How to Plan Your SaaS Content Calendar

As you introduce your SaaS product to more of your targeted customers, it gets more crucial to put out relevant and high-quality content so you can stand out among your competitors, drive continuous customer engagement, and grow your revenue.

How do you achieve this, you ask? By creating an effective content calendar for SaaS applications.

A well-organized content calendar makes for a good website, and a good website becomes more than a digital brochure for your SaaS business. It determines your identity, integrity, and how well you’d communicate with your audience in ways they’d quickly understand. But, of course, the same is true with the rest of your digital platforms.

In this article, we will guide you through the process of creating and using a result-driving content calendar for your SaaS organisation.

What is a content calendar?

A content calendar outlines, organizes, and contains your schedule of current and future content for publishing. It consists of all the posts your team needs to create, the ideas you’re forming, where and when they will be posted, and all the topics your team needs to cover.

A good content calendar will help you consistently generate high-quality content that stays true to your company’s digital voice, personality, and goals. It’s more than just a calendar; it becomes an integral process in content production that’s adaptable to your business needs. Once a calendar is put in place, your team will be able to perform content batching more efficiently.

Creating a valuable calendar is an investment. But we’re telling you: it’s worth it. In the next section, we’ll evaluate some of the main reasons why you should be using a content calendar for your SaaS content.

The benefits of using a Content Calendar

Nowadays, content is king when it comes to marketing your product. Whether your content is paid or organic, placing them all in a content calendar will help you see which works well.

Here’s how successfully integrating a content calendar into your workflow will benefit your team:

1. Streamline content production

A content calendar connects your team to everything they need to create technically accurate and engaging content. In addition, it also makes it easier to link your posts together so they can easily find related topics.

2. Organize your content

Content calendars organize every asset related to all your content. This way, your team sees which tasks they should prioritize.

3. Content is less likely to be delayed

Your calendar helps keep track of your deadlines and serves as a reminder of which content is due for publishing.

4. Better results with content

Planning your content enables your team to devise creative ways to increase your post’s value. The more customers find value in your content, the better its engagement.

5. More consistency in content creation

A good content calendar helps you stay on track with your posting schedule, brand voice, and content topics.

6. Increase customer retention

Your calendar will help you make sure that your viewers get what they subscribed for. More satisfied readers help you establish your brand’s authenticity and, more importantly, keep them coming back.

7. Better positions in the search rankings

Planned content has more chances to increase its ranking in SERPs because it went through adequate polishing and SEO checking before publishing.

8. Brainstorming

Because a content calendar promotes task visibility across different teams, they can share their ideas in real-time without having to call or set a meeting.

Now that you know how vital a SaaS content calendar is, you have to learn how to create one the right way. Want to know exactly what to include in a content calendar? Keep reading to find out.

What do you need to include in your content calendar?

There are different styles you can use for your SaaS calendar. Some of the more common examples are the calendar layout and the Kanban board layout.

A calendar layout is a calendar view with all content schedules and tasks plotted for each day. A Kanban board, on the other hand, divides your content into its status – to do, in progress, etc. – helping you know which task to prioritize.

In general, an effective content calendar for SaaS needs the following fundamental features:

• Task/assignment date
• Title or topic of the assignment
• Assignee
• Status (pending, in progress, completed)
• Supporting content

While these are staples to most content calendar layouts, you can tweak your calendar to suit your team’s needs.

It is also important to know why you’re making a content calendar so you know that each step you take is purposeful and not a waste of time. Align your team’s vision by asking these questions to help specify the features your calendar needs:

• What are the long-term goals you want your content calendar to achieve?
• What keywords do you want your content to rank for in Google?
• Who are your target audiences, and what type of content do they like?
• How often should you publish content on social media, email marketing, and blogs?
• Who will be responsible for creating the blog posts or writing articles that will go on social media, and where will they be published (e.g., company blog, LinkedIn, Twitter)?

Additionally, use the tips we have below to optimize your content calendar.

7 Tips for Creating a Content Calendar

All effective content calendars follow similar principles. While it increases the chances for successful content planning, you can still encounter impediments along the way. Always remember to view hurdles as room to improve your strategies.

Here are some of the best tips to create a helpful content calendar that would increase your team’s collaboration, productivity, and efficiency.

1. Choose a platform to run your content calendar

The best SaaS organizations plan their content ahead of time to maintain control over their content marketing strategy. The first step to accomplish this is to find the right platform and tool for your company.

You can create your own content calendar or use calendar apps. Some of the tools you can use for the content production calendar are the following:

Excel/Google Sheets

Google Sheets is the most basic tool you can use to create your content calendar. There are many templates on the internet that you can use as well, but they generally offer limited task-tracking capabilities.

Asana

Asana is a work management platform. It has a lot of customization features you can play with to further organize and track each task’s progress. For small organizations with up to 15 people, you can also opt to try out their free version.

Airtable

Airtable is a more comprehensive task management platform that offers different custom reports, a navigable and easy-to-manage interface, and different workspace templates for all-around use. It has everything you need to plan, assign, and track your tasks.

With the right platform, everything would be seamless, saving your team’s time so they can focus on content creation. For bigger companies, we recommend automated apps that have rich features.

Generally, we recommend that you look for the following features when trying to find the platform that’s perfect for your team:

• Easy to use
• Easy to collaborate
• Able to track progress
• Able to see changes made

2. Create a production workflow

A content calendar works hand in hand with a production workflow. Simply put, a calendar lays out the step-by-step process of scheduling all your content, while your production workflow is the step-by-step process of creating each media/content.

With a functional production workflow, your team will be able to enjoy these benefits:

• Consistency – An established workflow yields more consistent and structured content.
• High-quality content – If your team is familiar with the production process, they can work more swiftly while producing better-quality content
• Accountability – With a production workflow implemented, you will know who is the most qualified to take on each task
• Accurate tracking – Track where each delegated task currently is on the production workflow.
• Visibility for the whole team – Your team can identify pain points and collaborate to resolve impediments more quickly with a working production process in place.

The most common examples of a content workflow involve the following steps:

1. Keyword research and topic creation

This is a crucial step to target the right audience with your content. However, the necessity of this step still depends on the platform you want to post your content to, as well as the current digital marketing trends.

2. Competitor research for target keywords

When writing content, it’s essential to research the target keywords your competitors are ranking highly for. Always aim to improve from their existing post as you apply their keywords to your content.

3. Brief / Outline Creation

Creating an outline is where all the consistency we mentioned earlier will be applied. The tone, personality, branding – everything should be considered before accomplishing your content brief.

4. Writing the content

This is where you give life to your outline with relevant and engaging information about your topic.

5. Reviewing the content

Give editors and your tech team time to validate and fact-check the article before publishing.

6. Publishing the content

After revisions, queue your content for posting. Make sure to get the right keywords, thumbnails, and hashtags if needed.

3. Identify and repurpose existing content

Digital marketing trends continuously change and evolve. Your content needs to keep up with these changes to stay atop of platform algorithms and help you maintain or increase visibility.

You have to allocate time in your SaaS content calendar to look through your existing content and evaluate its performance. For starters, you’ll need to take a look at your analytics data and see what content is performing and what’s not.

Review and update the low-performing content. Pinpoint which factors cause them to have lower engagement (poor SEO, content relevance, etc.) and improve on them following your established production workflow.

You can also identify which of your past content can be repurposed. There are many SaaS companies repurposing their blog posts to video format so they can attract different audiences that prefer different platforms for consumption.

For example, Slack has been formatting its blogs into Youtube videos to adapt to new trends. (which garnered them a hundred thousand views)

4. Create new content to fill gaps

With the technological advancement of different SaaS applications, it makes sense to not just upcycle your old content but make new ones to fill the gaps.

Creating new content works well to retain your existing customers and keep them engaged. You can also use these fresh posts to attract audiences with different demographics to your platform.

To create valuable content, get the best information you can gather and make it digestible. You can also sprinkle a little entertainment to keep them memorable while still being informative. Don’t forget to look out for trends that relate to your SaaS application and find a way to connect to them.

You can also diversify your content by identifying what kinds of articles your audience would want you to publish.

5. How to assign tasks to team members

Once your SaaS content calendar for existing and new content is completed, you can now break the plan into tangible tasks. Work collaboratively with your team members and assign them specific tasks. By doing so, you will have an estimate of how long it will take to complete a task, what skills are needed, and who can best fulfill the roles.

This is where your SaaS content calendar app shines through. A good calendar will make it easier to assign tasks. In Airtable, for example, it’s easy to assign each task to your team members. Just fill out a collaborator field with their name, and they will be automatically notified of their new responsibilities. With Kanban boards, you can easily drag tasks to the collaborator name column.

An effective calendar tool will also display which members have more tasks than they can handle. Simply look at the column on your board with their name to double-check before you assign any more tasks to them.

Ideally, each of your team members will have their specialty, which their tasks will all be about. For bigger teams, there are separate members that handle content and keyword research, providing graphical assets, writing, and proofreading the content.

6. Choosing channels to publish your content

To ensure the success of your marketing efforts, you should research how to best publish your content on different digital channels.

This is especially true if you’re going to be using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. It’s vital that you know the strengths and weaknesses of each of these platforms so that your content will resonate better with the audience on that platform.

These are some things your organisation should consider when choosing channels:

• The goal of your content
• The audience for the content
• Target stage on the sales funnel for your content – BOFU, MOFU or TOFU

Some marketing teams are adopting the omnichannel approach to maximise their reach. Discover which way your SaaS app will benefit best. You can, however, focus on just one of the channels to publish your content:

• Website
• Blog
• Third-party site
• Social media

7. Evaluate and improve your marketing strategies

Just like in different aspects of your businesses, each strategy you implement is evaluated after a certain time of implementation. In the same way, always allot time to assess your implemented marketing strategies. Without these small pauses, you would not have any idea about your next steps or what you should improve to support the growth of your business.

The goal is to keep up the top-tier and performing content and revamp the low-performing ones.

Build strategies that work

Organising your content calendar for SaaS is the best way to plan your content and monitor if your efforts are bearing results. Create a consistent schedule, evaluate your strategies, and continue to improve. This way, you build a credible digital presence for your SaaS application and bridge the gap between your software and the businesses you want to sell it to.

If you need help with your digital marketing needs, let’s find common ground and collaborate! Contact us today to know how.