Content Calendars, Planning, and AI Work Slop

Yes, you can use AI for content calendars and planning, but that’s not the whole thing.

I saw a great post on LinkedIn today by Rachel Sparacio-Foster that just nailed something I’ve seen over and over again—heck I’ve even been guilty of it in the past myself: thinking if you have a content calendar chock-a-block with content for the month, quarter, or year, you have a “content marketing strategy.” Rachel’s headline is perfect: You Don’t Need a Content Calendar, you need a Decision Making Framework. And she kicks off her post with this killer line: “A full content calendar doesn’t mean you’re being strategic, it just means you’re busy.”

Busy is nice. Busy and strategic is better.

Full content calendar, empty strategy

In a recent job I had scorecard goals—things I needed to do to get my bonus—like “write three posts per product per quarter” tied to creating content to support the business. It’s smart—but not really SMART—to match something I could control (writing) to business goals (kinda). The problem was the stuff I couldn’t control: what each products’ marketing needs were.

Sure, I talked with folks at each product to understand what kinds of content they wanted and needed. Generally I could get something to write about. Not always sure the content was strategically aligned, but I could check something off on my scorecard. As time went on though, it was getting harder and harder to create the content. Emails when unanswered to find out what people needed. If people did answer I often got a “no thanks, we’re good” reply. Which meant my bonus was being held hostage by other people’s strategic plans, goals, and priorities.

Not good.

The whole Catch-22 of being an internal marketing service agency and trying to set goals when you can’t really influence what people want or need is the topic for another post. Right now let’s get back to Rachel’s post.

Busyness for the Sake of Busyness

Rachel points out that B2B marketing teams are under tremendous pressure to keep feeding the content machine. They map out themes, campaigns, and social posts, but it’s often a packed calendar that’s completely disconnected from what the business actually needs. Here’s the kicker she mentions, and I’ve seen/done this so many times that I can’t even; you write all this stuff, fill the calendar, hit publish… and then sales comes to you and says, “We still don’t have anything we can actually use to move a lead through the funnel.”

It’s the classic “random acts of marketing” fire drill. And it’s a waste of everyone’s time. No one is really happy. Sure marketing may have checked off some kind of production goal they’re held to, but to what end? And the worst of it is that the sales-marketing-content misalignment can be solved with just a few discussions and a little bit of planning.

It’s Process, Not Just Prompts

This whole problem is exactly why I built my “content marketing trifecta” series of prompts—brand voice, content audit, and content calendar. My philosophy has always been to use AI to do the tedious things I hate doing, the grunt work, so I can focus on the thinking. I really hate doing brand voice guides and content audits (I don’t know anyone who likes them), so I built systems to take a lot of the drudgery out of doing them.

Seeing the “content calendar” part of the trifecta might make your “irony approaching” warning light start flashing, but stick with me here, it will make sense, I promise.

Sure, you could run my content calendar prompt all by itself. It’ll spit out months’ worth of blog posts, social updates, podcasts, and webinars, all neatly grouped into SEO-friendly content pillars. It’ll give you titles, descriptions, and a publishing schedule. But without the context from the brand voice guide and the content audit, it’s exactly what Rachel was talking about. It’s not strategic. It’s just a list of stuff to do to keep you busy.

The magic happens when you feed the outputs from the first two steps into the third. The brand voice guide ensures the content sounds like you; the content audit provides the context for what needs to be created. They ensure the content calendar can be a strategic weapon, not just a to-do list.

And part of the secret sauce is that the inputs not only talk about your content and your voice, but also your competitors’ too and how you can stand apart from them. At the end of the content audit is an entire section (the longest part actually) with short, medium, and long-term tasks all tied to filling in the gaps between you and your competitors. In the brand voice guide is a section geared towards “here’s how not to sound like everyone else.”

If you want to add more planning into the mix, add a detailed marketing project brief into the context mix, you’re even closer to something more strategic, something tied to a larger goal. (Yes, I have a prompt for that too, because, yes, I also hate doing campaign briefs.)

Context moves you from “give me weekly blog posts for my website for the next six months,” to “based on my voice and the gaps in my current content, give me weekly blog posts for the next six months.”

Is the content calendar output perfect? Of course not. It’s maybe 90-95% of the way there. But it’s a hell of a starting point for a real strategic framework. It’s something you can take to your stakeholders—especially sales—and ask, “Does this stuff answer the questions you’re getting on calls? Is this what our customers need?” That’s when you get the feedback you need. “This topic comes up all the time, I don’t see it here.” Or, “Nobody is asking about that, why are we talking about it?”

I’m not saying the content calendar my prompt cranks out is a content strategy, but if people aren’t sure where to begin, it’s not a bad place to start.

Less “what are we posting” and more “why are we posting what we post”

We’ve all heard the cliché, “failure to plan is planning to fail.” It’s tired, but it’s true. A content calendar without a strategic foundation is just planning to be busy. When I first developed my content audit prompt, I was thinking that every content audit I’ve ever read always missed the “So what?” question. Lots of information on what was there, maybe a few SEO gaps, maybe a look at competitor or two, but nothing that said “And here are the things you need to do fix right now and what you need to do in the next six months to be more competitive.”

It’s the planning part. It’s the part where you can go to your leadership team and say, “Here’s where we’re at, here’s where are competitors are at, this is what they don’t have that we can take advantage of, and here’s how to get there.” No, still not strategy, still tactical, but it starts a discussion that could begin with “Is there where we want to play? Are these the customers we want to reach?” That’s where strategies start to take shape.

AI isn’t going to solve all your strategic problems. But it will let you iterate faster. The whole process—brand voice, audit, and calendar—can be done in about an hour. Imagine walking into a meeting with a data-backed, six-month content plan and saying, “Here’s our first cut. Let’s make it better.”

What’s missing? What don’t we need? Will this connect with what customers are looking for/need?

Is this a little bit of “cart-before-the-horse” work? Absolutely. Really the strategy should inform the content not the other way around, but if you’re spinning your wheels on strategy, sometimes being able to look at something is just what you need. It’s a lot easier to get to a strategy when you can toss out things that you don’t think fit than starting with a blank whiteboard and say “So, what do you think we should do?” And if you’ve got a brand voice, a content audit, a marketing goals brief, and a content calendar, that might just do it to kick things into gear.