According to Socialpilot, a content calendar is a staple part of any business’s marketing strategy. It creates 1.) Organization 2.) Structure and 3.) Processes to aid one in having a laid-out marketing strategy.

However, a lot of content calendars can get complicated and may add extra layers of complexity within a business. With modern tools such as Facebook Business, Buffer and Hootsuite, the options for content calendars are endless.

“Do I need a content calendar?’

“How does a business choose their content calendar?”

Well, the answer to if you need a content calendar is that it depends.

Do I Need A Content Calendar? – The Bottom Line

A content calendar’s goal is to keep your online marketing channels organized onto one central place so that you have an overview of your content’s overall strategy.

A content calendar is simply that, a piece of organization tool to help you get organized in terms of your content. But what it is, is not is a substitute for creating great content. If you do not get the content piece right, the right organizational system will not do anything.

After consulting with over 10+ companies in this field. I found that the companies that do the best in generating the best results surprisingly enough, do not have a complicated laid out process.

They follow simple, easy to follow rules. Take a look at the three best faces in marketing, Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone and finally Gary Vaynerchuk. Their posting schedules are all over the place, yet they remain the top of the industry.

Tony Robbin’s team posts Instagram content on a near daily basis.

What this shows is that the content planning is not necessarily the key to success, but the content itself is.

Do I Need A Content Calendar? – Massive Action

You can have the best processes in the world and take no action and you will have zero results.

You can have NO processes and do everything by gut instinct while taking massive action and you will find a great deal of results.

You can also have BOTH organization and action, which will generate excellent results

All marketing tools are that, simply tools. It is dependent on the skill of the user for the results it generates. I want you to imagine that you are trying to saw a tree. Give an axe to a woodcutter and he will chop down the tree. Give an axe to a toddler and they will not be able to do much with it. Tools are dependent on the skill of its user.

What’s most important is HOW the user applies the content calendar. Does he actually have actual quality content in place? Do they have an overall marketing big picture strategy? What about data tracking & analytics?

These are things that will determine whether an organizational tool such as a content calendar will succeed in achieving your business results.

What are the Usages of a Content Calendar

A content calendar is used for mainly three reasons:

• Having an organizational method in place to schedule content.

• Having an approval system to quality check your content.

• Having a tool to see the overall big picture marketing strategy.

Great Content Calendar Tools to Use

1. Hootsuite

Hootsuite is an inexpensive choice to get started with. They have integrations with Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn in addition to having a good data tracking system in place. Here are their pricing plans:

2. Planoly

If you have a sizable part of your business on Instagram (mostly e-commerce brands), then Planoly is the place to choose. You can schedule your Instagram posts on your phone or through their desktop app.

3. Buffer

Buffer is also a good alternative to Hootsuite, they have affordable pricing models that carter from small businesses to large enterprises.

Approval Process for Content Creation

Having an approval process plays a huge part in having a content calendar, you want to always have people checking your content to make sure that it is of good quality before launch. A content calendar allows managers & C-suite executives to check the quality of work before a piece of content is launched to the market.

However, I have worked with large corporate companies that have no approval process whatsoever and I have worked with startup companies that have the strictest approval process where one misspelled word can turn the whole project upside down.

An approval process at its core’s job is to catch errors and to ensure the quality of the work. The job of an approval process is NOT to find you clients and customers, it’s simply there to detect errors. On the contrary, having too much of a perfectionistic mindset to detect irrelevant errors can hamper revenue growth because at the end of the day, how good content is determined is still very subjective and can only be determined by your marketplace.

If your marketing strategy is not client-facing, and customer-centric, then having the best approval process will do no good. Your approval process should weed out the errors of the content first, spelling second and finally, grammar last.

As your company grow, having a stricter approval process is needed. However, a content approval process is only as good as its user, for example, if a content launch needs work and the content is rejected, they will need a system where feedback is applied fast and re-sent for approval. If both users of the system (the person doing the approvals and the creator) are not responsive and it is taking forever for them to get things done. Then you’re going to have a business process bottleneck.

After advising many companies on their approval process, what I found was that they either have too many errors slip through the cracks or have a very slow approval process, both ends of the spectrum will affect profitability and gross revenue.

Time to market is key to any business that’s why you want to make sure your approval process can check errors while remaining functionally efficient. From experience, what I found was companies that have approval process issues suffer not from a system issue but a deeper issue of communication.

As mentioned above, a system can only be as good as its user, and an approval process is no different. Usually an issue with approvals is an issue of management in terms of communication. Communication is absolutely vital internally to produce the best quality work possible.. Having a tougher, approval process will not fix any communication issues.

I would recommend for anyone reading this suffering from a dysfunctional approval process to see if these tips work for you:

1. Founders should communicate their mission and objectives thoroughly and clearly.
2. Company authorities should open doors for personal discussion to clear up any miscommunication.
3. If a problem comes up, which it will, then people should be over-communicating to make sure things go through smoothly.
4. Correcting errors should have a clear reason WHY these are specified errors and also a deadline for both parties to touch base again.

So Do I Need A Content Calendar?

The answer is yes, you do need a content calendar. It’s a good place to stay organized and for managers to have a big picture understanding of your overall marketing strategy,

However, it also depends on which stage of the business you are at. Larger enterprises need stronger systems in place while startups may be need looser systems due to their greater need to generate results.

Most important for all level of businesses is still speed of implementation, and this goes the same with content. The goal is to produce as much quality content as possible in the shortest amount of time, if done right, having a system like a content calendar should help produce speed and, in that sense, not be subtracting from the spe ed of implementing marketing projects.

If you find that your organizational system is bogging you down on speed when you are executing your strategies, then it may be time to investigate your overall system in which you are employing and how it fits with your business values, personality and marketing goals.

I hope this article helps and talk to you all soon.