For a lot of content marketers, their biggest challenge when it comes to managing their content is keeping track of everything. My go-to solution for this is to create a content calendar.

A content calendar can lay out everything and give you a big picture overview of your content strategy. At the same time, it can help make sure that you publish everything in a timely and consistent manner. From experience, a content calendar has proven to be one of the more useful things in my marketing toolbox. Here are some useful tools that I use to create them:

1. Google Sheets

Content calendars often involve a lot of moving parts. In many cases, they involve multiple topics and angles to be published across different platforms, employing varying strategies based on unique objectives. That’s a lot of things to keep track of off the top of your head.

To streamline everything, I use Google Sheets. You can easily customize your calendar according to your specific needs and make sure that you’re able to seamlessly collaborate with team members. It’s easily accessible by anyone in your team, familiar so people can easily use it, and minimizes all too common versioning issues.

2. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a game-changer for many content marketers. It allows you to discover high performing, high engagement content so you can find the most relevant articles, infographics, videos, and other forms of content that will engage your specific audience.

It’s a great tool for research purposes and significantly reduces research time so you can easily curate material for your social media platforms or get inspiration for your own content.

3. Trello

I use Trello to keep track of tasks and to-dos that different team members have to stay on top of. It’s a pretty straightforward platform that provides a full picture overview of who’s in charge of what and when tasks are due.

It’s a great way to track important dates and deadlines that are relevant to my content. Presenting it all in a simple format allows for keeping everything organized while following each progress stage.

4. Social Scheduling Tools

Social scheduling tools are an integral part of my content calendar process. They allow you to automate one of the most tedious and time-consuming tasks of the content calendar process. No need to log in and log out of different social media platforms and manually post everything. You can simply schedule everything to publish at a specific time and day. I personally love Buffer for being straightforward and easy to use, but there are a lot of other options available.

While content calendars are customizable, I found that Hubspot’s content calendar template roundup is a great place to start. From here, you can use the examples given as a guide and figure out what sections you actually need and adjust accordingly.

Hope my answer helps! If you have questions, leave me a comment below or reach out to me via Leadspanda.