— David McCarthy, Chicago-based content marketing strategist

[sharminsumu]

Use an editorial calendar to organize your work
Creating a content calendar is the most effective way to organize all the information gathered in the previous steps. Use it to plan content marketing campaigns, design topic clusters, and implement content production.

Some of the key elements to include in your calendar include topics, keywords, target dates, titles, categories or clusters, content formats, target personas, and success metrics, among others.

Download this free Content Calendar Template Kit to complete this step.

You can also use Semrush’s Marketing Calendar tool , which student data works like a collaborative editorial calendar. It lets you track your progress in real-time and integrates with Google Analytics.

Semrush Marketing Calendar
Make sure to share your content calendar with the entire company. Ideally, you should actively involve other teams to enrich and improve the calendar. For example, customer-facing teams (like sales). Encourage them to add their ideas to make your content more customer-centric.

This can help position the (content) team not as a “group of writers and grammar nerds,” but as a critical part of the company’s pipeline and revenue-generating engine.


Plan content production
Try to find ways to make content production more efficient from the start. You’ll create better content while reducing organizational chaos. As you plan your content strategy, think about some high-level solutions that can improve your content production cycles and save you resources. Start by: