Content Calendar Creation in Trello/Notion

Hello! Welcome to the final lesson in our Go-to-Market Content Strategy module.

In our last session, we built a crucial piece of infrastructure: a landing page to capture email leads. You now have a "front door" for your potential customers. But a door is only useful if people know where to find it.

Today, we will address that by tackling the learning outcome: Map out a 1-month content calendar using a tool like Trello or Notion, aligning topics with funnel stages. This calendar will be your strategic roadmap for creating and publishing content that consistently drives your ideal customers to your landing page and, eventually, to your product.

Why You Need More Than Just a Schedule

A content calendar is not just about picking dates to post. It's a strategic tool that ensures every piece of content you create serves a purpose. For a SaaS founder, that purpose is to guide a potential customer from being unaware of your solution to becoming a paying user. This journey is commonly known as the marketing funnel.

You're already familiar with the concept of a marketing funnel, but let's quickly reinforce how it applies to content planning. The funnel is typically divided into three stages:

• Top of the Funnel (TOFU): Awareness. The customer has a problem but may not know a solution exists.
• Middle of the Funnel (MOFU): Consideration. The customer is aware of solutions and is actively researching and comparing them.
• Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU): Decision. The customer is ready to make a purchase and needs to be convinced your product is the right choice.

To see how this works in practice, let's watch a brief segment from a HubSpot video.

Here is a helpful visual summary of this concept:

Choosing and Building Your Content Calendar Tool

With the strategy in mind, let's get to the practical build. You need a central place to plan, organize, and track your content. The two most common tools for this are Trello and Notion.

• Trello: A simple, card-based system (like a digital Kanban board). It's great for visualizing workflow stages.
• Notion: A more powerful, flexible workspace that combines documents, databases, and project management. Given your computer science background, you'll likely appreciate Notion's database capabilities, which allow for creating multiple, interconnected views of your content plan.

We will focus on Notion for its power and flexibility. This next resource is a comprehensive tutorial on building a content calendar from scratch in Notion.

Your Notion Calendar Blueprint

Based on the video, here is the structure you should build in Notion.

1. Create a new page and call it "SaaS Content Calendar."
2. Make it a full-width page.
3. Add a new Database - Full page. Choose a default view like Calendar or Table.
4. Rename the database to "Content Hub."
5. Configure the database properties. This is key for strategic planning. Delete the default "Tags" property and create these:
   • Topic: (Title property) The title or main idea of the content piece.
   • Status: (Select property) With options like Idea, Drafting, Review, Scheduled, Published.
   • Funnel Stage: (Select property) With options TOFU, MOFU, BOFU.
   • Content Type: (Select property) With options like Blog Post, LinkedIn Post, Twitter Thread, Video.
   • Publish Date: (Date property).
6. Create different views of this database using the "+" button next to the database name:
   • A Calendar view showing items by Publish Date.
   • A Board view grouped by Status to visualize your workflow.
   • A Table view for a master list to easily brainstorm and add new ideas.

When you're done, you'll have a powerful system that looks something like this:

Populating Your 1-Month Calendar

Now that your system is built, what do you put in it for the first 30 days? You need a plan that balances content across the funnel stages to build an audience while also moving prospects toward your lead magnet.

The following article offers a great week-by-week framework.

Here’s a practical plan for your first month, inspired by that framework. Add these as Idea entries in your new Notion calendar.

Week 1: Establish Authority (TOFU Focus)

• Goal: Attract your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) by talking about their problems.
• Content Idea 1 (TOFU): A blog post or LinkedIn article titled "The 5 Biggest [Problem your SaaS solves] Mistakes We See Startups Make."
• Content Idea 2 (TOFU): A Twitter thread summarizing the key points from the article.

Week 2: Connect Problems to Solutions (MOFU Introduction)

• Goal: Guide people who are now aware of the problem toward potential solutions.
• Content Idea 1 (MOFU): A post comparing two methods for solving the problem: "Doing [X the old way] vs. [X our new way]."
• Content Idea 2 (MOFU/BOFU): A social media post that directly promotes your lead magnet, linking to the landing page you built.

Week 3: Build Trust and Show, Don't Tell (BOFU & Social Proof)

• Goal: Show your solution in action and build credibility.
• Content Idea 1 (BOFU): A short screen-recording or series of screenshots showing a core feature of your (future) product solving a specific pain point.
• Content Idea 2 (MOFU): A post sharing a positive comment or piece of feedback you've received (even if it's from a friend you showed the idea to).

Week 4: Engage and Repurpose (Mix)

• Goal: Reinforce your message and build community.
• Content Idea 1 (TOFU): A "build-in-public" post sharing what you learned this month while developing your SaaS.
• Content Idea 2 (MOFU): Repurpose your Week 1 article into a different format, like a checklist or a short video.

Test your understanding!

Imagine your SaaS idea is a tool that helps freelance writers manage their clients and invoices. Using the TOFU/MOFU/BOFU framework, propose one content idea for each stage.

Show answer

• TOFU Idea: A blog post titled, "How to Avoid Scope Creep: 5 Essential Clauses for Your Freelance Writing Contract." This addresses a common problem for the target audience without mentioning the product.
• MOFU Idea: A downloadable template: "The Ultimate Freelance Invoice Template." This is a solution-oriented piece of content that could also serve as a lead magnet.
• BOFU Idea: A short video or GIF showing how the tool automatically generates and sends a recurring invoice to a client, with the caption: "Stop chasing payments. Start automating your invoicing in 60 seconds." This is a product-focused demonstration of value.

Conclusion

Congratulations on completing the Go-to-Market Content Strategy module! You have now built the strategic engine for your marketing efforts. A landing page is your destination, and your content calendar is the map that will guide traffic there.

Key Takeaways:

• A content calendar is a strategic tool for executing your marketing plan, not just a schedule.
• Aligning content with the marketing funnel (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU) ensures you are meeting customers where they are in their buying journey.
• Tools like Notion provide a powerful and flexible way to manage your content database, workflow, and schedule all in one place.
• A balanced one-month plan should start with building awareness (TOFU) and gradually introduce solution-oriented (MOFU) and product-focused (BOFU) content.

Preview of the Next Lesson:
You have your content plan. Now, how do you create high-quality content efficiently? Our next module, AI-Powered Content Creation Workflows, dives into exactly that. In the first lesson, we will develop an advanced research workflow integrating Perplexity and ChatGPT for competitive analysis and content ideation. This will equip you to execute the plan you've just built with speed and intelligence.