How to design a social media marketing calendar that generates leads and profit (free template)

Using a social media marketing calendar to coordinate content creation is table stakes for small businesses.

What sets winners apart is their focus on designing a social media calendar that not only drives leads but also helps close sales.

In this article, you’ll discover two different ways you can create a social media calendar for your business, plus a free template to get you started. You’ll also explore seven best practices that ensure your content calendar contributes to your SMB’s bottom line.

Key takeaways from social media marketing calendar

• SMBs use social media calendars to plan out content weeks in advance.

• You can create a calendar for your business using a dedicated tool, a homemade spreadsheet or the free template provided.

• To generate leads through your calendar, design it around your sales funnel, use lead magnets copiously and bake in scarcity.

• Use Pipedrive’s CRM to manage leads after generating them – sign up for a 14-day free trial today.

Why should small businesses use a social media marketing calendar?

If you’re a marketing manager in an SMB, a social media marketing calendar is an indispensable tool to organize what you post on social media.

Your calendar functions as a visual overview of your company’s upcoming social content so your team can see what you’ll publish on each platform.

The posting deadlines on social media calendars streamline collaboration and approval workflows. For example, if the operations team knows the deadline for a particular post, it can set a deadline for a designer to create an image a few days earlier.

It’s also easier to maintain a consistent posting schedule when you use your calendar to plan a month’s content at a time instead of releasing posts piecemeal as you write them.

Social media teams sometimes get requests from external partners or other departments to post content. Your calendar lets you see whether you have space in the upcoming schedule or if you must prioritize more essential content.

When you have a business need to repeat the same marketing messaging, going through your social media calendar is a faster way to find suitable evergreen content than searching for it by hashtags.

Free social media marketing calendar template for SMBs

If you want to jump straight into organizing your social media marketing, here’s a free social media content calendar template from Pipedrive.

You’re welcome to download it and customize it to your own needs.

Keep reading to learn how to make your own social media calendar and ensure it helps you generate more leads and profit.

How can you create your own social media marketing calendar?

If you’d rather have your own social media calendar, you can either create it using a dedicated tool or build it from scratch in a spreadsheet.

There are pros and cons to both approaches:

• Purchasing a tool requires less upfront work but adds another monthly expense

• Using a homemade spreadsheet gives you more control over the structure of your calendar, but scales poorly

Using social media calendar software

Two of the best-known tools for creating and managing your social media calendar are Hootsuite and CoSchedule.

Hootsuite lets teams schedule, publish and monitor posts across multiple social networks from one central dashboard.

Its notifications alert teams when posts go live, while marketing metrics highlight high-quality posts.

CoSchedule helps teams plan social posts in a single calendar view that also includes blogs, campaigns and broader content marketing activities.

The app is more for cross-channel alignment and social media strategy than for daily post monitoring.

Building your own social media calendar from scratch

Follow these steps to create your own social media calendar in a spreadsheet on Excel or Google Sheets:

1. Assign each month to a different tab.

2. Create a 7x5 grid in each tab, with each row of seven cells representing one calendar week.

3. Decide with your team how often you will post on each platform. For example, you might choose to post twice a week on LinkedIn and once a week on Instagram.

4. Determine your social media planning horizon. In most small businesses, marketing teams plan all content the month before they post it.

5. Add key publishing dates to your calendar: think product launches, webinars or days of celebration like Christmas, Black Friday, International Women’s Day and National Salesperson Day.

6. Create a backlog of content ideas, complete with images, links, quotes and sources of inspiration.

Over your planning horizon from step four, schedule enough posts to match your posting frequency from step three. For example, you could plan one month’s worth of posting on LinkedIn twice a week and once weekly on Instagram.

How can you ensure your social media marketing calendar drives sales?

Regardless of how you create it, the most effective social media calendar helps your business generate leads and close sales.

Below, you’ll discover seven ways to set up your calendar to support your marketing goals.

1. Design your calendar around your sales funnel

Map your social content to the stages of your sales funnel and schedule posts that support leads at each stage.

Here are some examples of content businesses typically use to nurture leads at each stage of the customer journey:

Assign each post in your backlog to a stage of your funnel and color-code it accordingly.

From there, develop a system to regularly schedule content for each funnel stage. There are several different ways you could approach this:

• Assign different days of the week to different funnel stages. Say, Wednesday is your day for bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) content, Monday is for the middle of the funnel (MOFU) and the rest of the week is for the top of the funnel (TOFU).

• Split your planning calendar into a ratio, for example, 50% TOFU, 30% MOFU and 20% TOFU.

• Organize your social media scheduling in waves. For instance, choose one week of TOFU, then a week of MOFU, then a week of BOFU – followed by repurposing old content to repeat your most important messaging points.

• Anchor your content strategy around designated conversion days. If Thursday is your conversion day, design all messaging leading up to it to drive a smooth sale.

Sometimes, one part of your sales funnel will stall. You might learn this from talking to your salespeople or by looking at your customer relationship management (CRM) software.

For example, Pipedrive’s funnel conversion report visualizes conversion rates between pipeline stages, including how many deals reach each stage and how many are lost along the way.

Once you know which objections are holding you back, add content on your calendar to address them preemptively.

If leads are complaining about unclear ROI, create a LinkedIn post that shows how investing in your product saves customers a specific number of hours per week.

If you’re getting pushback on it not being the right time to move forward, consider an Instagram carousel that shows how starting now prevents problems later.

For leads who find your onboarding process confusing, record a YouTube video of an employee setting up an account in a few minutes.

If a particular objection appears frequently, you could dedicate an entire week of content to it and track your results to see if things improve.

The synergy between your sales team and your social media calendar goes in both directions. Sales can suggest social media content that preemptively addresses objections, while marketing can schedule social media posts that salespeople can send to future leads to overcome them.

5. Bake scarcity into your calendar to encourage immediate action

Including posts with an element of FOMO or scarcity in your content plan will encourage your followers to take action before it’s too late.

This step doesn’t always have to mean buying from you, though it should deepen their engagement – perhaps by taking a quiz or downloading a cheat sheet.

Plus, whichever lead magnets your business uses in its marketing strategy, make sure they have an expiry date. Only promote them a certain number of times and tell your audience directly that they won’t be available forever.

One of the best ways to communicate scarcity is to use a countdown sequence that says “X days to go until Y”. This example from digital canvas provider Vieunite creates a sense of urgency to watch the posted video before a much-awaited event:

Sometimes, early access to your products and services can drive scarcity. For example, you could:

• Highlight that early birds for a product webinar you’re organizing get a 30% discount

• Put out a call for beta testers for a new feature you’re launching

Businesses also communicate scarcity on social media by creating offers available to a limited number of users.

Many companies use sales that appear once a year to drive a sense of scarcity. The best example of this is Black Friday. Customers are always excited to purchase goods at discounted prices before the offer expires.

Make sure your social media calendar reflects these moments of urgency. Label or color-code them to make them stand out internally.

6. Map out the conversion pathway for each type of post

Identify how every post in your calendar that doesn’t drive immediate conversion moves your audience through your funnel.

A social media presence that consists only of CTAs is aggressive and turns people off, so you need TOFU and MOFU content to build trust and rapport.

To maximize the value you get from content higher up your funnel, it’s wise to map how people who consume that content might convert later in the customer journey.

Here are some post ideas to get you thinking about your own social strategy:

Imagine seeing this LinkedIn post from the user onboarding app Userpilot:

Your next step will likely be to download its product analytics report.

If the report proves valuable, you’ll be more receptive to future CTAs encouraging you to try Userpilot as a product analytics tool.

7. Manage leads once social media generates them

Whenever your social media marketing generates a lead, you need a way to track that lead’s progress through your funnel to maximize the odds of your lead turning into a sale.

Pipedrive is well-known for its CRM software, which lets SMBs track, organize and prioritize leads through every stage of the sales process.

Here are three ways you could add leads from social media to Pipedrive:

1. A prospect downloads a lead magnet and subscribes to your newsletter, which you administer using Mailchimp. Since Mailchimp integrates with Pipedrive, it automatically creates a lead that your salespeople can follow up with.

2. The person managing your social media accounts notices that one particular Facebook follower is a vocal advocate of your product. She ensures your CRM manager adds that follower as a lead so sales doesn’t lose track of them.

3. A lead sends you a DM on Instagram about a new product line. Your social media manager uses the Missive integration to generate a Pipedrive record of the conversation so a salesperson can follow up.

Once a lead is in Pipedrive, the software automatically creates a deal card to represent it. You can move the deal through the stages of your sales funnel and visually track its progress.

The Pipeline view makes it easy to identify bottlenecks and figure out next steps.

Use custom fields to tag leads by industry, source, region, deal size or any other custom criteria. Filters let you quickly group similar leads so you can run marketing campaigns that target them.

You can schedule follow-up tasks like calls, emails or DMs directly on each lead card. These tasks sync with your calendar to keep reps on track.

Pipedrive’s AI Email Writer feature even writes follow-up emails to leads automatically with simple prompts.

If you need to estimate the likelihood of a deal closing, there are two ways you can do that with Pipedrive.

One option is to enter the percentage chance that a lead will reach a particular pipeline stage.

Alternatively, use Pipedrive to manually give each lead a score. The higher the score, the more likely the deal is to close.

Lead scores also help your sales team work out which leads are the highest priority at any given moment.

Pipedrive’s CRM solution also comes with the following integrations to other tools in your social media marketing stack:

• Surfe – lets you add LinkedIn contacts and conversations to Pipedrive.

• Facebook Messenger – centralizes Messenger chats inside Pipedrive so you can respond to messages and create deals from conversations.

• Outfunnel – logs email campaign interactions like opens and clicks in Pipedrive to optimize lead scoring and segmentation.

• LeadFuze – pulls contact data into Pipedrive to help you build prospect lists that you can target via social media campaigns.

All these integrations make it easier to manage leads you’ve generated on social media and keep them moving through your funnel.

Social media marketing calendar FAQs

Final thoughts

Design your social media marketing calendar with sales in mind by including CTAs, scarcity, lead magnets and multiple conversion paths.

A CRM will help you make the most of any leads you generate, ensuring they don’t get lost and that your sales team knows when to follow up.

Pipedrive stands out with its intuitive visual format, AI automation features and integrations with other tools in your marketing stack. Sign up for a 14-day free trial to start turning your social media leads into customers.