LinkedIn Content Calendar: How to Plan Content That Attracts B2B Clients [+ Template]

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Whether you’re trying to grow your personal or company brand on LinkedIn, you have to publish content consistently.

This will help you reach potential B2B clients who visit the professional network every day.

But as you already know, publishing content consistently on LinkedIn is easier said than done.

That’s why you need a LinkedIn content calendar to aid your content publishing efforts.

And in this guide, I’ll walk you through all you need to know to create an effective LinkedIn content calendar.

Plus, I’ll also share a LinkedIn content calendar template you can adapt to your needs.

Let’s dive in.

Why create a LinkedIn content calendar?

Here are 4 reasons to create a LinkedIn content calendar:

• Publish content consistently: To reach your ideal audience and stay on their mind, you have to show up regularly on LinkedIn. A LinkedIn content calendar lets you plan and publish content at regular intervals.
• Organize content: A LinkedIn content calendar provides an overview of content pieces for LinkedIn. If you also operate personal and brand pages, you can organize content for each page.
• Collaborate with team members: If you work with team members or clients, a calendar can be your workspace. For example, you can assign tasks to team members and request post approvals from clients when scheduling posts on LinkedIn.
• Maintain voice tone: Once people associate your brand with a voice, you want to maintain that voice on LinkedIn. With a LinkedIn content calendar, you can easily pinpoint posts that stray from your brand voice.

That said, how do you obtain these benefits?

By creating a LinkedIn content calendar that suits your needs.

Let’s see how to do that.

How to create a LinkedIn content calendar

Here are critical steps to follow to build a LinkedIn content calendar that aids your publishing efforts:

1. Define target audience

Even though LinkedIn is a professional network, users still have different interests.

This means your posts can’t and won’t appeal to every professional on LinkedIn.

So, you have to define LinkedIn users who can likely become your customers.

Defining your target audience will help you plan posts that can educate and convince them to check your business out.

However, if you already have a buyer persona for your business, it should work for LinkedIn content.

If not, you can define your audience on LinkedIn by specifying details such as:

• Name
• Age
• Job
• Income
• Level of expertise
• Location
• Topics of interest
• Common problems at work

You can also find more information from the people who already follow your account. So, dive into your LinkedIn analytics to learn more about your current audience.

Create a document and put these details in it. This way, you can always refer to the document.

Once you understand the person to create content for, define what you want to achieve.

2. Set LinkedIn content goals

Put simply, content goals are the results you want to achieve with your LinkedIn content.

Examples of LinkedIn content goals include:

• Brand awareness
• Increase in LinkedIn followers
• Increase in LinkedIn profile visits
• Increase in service inquiries
• Website traffic
• Lead generation
• Sales

There’s one main reason you should set goals.

Setting goals will guide the type of content you create and how often you publish on LinkedIn.

To set LinkedIn content goals, you can use the popular SMART framework. 

This means your goal should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.

For example, a good goal for a LinkedIn account with 1,000 followers can be to increase followers by 200 within a month. This is achievable and relevant to the account owner.

As a writer, I often set goals to increase the number of profile visits and service inquiries because it’s relevant to my work.

Of course, you can set multiple goals for a month and plan content pieces for each goal.

3. Determine LinkedIn content publishing frequency

Publishing frequency is the number of posts you publish daily or weekly.

Your publishing frequency provides a clearer picture of the number of posts you need monthly.

That said, how do you determine the best publishing frequency for your page?

One place to look at is your content goals for the month.

How many posts do you think you need to achieve your LinkedIn content goals?

By answering this question, you can set a publishing frequency for each week. 

While people only think of LinkedIn posts when talking about frequency, comments are also important.

Dropping insightful comments on relevant posts in your industry can also help you reach more LinkedIn users. These comments can reach people who don’t follow your account.

So, plan to publish a number of insightful comments daily.

4. Determine the best days and time to post

The best time to publish posts is when your ideal audience is on LinkedIn.

Because of this definition, the best time to post will differ for each business.

Nevertheless, publishing posts at your audience’s best times will attract more eyeballs and engagement. 

Thanks to this engagement, your posts can get an initial boost that tells LinkedIn to recommend them to more users.

While people can see your posts hours after publishing, you want many people to see them soon after you publish.

The first step to determining the best time to post is to put yourself in your audience’s shoes. What time are they likely to be on LinkedIn?

From here, you can experiment a few times to find the right spot.

Another way to find the best time is to check studies online about the best times to post on LinkedIn.

Finally, if you use a social media management tool, you can get time suggestions for optimum performance.

Whatever method you use, you have to check your post performance and adjust accordingly to find the best times for your brand.  

5. Define LinkedIn content ideas for the month

Content ideas are the concepts you use in your LinkedIn posts.

Some LinkedIn content ideas include:

• Personal experiences
• Thought experiments
• Studies
• User-generated content (UGC)
• Testimonials
• Share a blog post
• Polls
• Tutorials

These content ideas bring your LinkedIn strategy to life. They can also help introduce variety into your posts to keep followers engaged.

Then, defining your content ideas will help plan posts that need collaborators.

For example, multi-image and video posts may need work from designers and video creators. With content ideas laid out, these collaborators can start working on content before the publishing date.

Which content ideas will work best for your LinkedIn content calendar?

It depends on your content goals.

For example, if lead generation is one of your goals, content ideas like UGC and testimonials can help achieve that.

If your goal is to drive web traffic, then you can share blog posts.

So, pick content ideas that align with your LinkedIn content goals.

LinkedIn content calendar template

Creating a LinkedIn content calendar from scratch can take some time.

But you can drastically cut down this time with a LinkedIn content calendar template.

A template provides the initial setup where you can enter important details about your LinkedIn content.

Better still, you can tweak a template to meet your unique needs.

To get you started, I’ve created a LinkedIn content calendar template for Google Sheets.

This template has 2 pages.

On the first page, you’ll see an overview of the calendar.

Here, you can enter details such as:

• Post idea
• Post type
• Description

On the second page, there’s a table where you can enter more details about each post.

These details include:

• Title
• Goal
• Caption
• Hashtags
• Media
• Creator
• Status

You can access the LinkedIn content calendar template here.

Note: You can’t edit the template directly. So, you have to create a copy of the template to edit it. To do that, click File and then Make a copy.

Of course, you can edit this template to fit your needs.

LinkedIn content calendar tools to plan content 

While the LinkedIn content calendar template can meet most of your content needs, some workflows require a more robust tool.

For example, if you need more robust collaboration features and the ability to schedule posts on multiple social media platforms, a social media management tool can fit your needs better.

These tools let you publish on LinkedIn personal profiles and pages.

Here are 3 great options:

Vista social

Vista Social is one of the best social media management tools.

And one of the reasons for that is its robust calendar.

First, the calendar lets you see monthly and weekly views of scheduled posts. You can also see previews of posts for each day.

To get more post ideas, Vista Social shows holidays across religions and countries. 

Then, you can download your calendar to send to an external party.

Apart from the calendar features, you can schedule posts on multiple social media platforms, collaborate with team members, and set up a link in bio page.

To learn more, read my full Vista Social review.

ContentStudio

ContentStudio has a planner to plan your content over a period. You can also see weekly and monthly views of your content calendar.

Then, there are the status and details of posts.

Before scheduling posts, ContentStudio suggests the best time to post for the best performance on LinkedIn.

Plus, ContentStudio has filters to easily find posts according to various criteria.

Beyond the content calendar, you can find content to schedule, write captions with AI caption generator, and collaborate with team members.

To see more of its features, read my full ContentStudio review.

Pallyy

Pallyy is a robust and affordable tool, especially for solopreneurs.

You get the content calendar in both the weekly and monthly views. You can also find national holidays across various countries to get post ideas.

Beside the calendar, you can see the media gallery. From the gallery, you can drag media to a day on the calendar to schedule posts.

Then, Pallyy suggests the best time to post based on your post performance history. You also get filters to find posts according to various criteria.

Finally, you can share your calendar with external parties.

Beyond the calendar features, you also get a post composer, AI caption generator, and a link in bio tool.

Read my Pallyy review to learn more about this tool.

Conclusion 

A LinkedIn content calendar can help organize your content schedule and encourage consistent publishing.

What’s the next step to take?

Follow the steps in this guide to create a LinkedIn content calendar on your favorite work tool.

Alternatively, use the template or any of the social media management tools.