Reaching customers is tougher than ever among the crowd of so many businesses. The channels for content marketing — Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram, Slideshare and others — are constantly growing.

With all of these factors, providing good, attention-grabbing content is vital to be heard in all of the noise. The pressure to create and publish timely and engaging content is higher than ever.

Despite the trend toward content marketing and its effectiveness, brands and companies are finding it difficult to overcome the challenges, at the strategic and/or tactical level. Understanding your target audience, identifying keywords, regularly finding ways to create and publish interesting content are a few of the challenges involved in content marketing. Read on to know how a content calendar can help overcome them.

1. Organization

Keeping up with the fast-paced online space and constant changes in search, social, etc., can be a struggle in itself. Organizing your work will always help you to stay efficient and on top of things. A content calendar does just that, and thereafter helps you focus and prioritize on other important aspects of your marketing.

2. Getting new ideas

The content calendar will help you free your mind of all your ideas in an organized, planned and easy-to-digest format. This will enable you to take your mind away from remembering all those ideas and possibly think of new ones. Just looking at all of your current scheduled content may help you get new ideas for content.

3. A plan

There are many aspects that will influence what kind of content will/should be published by your brand/company. New launches, events, etc., are often overlooked until the last minute. Creating a content calendar means having a plan in advance of what content needs to be marketed. Coordinating it with your events calendar and considering dates of new launches, conferences, etc., will enable you to avoid last-minute changes to your content marketing and publish the latest content in a timely and engaging manner.

4. Manage multiple contributors

Many corporate blogs have multiple authors, and it's helpful to have a calendar that everyone can refer to so your content/posts are evenly spaced out, rather than jumbled up on a few days with a phase of inactivity on the other days. The calendar will also help assign tasks and topics to all of your writers, avoiding the confusion and inconvenience of overlapping topics and, thus, wasted efforts.

5. Convenience for advertisers

If your blog is being monetized, advertisers would want to have the convenience of knowing in advance what content is being published when, via the content calendar. This also helps maintain the relevance of the advertisements with your content, which in turn benefits both you and the advertisers.

These are some of the most important benefits of having a content marketing calendar. There are a ton of resources available all over the Internet that will help you create content calendars of various types, whichever you think will suit your needs best.