A marketing tool every startup needs - An Editorial Calendar
Keep track of what, when, and where your content goes
By Robin Anderson
A key factor in building a customer base through marketing is to communicate to that target directly as well as through social media. How you nuture a customer from the moment of capturing awareness, then driving interest to conversion, all begins with sharing content. Creating, curating, and repurposing content takes a lot of time. Doing so in the most efficient and effective way minimizes costs and time. How?
Use an editorial calendar. A marketing tool that costs nothing but has high returns, even for startups.
What is an Editorial Calendar?
An editorial calendar is a visual workflow that helps a team of content creators schedule their work on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Editorial calendars can help you track content types, promotional channels, authors, and most importantly, publishing dates.
“A strong editorial calendar will categorize content and show the corresponding timelines to ensure transparency on upcoming material.”
The most important reason for using an editorial calendar is to be consistent with publishing content. The consistency will help with growing your base and improving your SEO.
Basic tools will work to get you started, your editorial calendar does not need to be grandiose. As your company and marketing efforts grow, your Editorial Calendar can expand to accommodate your company’s additional endeavors. Many begin using a spreadsheet to track their content planning, development and delivery. Spreadsheets are easy to use and easy to share. For those who prefer to use tools that have already been designed specifically for content management, take a look at Loomly, Contently, and CoSchedule.
NOTE: All the content you create, and the means of distribution will be reliant on understanding your target audience - your persona. These are the people you want to reach with content that they will want to read. They are the center of all your efforts. It’s critical that you understand this piece before you start planning.
The benefits of an using an Editorial Calendar include:
Organizing the content you are creating and provide structure to track the development.
Planning what types of content are needed to give your team time to adequately research the subject matter whether they are using it to write, or create videos. Use this time to determine the keywords that will need to be integrated into your content to support your SEO.
Strategize your content. What is the goal of your content:
Drive traffic to your website?
Increase brand awareness?
Generate leads?
Support overall marketing campaigns - such as product launch, or feature updates? Is your industry reliant upon seasonality and holidays? Maximize your planning in advance. The goal will determine the focus of your content.
Schedule the delivery. Determine what platforms are the best to target based on your primary persona. Learn what days and the best times to post. Once that is determined, maintain consistency with posting to help your ranking in Google.
What to include in your Editorial Calendar
The point of the editorial calendar is to provide a centrally located tool for everyone to access and refer, for all of your content marketing efforts.
Channels: What are your primary channels for delivery. Social? Email? Advertising? Website (blog)? You can color code these to make it easy to view.
Calendar: what day/times are you posting. Consistency is posting helps you in two ways:
Overall, gain more visibility for those who click through social to your website
Establish a pattern of posting - consistency helps drive interest
Content type you are delivering: blog, video, webinar, ebook, newsletter
Themes: The topic and title
Meta description
URL
Who is responsible for creating the content
Status (draft, editing, review)
Deadline
Keywords
Hashtags
Call to action (CTA): What you want your reader to do/action to take
When it comes to content, start with a strategy
Your focus is not about what content others in the company think you need to share in a blog, but about creating content your customers want to read. Rather than haphazardly creating and posting content, develop a strategy, and create content with a goal in mind. Determine HOW MUCH content you can generate. Create a list of content ideas. Group them into themes, match to seasonalities/holidays. You’ll generate better results.
A few examples of types of content
Newsletters
Offers to drive conversions (ebooks, trials)
Drive awareness (webinars, case studies)
Your industry and your audience will determine the type of content you need to create. Use analytics to determine what is working and what is not.
For brand awareness - social shares, clicks through to your website
Lead generation - conversion rates for blog posts, new leads from gated content
SEO - traffic from organic search, rankings for your target keywords
It takes time to reach your target audience and gain traction through content. That is where consistency in posting content becomes your friend.
Need help planning, creating and delivering your content? Contact us for a free 30-minute consultation to see how we can help!
FunFact Friday
The first use of calendars occurred during the Bronze Age, 3100BC in Mesopotamia by the Sumerians. For months with a full moon would have 30 days, those without only had 29. The year consisted of 12 months.