Now that you know how important it is to schedule out your content and copy, it’s time to talk about the best way to do it — a content calendar!

One of our favorite sayings here at Taylor & Pond is Pause, Plan, Proceed. In order to create a content calendar, you must know what you need and what you’re looking to get out of it. Before you start creating your content calendar, pause and ask yourself the following questions.

What platforms are you prioritizing?

Depending on what your brand or product is, you will have different target social channels. For instance, if you have created a cookbook, you might want to focus heavily on Pinterest; if you are in beauty, you will want to focus heavily on Instagram and Facebook.

What is your brand’s voice?  

When writing copy, keep in mind what your brand’s voice is. Are you using your social channels as a point of information for your customer, or are you using your channel to be fun and engaging? Once you’ve established what your relationship with your customer is going to be on your social channels, it’s then important to keep that same tone of voice throughout all captions and posts.

Which products are you pushing?

In order to drive sales, it’s important to keep your social channels in alignment with your marketing calendar. Utilizing social media is a great way to push products and direct traffic to your website, however, it is futile if you are not promoting your best deals.

Once you have the above information about your brand determined, you can now move on to the actual planning. Depending on your brand needs and personal preferences, you can either make your own content calendar via Excel or use a content calendar template.

More often than not, I like to create my content calendars from scratch. It gives me the freedom to be as organized as I’d like (which is a habit I often take too far) and make everything a perfect fit to what my brand needs. Now it’s time to ask yourself: what fits your brand’s needs? Do you need a simple content calendar that you can find via a template or do you need to create a content calendar yourself?

If you need to create a content calendar yourself, keep reading.

The first step to creating a content calendar yourself via Excel is to lay out an entire week, separating each column with a new date and leaving space for the content below. Once your week is laid out, separate your content by platform (I like to start with Instagram, then Facebook, then Twitter). To keep the social platforms organized in the content calendar, color code each row (i.e. the Instagram row is pink, Facebook is blue, Twitter is yellow). Once you have this laid out, you can now input your content and copy and start planning!

Now comes the last (and most exciting step) of the Plan, Pause, Proceed mantra: you can finally schedule your content! All that’s left is to sit back, relax and watch your engagement take off!

There are many benefits to creating a content calendar for your brand. If you’d like to learn more about scheduling content, check out this blog post.