The Uncommon Sense of Content Calendars: Going Beyond Dates

Most content calendars are glorified scheduling tools. Here are 15 practices that go beyond dates to actually drive business results.

1. Always start with, and come back to, the questions your prospects and clients ask.

This is your No. 1 SME assignment: talk to clients. Talk to sales. Too often, we plan ahead and then use our time on the wrong outcomes because the market has shifted. For example, you can meet with VIPs on a regular cadence and then plan a rotation with specific teams.

2. Use the stakeholders’ process as your calendar/compass.

Follow your prospect throughout their buying cycle, creating content that supports sales enablement and aligns with their current stage in the journey. For example, if you are in discovery, produce discovery templates; when in design, provide accessibility guidance, etc.

3. Tell the story, not the solution.

Create personas that bring more humanity to your main journey paths. Are they talking to the cool aunt? Professor product? The helpful coach? All marketing is psychological. Bold creativity can evoke the best emotions.

4. Make it eventful.

Track major industry events and releases, acting as the resident emcee for your organization and your customers. Test your predictive skills by seeing if you can forecast outcomes based on the speakers and topics.

5. Plan for a timely release.

Analytics and ROI discussions may be more relevant near the end of the fiscal quarter and year. Trends for the next year will be in full swing in Q4 but become irrelevant quickly in Q1. That means surveys about trends may be most relevant in Q2, etc.

6. Keep the flow of ideas fresh and invite others to participate.

Share as you go instead of repackaging something stale. Create an events calendar that others can use in multiple formats. Or write about it and make it a series. That’s just one example. Thinking in public is part of the job.

7. Let content emerge.

As you complete one content piece, ask, “What’s next? What does my reader expect and need after this?” This will either confirm that there isn’t a gap or show the next bridge you need to build. You can align with buyer journeys in the traditional funnel, but in a way that feels organic and keeps ideas fresh.

8. The gap to mind is the one that’s closest.

Keep a close eye on your top two competitors; they may be noticing industry trends you are missing. It’s not your job to chase them —hopefully, they are chasing you. You might find ideas in the white space between them or want to develop that space further with expanded thinking.

9. Make everyday content systems into brand bank assets.

Create a question bank for your SMEs and teams with a company-wide wiki. Capture “today’s ideas” with a tag in an Apple Notes logbook. Curation is part of the journey. You can let ideas brew until the timing is just right.

10. Research rules.

Set aside ample time for comprehensive research once or twice a year. Becoming steeped in the industry’s very particular, competitive insights gives special powers. Digging deep gives you the nutrients to keep your business and content strategy healthy.

11. Bring mad scientist vibes.

Develop and test hypotheses, and focus on iterating. We need to be both pretty sophisticated and scrappy at the same time. Luckily, it’s better to be fast and wrong than right and late with most content projects. For example, don’t get too caught up in specific terminology and make broad-scale changes until things can sit for a while. A/B test before losing your niche by getting too deep into it.

12. One metric at a time.

Set one metric and live by it for that audience until you’ve worked through enough hypotheticals to level up. Not all businesses have great guidance, so tread carefully. This is more than a north star—it’s the lens through which you make decisions, possibly for the next year. Organic traffic growth is a good starting point because if you don’t get page visits, none of the other metrics matter. Failure to grow is a true marketer’s nemesis. Understand why your mad science worked or didn’t to escape the black hole of attribution.

13. See what sticks.

Test using the latest AEO strategies and lean into what works. Authority through trusted third-party signals is genuinely a smart content strategy. Topics can be covered holistically, combined, and semantically optimized recursively using generative AI. After a short time in the wild, you can build on the results.

14. “Is the opposite true?”

Make a practice of disagreeing with yourself. Imagine that the one person you were sure was wrong, well, they’re right today. You aren’t a mind reader, so this is almost common sense. When you sit on someone else’s side, you are closer to the problem and can better see their point of view. Hot takes get cold a lot faster when you can’t take the heat.

15. Dig a well to draw from.

Know that it is standard operating procedure to grant whichever side of your brain needs a break freely. When we enjoy what we do, the reader can feel that.

The real irony is that creativity doesn’t actually live on a calendar. You have to continually invite it in.