What are the best tools and apps for creating and managing a content calendar?

A content or editorial calendar is a comprehensive tool to cover all aspects of content so there are inherently a variety of needs and wants. A good calendar addresses brand awareness, lead generation, sales nurturing, customer loyalty and a lot more - i.e. fostering partnerships, providing educational content, improving your position in the market and/or with a large client, and so much more. We recommend dividing your calendar into color-coded buckets to ensure you are achieving all your objectives and keeping each top-of-mind.

Again, this should be audiences - plural. A solid content plan with a supporting calendar should address multiple needs and interests. There should be plans to promote culture, attract new employees, encourage existing employees to interact and amplify content, attract new prospects, engage with your sector's community, engage with your focus' community (e.g. cybersecurity, Healthcare IT, etc.), etc. A strong content plan and corresponding calendar will have multiple objectives and by building it out comprehensively, you can ensure multiple needs are being met and you continue to help it evolve.

Content needs to be fresh, exciting, and topical. A content guide (along with a style guide) can help with voice and style, and inform how you use different types of content, which feeds directly into your plan and calendar. While attending a major tradeshow, we live-tweeted it and received comments and likes from Katie Couric, Sony, Google, Microsoft and others because of our engagement and smart use of tagging. This increased followers and engagement, and we used other content to convert these into real leads.

While deciding on content types and selecting platforms, using tools such as https://otter.ai/ to transcript audio notes can be helpful when looking over ideas. Audio notes and transcripts can also be the first step toward developing evergreen content. Developing evergreen content can also help fill up a content calendar for months or years, depending on planning.

A solid content plan should be developed and that will feed your content calendar and help with what kind of template you need. The content plan should address types of content and the objectives for each, and prioritize it, which helps develop the calendar.

One thing that may help you begin filling your content calendar with ideas is to look at recurring themes such as holidays (religious observations, federal government observations) and media/arts/sports events that occur yearly (i.e., NFL Super Bowl, New York Fashion Week, March Madness, Met Gala, etc.) Carve out these dates on your calendar and determine whether you will create content around these events. Remember to include ideas in your calendar specific to your organization (i.e., owner's birthday, company milestones, anniversaries, loyalty sales events, etc.) A great resource is Google Trends at this link: https://trends.google.com/home The data lets you see what is trending and what topics were popular in previous years.

Determining 'pillars' that your organization focuses on is extremely helpful. If you are an IT consulting firm, what are your primary focuses? Cybersecurity, data, cloud, apps, etc. Also, don't forget to leave the availability of topical content needs. Contributing to trends (and especially helping to foster or inventing them) is a solid way to develop an audience, address client needs, and showcase your thought leaders and subject matter experts. Check news sites and social media frequently, and have a team member devoted to topical content.

Your content plan and calendar should be living documents and should be updated a few times a week. This can be so you can add topical content, make sure you are addressing trends within your industry, taking advantage of other content from other sources (someone writes a solid post but you have a different take), improves engagement, and showcases your organization as involved and informed. For instance, our team wanted to be on a prominent podcast important to our industry. We frequently engaged with their social media channels and were always providing comments and ideas. After we had engaged in a friendly debate with one of their hosts, we were invited on to the podcast.