Content Calendar — 30 days that ladder to something

A calendar full of "post something Tuesday" is a chore list, not a strategy. This calendar gives every piece three jobs before it earns a slot — a pillar it argues, a journey stage it serves, a next step it points to — and pre-writes the week-one hooks so the plan survives contact with Monday.

Inputs

• Platforms in play and honest posting capacity per week: $ARGUMENTS
• From marketing-brief.md if present: the message pillars (every piece ladders to one), the customer journey and top pains, the primary channel, voice rules, and the banned-phrases list.

Do this

1. Check the foundations. No message pillars in the brief? Run /marketing:message-map first — a calendar without pillars is a posting schedule, and posting schedules produce noise on a cadence.
2. Set the weekly mix against where the funnel currently needs help, varying format to each platform's native shapes:
   • Problem and pain pieces — earn attention at the top of the journey.
   • Mechanism and proof pieces — build belief in the middle.
   • Offer and CTA pieces — convert at the bottom, in proportion to the trust built.
3. Generate the idea bank: roughly ten cornerstone ideas, each drawn from a pillar crossed with a pain, desire, or objection in the brief. Inside Claude Code, the content-strategist agent can run this pass.
4. Plan the repurposing chains before filling the grid: each cornerstone spawns derivatives — a long post becomes a carousel outline, three short takes, and an email. Thirty days of content should need about ten ideas, not thirty.
5. Build the 30-day grid: date, platform, pillar, journey stage, format, working title or angle, CTA. One idea per piece. Leave roughly one slot in five unassigned for reactive content — a calendar with no slack gets abandoned by week two.
6. Pre-write the week-one hooks — the first line of every week-one piece, structure-first (/marketing:hook-factory does this properly). Whether week one ships is what decides whether the calendar lives.
7. Set the weekly review: which pieces earned attention and moved pipeline, what gets doubled, what gets killed. Save the whole thing as content-calendar.md in the project root.

Output

The 30-day calendar grid, the repurposing chains, and the week-one hooks written out — saved to content-calendar.md. Flag any slot that could not be tied to a pillar; those are the first candidates to cut.

Rules

• Every piece ladders to a pillar or it does not get a slot. Volume without message is noise with production costs.
• One idea per piece. A post carrying three points makes none of them.
• CTAs match the journey stage. Asking cold readers to book a call is how content "fails" while doing its job perfectly.
• A derivative is reshaped for its platform, never pasted across three.
• Capacity honesty beats ambition. A three-post week that ships beats a seven-post week that collapses by week two.