7 causes of content calendar chaos—and how to solve them

From insightful blog posts to engaging social media campaigns, every piece of content your brand creates serves as a cornerstone of its identity. But the more your organization creates, the more complex the task of managing your content calendar becomes.

If you’re facing content chaos, you’re not alone. With the right tools and techniques, you can transform that confusion into clarity. Let’s explore the common challenges in content calendar management—and their solutions—so you can simplify your content strategy and amplify its impact.

1. You lack of visibility into published and upcoming content 

When it comes to managing a content calendar, teams struggle to maintain a clear view of what’s published and what’s upcoming. With so many types of content to keep track of—like blog articles, playbooks, social media posts, webinars, event content, and more—understanding how everything fits together, and where it all stands in terms of process and progress, isn’t an easy task. What’s more, disjointed tools and platforms can lead to silos, making it difficult for teams to get a unified view of content schedules. All this leads to content overlaps, missed opportunities, and a general lack of alignment.

The solution

• Centralize content information. Streamline content campaign management by consolidating all content information into a single, accessible hub. Create a content repository that houses all of your published and upcoming content projects, complete with important information like go-live dates, content status, content owner, asset type, and links to the content's live location. This approach will ensure visibility across the entire content lifecycle, so every team member knows what's been published and what's on deck.

• Give your team at-a-glance visibility. Give your team a bird’s-eye-view of all scheduled and in-progress content activities, so they can quickly sync up and avoid overlaps or gaps. Set up your content calendar in a tool with a calendar view so teams can easily see what’s been done and what’s coming next. This approach makes it easy to plan out content in advance for a consistent publishing schedule. Plus, drag-and-drop features that allow your team to automatically update due dates makes it easy to reshuffle content timelines, even when quick adjustments are needed.

2. It’s difficult to manage resources 

Balancing available resources with the demands of content production can be complex. There’s a lot to coordinate—including the strategists and stakeholders who plan the content, the writers who develop it, the designers and developers who bring it into visual form. More complex content forms, like webinars, live events, and multi-channel campaigns can involve even more teams and tasks. With so much to manage, effective resource management is essential. 

The solution

• Visualize your team’s workload. Keep an eye on your team’s capacity with a clear view of everyone's workload. Use a tool with workload visualization features that allow you to quickly see your team’s current projects and tasks, so you can easily rebalance work, plan for upcoming projects, and forecast future resourcing needs. 

• Leverage AI for smarter planning. Embrace the clarity that comes with AI-driven updates and recommendations. Use an AI tool or feature that integrates with your existing systems, allowing your team to easily monitor project progress, spot blockers, and make quick resourcing adjustments. That way, your team can quickly shift tasks and redistribute work as needed, reducing the likelihood of missed deadlines and overburdened staff.

3. You have trouble prioritizing content projects

They say content is king—but it’s not all created equal. Creating content for the sake of creation is likely to end in wasted resources (at best) and a poor brand experience and a misalignment with strategic goals (at worst). The challenge lies in prioritizing projects and tasks that align with the overarching goals of your company to ensure every piece of content serves a purpose and moves the needle.

• Connect content initiatives to company objectives. The content your team creates needs to drive your company’s objectives forward. Make sure you’re prioritizing the highest-value projects by anchoring content to your company’s goals. For example, look for a work management platform that connects company objectives to the work that supports them. This way, you can clarify priorities and ensure resources are allocated to projects with the greatest potential for impact. 

• Provide easy visibility into content details. Don’t just organize; strategize. Categorize your team’s content with important details like target audience, channel, stage, and launch date. Adding these custom labels to content helps your team sort, filter, and prioritize work based on what best ladders up to your company’s goals.

Reach your customers with the content they care about

Learn how Asana can help your teams map the sales funnel, create relevant content, and launch effective campaigns.

Simplify content campaign management

4. Your workflows and publishing processes are inefficient 

Managing a content calendar without clear, predefined workflows is like navigating a maze without a map. The process can quickly become tangled in delays and bottlenecks caused by miscommunications, gaps in information, confusing approval processes, and human error. These issues slow down production and can lead to oversights and inconsistencies in your content strategy.

The solution

• Gather information upfront. Make sure your team has all the details they need before work even kicks off. Use tools like standardized request forms to simplify gathering information. Each requester simply fills out a form with pre-created fields and requirements. That way, your team has the information they need right from the start. 

• Kick-off with error free processes. Take the guesswork out of content planning. Standardize your team’s best practices for specific workflows, like writing social media content or creating blog articles, so you can be confident your teams are following the same steps for every project. For example, create a template that outlines the end-to-end steps needed to produce a gated report. Then, use that template every time your team kicks off a similar project. This approach will also help cut down on the need for revisions and guarantee every piece of content is consistent in terms of quality, brand voice, and messaging. 

• Create custom, standardized workflows. Cut down on the back-and-forth between teams and keep things running smoothly from start to finish. Create processes that run themselves by automating workflows and routine tasks. That way, once your team starts a project, the next steps—like assigning work to team members or moving the task to the next stage—happens automatically. This keeps content moving seamlessly from one stage of the process to the next—without you having to micromanage every detail. 

5. It’s difficult to collaborate across teams 

It’s true of any workflow: the more teams involved, the more room there is for miscommunication and error. And a lot of teams and departments contribute to a company’s content calendar, including creative, marketing, product, and sales. So many moving parts result in duplicated efforts, content gaps, and alignment issues—especially when teams use different tools to get work done. 

The solution

• Share frequent updates. Don’t make stakeholders go digging for information—or worse, rely on outdated info. Keep everyone in the loop with frequent status updates on project progress and what’s coming next. Take it a step further by using AI to share automatic status updates. This way, everyone's always on the same page about real-time progress and upcoming milestones.

• Simplify cross-team collaboration. Break down digital walls to keep projects moving. Centralize information like communication, content assets, project timelines, and approval workflows in a work management platform. As a result, everything from brainstorming and content creation to reviews, revisions, and approvals can happen in one place. 

• Bridge the gap between disconnected tools. Too often, teams rely on disjointed tools that get in the way of collaboration. With important tasks like feedback, reviews, and approvals happening in multiple places, teams are constantly bouncing between platforms—and risk missing crucial. Solve for this with integrations that sync with your team’s current setup and allow for easier collaboration. Turn Outlook emails and Slack messages into actionable tasks or attach Google Drive files directly where projects live. 

Reach your customers with the content they care about

Learn how Asana can help your teams map the sales funnel, create relevant content, and launch effective campaigns.

Simplify content campaign management

6. You struggle to capture and action on feedback

There’s no shortage of team members involved in the content creation feedback process. Taking into account the editors reviewing the written content, the art directors providing feedback on designs, and the strategists ensuring alignment with goals, the review process can quickly become overwhelming and inefficient. With multiple stakeholders managing feedback across multiple communication channels—like emails, meetings, and document comments—miscommunications, overlooked suggestions, and inconsistent revisions are common. 

The solution

• Make sure your feedback is actionable. Clarify next steps by providing feedback that points directly to what needs to be done next. When you assign team members tasks, use clear direction and set specific due dates so everyone can easily see what needs to be done and by when. This way, there’s no guessing game—everyone knows their part and the timeline.

• Move work through the process seamlessly. Ensure that projects don’t get stuck waiting for a green light. Set up automated rules that notify team members when work is ready to be reviewed, send reminders as due dates approach, and push tasks forward once approvals are in place. This approach cuts down on delays and makes sure that content moves from draft to done without unnecessary pauses.

7. You’re not accurately measuring performance 

Once your team has created and published content, measuring its performance is essential for evaluating impact and informing future strategies. But if metrics are unclear or scattered across different platforms, it can be a challenge to consolidate them into a cohesive analysis—resulting in difficulties determining content effectiveness, identifying areas for improvement, or justifying content spend. 

The solution

• Start with clear KPIs. Before diving into the data, get crystal clear on key performance indicators (KPIs). That means determining what success looks like for your team’s content. Is it more website traffic, higher engagement on social media, or more leads generated? Answering these questions and setting specific KPIs from the get-go will make sure your team gathers insights that actually matter.

• Track content performance against goals. Pinpoint how your team’s work ladders up to company objectives. Connect work to company goals and watch in real-time as the goal is updated based on the sub-goals or projects that support it. Create dashboards to monitor goal progress and share out updates. This isn’t just about drowning in data; it’s about making sure all of your team’s efforts make a tangible impact.

Streamline the content calendar management process with a work management platform

Say goodbye to content chaos. Transform your content calendar management process from cluttered to coordinated with a work management platform like Asana. By leveraging the tools and insights needed to manage your content calendar efficiently, you can ensure every piece of content your team creates is purpose-driven and aligned with your company’s strategic goals. 

Reach your customers with the content they care about

Learn how Asana can help your teams map the sales funnel, create relevant content, and launch effective campaigns.

Simplify content campaign management