An Engineers Guide to Building A Content Calendar

Whether you're just starting out with content strategy or you’ve an approach in place, it’s always a great idea to revisit the content calendar and make sure it’s up to date, innovative and effective. After all, you've got more competition than ever.

Do you know what is your content team posting, sharing, blogging coming week? How about next month, next year? Over the years, one challenge that I’ve faced with marketers is being organized in their professional life. For me being organized from a content marketers perspective means organizing the content being produced daily, weekly, monthly and keeping necessary stakeholders in the know. To give you an example, if a company relies heavily on a central design team, and different teams collaborate with the help of a program management team, it is the responsibility of the content team to keep all these teams in the know ahead of time.

So today I am going to offer my best advice into content calendars. I’ll show you an example of a functioning content calendar, so that you know what I am talking about. Since the content strategy of a company is unique to its offering, I will keep this post limited to just the operational aspect of building a content calendar. Below are some straightforward steps to building a content calendar:

1. List down the type of content you’d like your content team to produce and create different worksheet for each of them in a spreadsheet. What that means is create a worksheet for blogs, a worksheet for case studies, a worksheet for ebooks and so on. Below are some examples of the content pieces you may want to write on:

• Blogs [Stories around proprietary/exceptionally exciting features, data driven stories, listicle, leaderboards etc]
• Case Studies
• Ebooks
• Guest posts [On your blog or on the blog of an authority/influencer in your space]
• Event driven stories [Stories around events in your industry, stories around events like commemorative days, sporting events, festivals etc]

2. Under each of these worksheets for different content types, create the following columns:

• Content type, content title, publish date, trigger date [this is a date you’d want your content marketer to start working on a particular content piece] days to prepare [this is the time a content marketer and the design team would take to generate content, create design and review the final content piece], approver, reason for approval, proposed by, owner and owner id [Refer: screenshot below]

Notice the columns Calendar event created and Unique id, I’ll take that up in the coming sections of the blog. Also, notice how the trigger date is calculated with the help of a simple formula. Create worksheets with similar format for each content type and fill all this information each month/week when you are planning your content calendar.

3. Automating reminders to each content owner and mapping these stories to your company calendar:

It is unrealistic to expect each content marketer to remember the stories he/she needs to publish each month and it is extremely difficult to remind each person of their publish date as a team grows large. Hence automating reminders and mapping these stories on your google calendar is extremely necessary, for all stakeholders to be able to view it on a calendar, rather than having to open a google spreadsheet each time [we all know how hard it gets to remember the name of each spreadsheet, so reduce the pain and map it to a company calendar]. Follow the steps below:

• Install a google spreadsheets add-on: ‘Add-reminders’ and setup the reminder in the following manner
• Map the deadline column to the trigger date
• Send reminders hours before/after the trigger date.
• Choose the Owner ID under the notify people options and customize your email body under the customize the emails sent option.

This will ensure each of your content marketers receive a reminder n days before the content is to go live. Note, you need to setup different reminders for each worksheet. Its laborious but helpful. Hack: Use Query to collect information from all the worksheetss and add it to a single worksheet and create a single reminder.

Now coming to the part of mapping each of these stories to your company calendar, simply go to Tools > Script Editor > Create a new project and copy the following script

The script simply creates a menu in your spreadsheet [Refer screenshot below] and maps all the stories to your central calendar [Refer screenshot], where all the stakeholders can access it and be prepared to contribute well in advance. As you’d see the line 12 of the script prints a value Y under the column ‘Calendar event created’ each time the event is created on the calendar. This serves to check an event is not created twice and also ensures an event is mapped to the calendar.

Quick tips

How to setup a new calendar and grab a calendar ID

• In Google Calendar, go to My calendars -> Create new calendar.
• Name the calendar whatever you want (we named ours “Content Stories”).
• Share the calendar with everyone in your organization. Managers should be able to Make changes AND manage sharing whereas employees should just be able to See all event details.
• Click Create Calendar. Your calendar should now appear under My Calendars.
• Click the drop-down next to the calendar and select Calendar settings.
• Under the Calendar address section find the Calendar ID.

There are a bunch of other views that can be created to organize your content calendar. Write to me on obanmol10@gmail.com for any questions. Founders of Saas startups, selling globally out of India - I love to discuss my experience of growth at two Saas Startups [Tracxn, Wingify]. Setup time with me here for a quick 30 minutes chat.

Happy learning!