What's the best way to create a content calendar for your thought leadership platform?

2 Know your audience and channels

The next step is to understand who your target audience is and where they consume content. You need to create content that resonates with their needs, challenges, interests, and preferences, and that matches the format and tone of the platforms they use. For example, if your audience is mainly on LinkedIn, you might want to create long-form articles, infographics, or videos that showcase your expertise and insights. If your audience is more active on Twitter, you might want to share short tips, quotes, or links to relevant resources. Researching your audience and channels will help you tailor your content to their expectations and behaviors.

3 Brainstorm and prioritize topics

Now that you have a clear purpose, goals, audience, and channels, you can start generating ideas for your content topics. You want to create content that showcases your knowledge, experience, and opinions on the issues that matter to your field and your audience. You can use various sources to inspire your topics, such as industry trends, news, events, research, questions, feedback, or personal stories. Once you have a list of potential topics, you need to prioritize them based on their relevance, urgency, value, and uniqueness. You can use a scoring system or a matrix to rank your topics and decide which ones to focus on first.

4 Plan your content format and frequency

The next step is to decide what type of content you want to create for each topic and how often you want to publish it. You can choose from different formats, such as blog posts, podcasts, ebooks, webinars, case studies, or interviews, depending on your goals, audience, and channels. You also need to consider how much time and resources you have to create and distribute your content, and how much content your audience can consume and engage with. You can use a content mix model or a content pyramid to plan your content format and frequency, and balance your content quality and quantity.

5 Create your content calendar

Once you have your topics, formats, and frequency, you can create your content calendar using a tool or a template that suits your needs. A content calendar is a visual representation of your content plan that shows when and where you will publish your content. It helps you organize your content workflow, assign tasks and deadlines, and track your progress and performance. You can use a spreadsheet, a calendar app, a project management tool, or a content marketing software to create your content calendar, and customize it with the details you need, such as title, description, keywords, channel, status, or metrics.