Customizing CoSchedule: How to Set up Your Calendar for Better Visibility

Looking to solve your team's visibility issues? Here is a step-by-step approach for customizing your CoSchedule account for better visibility. Getting the metadata like color labels, project types, and tags set up correctly on your Coschedule calendar is one of the most important steps to success. Use this the blog post to explore if you're setting things up in the best way.

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Color Labels
• Project Types
• Tags

Introduction

What is this blog? This lesson dives into how to set up your CoSchedule calendar to help you organize, visualize, and report on your marketing strategy.  Who’s this blog for? New CoSchedule champions that will be implementing CoSchedule for their marketing team. What you’ll learn: 

• The best color label strategy for your company’s needs.
• How to set up and use project types.
• How to best utilize tags for an added level of organization.
• What a saved view is and 4 different ones your team might need.

Before diving in, it’s beneficial to understand how color labels, tags, and project types work together to organize your marketing.  These things give you ways to organize and filter your calendar to make reporting, planning, and tracking easy by using something called a saved view. Here are a couple of examples of saved views you can create based on color labels, project types, and tags.  Filter Based on Color Label: A Saved View for Each Department You Work With This saved view gives you visibility into the work your team does on behalf of other departments so you can quickly provide timelines for projects. Filter Based on Project Types: A Saved View of All Emails and Newsletters This saved view shows you all the emails your team will send so you can avoid collisions and sending too often to the same audience. Here’s what it looks like on the calendar: Filter Based on Tags: A Saved View of Every Project That Contributed to a Certain Region This saved view pulls every project that is tagged with a specific region so you can prove to stakeholders all the activities your team is doing per region. 

Color Labels

As mentioned above, color labels are the highest and most general level of organizing your calendar. These are concrete categories that are applied to all your marketing activities – meaning these categories are not likely to change over time. Here are a few of the most important things color labels can do for you:

• Allow you to quickly visualize which activities are tied to certain departments, business units, or teams. 
• Help you report on what your team is working on.
• Easily see how all the pieces of your marketing strategy fit together. 

Choose Your Color Label Strategy

To make it easier to set-up, we have a suggested color label structure for three different types of marketing teams. Read the descriptions and select the one that best fits your marketing team. 

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Apply Color Labels to Your Calendar

Now that you know what your color labels will be, here’s how to set them up on your calendar.  Click the hamburger menu and toggle down your name. Select “Calendar Settings”.  Under the Color Labels section, name your label and apply a color. 

Create a Saved View for Each Color Label

To create a new saved view, click the last item in the breadcrumb menu. This is where you can navigate between saved views and create new ones.  To create a new saved view, click “Create New Saved View”. Name the view after one of your color labels and check the box that says: “Share view with my team”. (This makes the save view visible to your team members.) Next, add one of the color labels you just created as a new filter category. Here’s how: 

1. Add a filter category.
2. Choose the ‘Label’ option. 

Apply the relevant color label from the drop-down list. 

Continue that process until you have created a saved view for each of your color labels.  This allows you to easily report on all the marketing projects you have planned for each department or business vertical. 

Project Types

A project type describes the type of asset that is being created. There are a few valuable ways project types help you get organized:

• Adds an additional filtering layer to your calendar. 
• Helps you show marketing activities to stakeholders. 
• Allows you to better visualize your marketing strategy. 
• Informs team members what type of asset they are creating. 

Apply Your Custom Project Types

To add your list of custom project types you created above, toggle down your name and navigate down to “Calendar Settings”. Next, find the “Project Types” option in the left-hand menu. Scroll to the bottom and add a new project type.  Start adding each item you checked on the list above and choose a custom icon from the dropdown menu. 

Create a Saved View for Project Types

To create a new saved view, click the last item in the breadcrumb menu and click ‘Create New Saved View’.  Name the view after the project type you want to track (ex. Blog Posts) and check the box that says: “Share view with my team”. (This makes the save view visible to your team members.) Next, add one of the project types you just created as a new filter category. Here’s how: 

1. Add a filter category.
2. Choose the ‘Type’ option. 
3. Apply the relevant project type from the drop-down list. 

This allows you to see all the items you have planned for any given content type.

Tags

Tags offer an additional way to filter and track your projects. Think of it this way: tags are additional categories that you might need to track which aren’t covered by color labels and project types.  Here are a few ways tags add value to your CoSchedule calendar. 

• Provide more context to each project.
• Allow you to create additional saved views. 
• Help you quickly find all projects that are tagged with a certain keyword. 

Apply Your Tagging Structure

To create a new tag, toggle down your name and navigate down to “Calendar Settings”. Under the color labels section, you’ll find an area to add tags. Enter each one from your list on the worksheet above.

Create a Saved View for Project Tags

To create a new saved view, click the last item in the breadcrumb menu and click ‘Create New Saved View’.  Name the view after the tag you want to track (ex. Persona 1) and check the box that says: “Share view with my team”. (This makes the save view visible to your team members.) Next, add one of the tags you just created as a new filter category. Here’s how: 

1. Add a filter category.
2. Choose the ‘Tag’ option. 
3. Apply the relevant tag from the drop-down list. 

This allows you to quickly see all the projects that contribute to certain goals, regions, personas, etc.

Mix and Match Saved Views

Now that you’ve created a saved view for color labels, project types, and tags, here’s something else you can do with a saved view, try mixing and matching various filters together to report on anything you need. Here’s an example: Create a saved view with content type + tag: Add blog posts as a project type filter AND one of your goal tags to see all the content you published that contributed a specific goal.   

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