Clear content planning with SeaTable
Successful online communication requires a well thought-out content marketing strategy. Social media and blog posts thrive on high-quality content that is appropriate for the target audience. But even the most well thought-out content strategy fails if your editorial plan is confusing and you can't meet your deadlines or posting frequency. Expensive content marketing tools or dull, functionally limited Excel spreadsheets make life difficult for you. Our free content calendar is a user-friendly tool to schedule all topics, tasks and responsibilities in time. Whether on Instagram, Facebook or your own blog - with our content scheduling template, no post will go missing anymore. All deadlines for important publications will be met in the future. You always keep track of your upcoming and ongoing posts and can efficiently play out content across all your channels.
Let's take a look at the example of a photoblog to see how SeaTable's content calendar is built and what useful features are integrated.
Structure of the content calendar
Our SeaTable template for successful content planning for your online marketing team consists of three linked tables. Let's take a closer look at all three tables:
Table Content Production
In the table "Content production" you can enter headline, sub-headline and images of your articles. In the second column, you can adjust the status of your projects at any time using a single selection. The "Section" column assigns your articles to the topic fields you have defined. So that you don't miss any more deadlines, you can also enter the corresponding deadlines for the draft template and the publication date here. You can also store the links to the articles already published on the blog. This way, your entire marketing team has direct access to past articles.
Table Social Schedule
Playing on social media channels is essential these days. The "Social Schedule" table gives you an overview of which posts are planned on which channels. Be it Instagram, Facebook or Twitter, all channels want to be played. Simply group your table here by platform type and keep track of everything.
- Each platform has different requirements regarding the post length, which is why you can always check in the "Character Count" column whether your posts are the right length. The maximum number of characters or the optimal post length per platform can be found here again clearly listed.
- In the Related Stories column, you can select the post related to the post thanks to a link to the Content Production table.
- Also in this table, your marketing team can deposit the appropriate links to the post and the web post.
Table Freelancer Timesheets
Different topics require different expertise and authors. To keep an overview of the responsibilities for your planned articles, the "Freelancer Timesheet" table is useful. We assume here that you don't write all articles in-house - but with your own staff, the process could also be mapped quite easily.
- Your freelancers are assigned to the corresponding articles here.
- In the "Attachments" column, you can easily upload the finished texts so that the entire team can access them at any time.
- The required hours for writing the contribution can also be entered here. Through the stored hourly rate, the freelancer's salary is calculated immediately.
Different views for the perfect overview of your content planning
SeaTable gives you a view of the data tailored to your exact needs through different views that instantly give you the information you want in focus. To change the view, simply click on the drop-down menu in the upper left corner. Here you can also create new views yourself. In addition to the main view of our content calendar, the "All content by section" view gives you an overview of all posts, sorted by topic. This helps you to see immediately which topic area is getting particularly much attention and which should be served with additional posts, if necessary. You can also analyze strategic questions: Why are there so many posts in the Beginners section? Are these perhaps particularly popular because my target group consists mainly of photography beginners?
The "Production Status" view provides you with an overview of the status of the planned contributions. For this purpose, the table is grouped according to the "Status" column.
Finally, the "Content by Author" view gives you an overview of the posts, grouped by the responsible authors.
Content planning made easy with SeaTable
Our free content planning template is ready to use right out of the box. Check out our photo blog example case to better understand the features of the calendar and then customize and use it for your campaign and post scheduling. Planning your content with annoying, unattractive Excel tables is over. SeaTable gives you different column types so you can integrate any type of information. Streamline your online marketing team's workflow and keep track of your content marketing efforts. Do you want to optimize other processes of your marketing team with SeaTable? Maybe you can find more useful templates here.
Do you always have all important holidays and action days in mind when planning your content? If not, this free calendar provides an overview of all important days in 2020!