simple. Once you’ve mapped everything out, you’ll quickly find that deadlines, due dates and dependencies are easy to manage in an efficient manner, so you never feel like you’re under too much pressure.
- The Kanban Board is your go-to view when you want a roundup of what to expect in the short term. If you’re expecting work to be completed to meet a deadline you’ll be able to tell at a glance who is doing it, what elements have already been completed, and when they expect to be finished. Proper weekly management is essential to meet the timeline requirements of a content calendar so getting to grips with this view is an essential step along the way.
- The Table View offers you an in depth snapshot of your day to day work, perfect for keeping tabs on your daily tasks. Not only is this great for day to day business, but it’s also a great help when you need to diagnose any issues, as you’ll be able to tell at a glance where your resources are being allocated.
Mapping out your marketing plan across a content calendar can be a daunting task. Implementing that plan in a timely, efficient and high quality way can be even harder. We hope that this template and the Hive toolset together can smooth out that process, saving you valuable time that you can use to make your plans a reality, and allowing you to take your business to the next level.
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