Content calendar template for four countries

What a content calendar template is for

A content calendar is the week-by-week plan of what you publish: the topic, the channel, who makes it and whether it is live. It answers when. Why you post and for whom belongs in a social media plan; how social sits next to your website, ads and email belongs in a marketing plan. The calendar is the sheet you open every Monday. Which day and hour suit each platform is in the best time to post on social media.

The case for one gets stronger the moment you sell in more than one country. A Belgian customer has a day off on 21 July, a Dutch one on 27 April, a British one on the last Monday of August, a German one on 3 October. Post a delivery promise on the wrong day and you make a promise your carrier cannot keep. Send a B2B newsletter on a bank holiday and it lands under a pile of out-of-office replies.

This template puts the four calendars next to each other so you do not have to look them up per campaign. It suits a European web shop, a software company with clients in the Benelux and the UK, or a foreign brand entering Belgium that wants to know what the local year looks like.

Public holidays in four markets, 2026

These are the days that differ. Christmas Day, New Year's Day and Easter Monday are holidays in all four countries and are left out here; the template has every day.

Germany has more holidays than the template shows: All Saints' Day on 1 November in five states, Corpus Christi in six, Reformation Day on 31 October in nine. The template keeps to the days the whole country shares. Selling mainly into Bavaria or North Rhine-Westphalia, add the days of that state yourself.

2027 dates to plan around now

Easter falls on 28 March in 2027, so the spring holidays come early. Book campaigns and stock around these:

Belgian sales start on 3 January and 1 July, a day earlier when that day is a Sunday, which is why winter sales open on Saturday 2 January 2027. For clothing, shoes and leather goods, Belgian law still bans announcing discounts in the weeks before: from 3 December to 2 January and from 1 to 30 June. In May 2026 the Council of State annulled three fines under that rule and the minister wants to change the law, but until then it formally stands. Schools in Flanders also close for a week in early November and for two weeks around Christmas and Easter, which shifts family spending.

The filled-in example: a web shop shipping to four countries

The Example tab shows a fictional home goods shop that sells from Belgium to the Netherlands, the UK and Germany, planning the fourth quarter of 2026. The holidays were already in the template; the shop filled in the rest.

Which template when

The calendar is the last sheet of your planning, not the first. If you are not sure which document you need now:

• Choose the content calendar ifyou know what you want to say and need to see per week what is fixed and who makes what.
• Choose the social media plan first ifyou have not decided what social media should deliver or which kinds of posts you make. The social media plan template puts goal, audience, pillars and rhythm on one sheet.
• Choose the marketing plan ifsocial is one channel among several and you split a budget across site, ads and email. Start with the marketing plan template and size the budget with the marketing budget calculator.
• Choose the SEO checklist ifyour calendar holds blog posts or new pages. A post Google cannot find earns nothing from a good week; the SEO checklist says what to fix first.
• Choose the website brief ifa campaign needs its own landing page per country. The website brief template asks for it in a way an agency can price.

Where a four-country calendar goes wrong

• Translating instead of localisingA Dutch post about King's Day means nothing in Belgium, a British Boxing Day sale nothing in Germany. Plan each market as its own channel. If your site is the bottleneck, see multilingual website development.
• One delivery promise for allLast order dates before Christmas differ per country and carrier. Put them in the calendar per market, in week 43 at the latest.
• Peaks without budgetAround Black Friday every shop pays for reach, so an organic post alone does little. Read how much Facebook ads cost in Europe before you plan the week, or have the campaigns run as Facebook and Instagram ads next to the posts.
• Measuring the wrong clickSince Meta changed how it counts clicks, only link clicks count as clicks in your reports; see the Meta click attribution change before comparing this year with last.
• New channels without a planTikTok Shop opened in Belgium this year (TikTok Shop Belgium). Add a channel to the calendar only when someone owns it every week.

Your first four weeks in the calendar

1. Download the Excel file and open the tab of the year.
2. Hide the country columns you do not sell in.
3. Mark your three busiest moments per market in Peaks by sector.
4. Fill in the next four weeks, with a name on every row.

If you would rather have the calendar filled and the posts made, see what that costs in social media management pricing, or how we made the launch reel and winter carousels for Les Terrasses de Durbuy. Tell us where you sell through contact.