Executing an effective content marketing strategy requires lots of planning and coordination. From brainstorming and scheduling articles to tracking campaign results, content managers need a robust system to plan and analyze their content pipelines.
In this guide, we’ll take a look at Spreadsheet.com’s Content Calendar template and see how key Spreadsheet.com features like data types, Related rows, Automations, and more can be used to create an all-in-one content marketing management solution. Take a look at our content marketing campaign management workbook and follow along, or create a copy for yourself to experiment.
Maintaining an editorial calendar to plan upcoming posts and articles is the foundation on which every content marketing campaign is built. With Spreadsheet.com’s unique data types and automations, you can easily turn a simple article list into an all-in-one content management system.
In Spreadsheet.com, cells can hold a lot more than just text and numbers. Spreadsheet.com supports more than 25 unique data types that let your workbook’s cells display things like attachments, checkboxes, icon sets, dropdown lists, and more. By using some of these data types in our Articles worksheet, we can turn our workbook into an end-to-end content management system.
Column C - Author uses the User data type to assign other members of the workbook to articles. When someone is assigned to a new article, they’ll receive an email from Spreadsheet.com notifying them of their new assignment.
Column E - Assets uses the Attachment data type to display photo thumbnails in cells. Each Attachment cell can hold multiple files. You can click on an image to view it in full size and download the original file.
Column I - Keywords uses the Multiselect data type to assign keywords to each article. By using a Multiselect column or cell, you can create a dropdown list of options like categories, tags, or statuses. Column D - Status uses the Select data type. It’s similar to Multiselect, but only allows one option from the dropdown list to be chosen at a time.
Select columns are often useful tools when sorting, filtering, or grouping your data. Take a look at the Sheet view below – we’ve applied row grouping using the Status column as our grouping criteria.
By adding an automation to our workbook, we can automatically notify team members of upcoming article deadlines. The When a Date arrives trigger and Send notification email action work together to notify a workbook user on, before, or after a specified date.
Here, we’re choosing to notify the author assigned to an article (Column C - Author) the day before an article is due (Column F - Due Date). We can use information taken directly from our worksheet to populate the notification that the author receives.
By using other action types, we could also send a notification through another service like Microsoft Teams or Slack.
By adding a Calendar view to our Articles worksheet, we can transform our article list into a content calendar. Calendar views use Date or Date and time columns to place rows onto a calendar layout.
Here, we’ve used Column G - Publish Date to create our Calendar view and assigned each article a color using the colors in Column D - Status. We can view our calendar with the Month view, or take a closer look with the 3 week or 2 week option.
Related rows, one of Spreadsheet.com’s data types, let you link rows in different worksheets so your sheets can work like tables in a relational database; editing one changes the data in another. Using Related rows helps organize your individual articles into specific campaigns.
In our Content Calendar workbook, we’re using Related rows to connect our articles with their associated campaigns. In the Campaigns worksheet, Column F - Content is a Related row column with a 2-way link that is connected to Column A - Name, the primary column, in our Articles worksheet.
With a 2-way link the relationship is reflected in each worksheet; the Articles worksheet shows the campaign that each article is associated with (Column K - Campaign), and the Campaigns worksheet shows all of the articles that belong to each campaign (Column F - Content).
By using Related rows with 2-way links, we can now use other Related row data types like lookups and rollups in both sheets.
Column D - Authors in our Campaigns worksheet is a Related row lookup column. It takes the Related row values in Column F - Content and then looks up the values in Column C - Author from our Articles worksheet.
Related row lookup columns are dynamic. As we add new articles to our Articles worksheet and associate them with campaigns, the list of authors in our Campaigns worksheet will automatically update. Related row lookups can pull in information of all different data types, like Column G - Assets in our Campaigns worksheet that looks up attachments from the Articles worksheet.
Once you’ve launched your campaign, it’s important to log and analyze results. Spreadsheet.com helps you aggregate information across worksheets and display it in your workbook in a ready-to-present format.
Similar to how we linked our Articles and Campaigns worksheets, we can also link our Campaigns and Results worksheets by using Related rows. Each record in Column A - Campaign from our Results worksheet is a Related row connected to Column A - Campaign from our Campaigns worksheet with a 2-way link.
Using Related rows with 2-way links lets us use additional Related row data types, like the Related row lookup in Column E - Budgeted.
Column B - Name in the Results worksheet uses the Column formula data type to create a unique name for each record.
This column uses the CONCATENATE function, but the Column formula data type can use any function supported by Spreadsheet.com. By creating unique record names and setting the column as our sheet’s primary column, it’s easy to reference rows from this sheet as Related rows in other worksheets, like Column H - Campaign Results on our Campaigns worksheet.
The table header row – denoted by the table icon to the left of the row number - separates a worksheet’s header and table regions. Only rows below the table header row are treated as table records (subject to sorting, filtering, etc.), making the table header region a great place to display other information like summary statistics or charts. Here, in our Results worksheet, we’re using the table header region to show summary information aggregated from all of our campaigns’ results.
Ready to get started? Browse Spreadsheet.com’s Template Gallery to find ready-to-use content marketing templates, as well as templates for project management, sales, finance, and more.