4 Steps to a Powerful Content Marketing Editorial Calendar
4 Steps to a Powerful Content Marketing Editorial Calendar
Great content marketing educates, entertains, and engages. It helps your audience find a solution while building trust in your organization. It even gets three times more leads than paid search advertising.
Sounds amazing, right?
But the thing is, content marketing requires a continuous stream of high-quality content. Many of our clients got stuck trying to create, manage, and share all that content in a cohesive manner. So, we shared our secret with them:
Editorial Calendar
A content marketing editorial calendar organizes all the content you are going to produce, the cadence, and how it will be shared. It’s like a friend gently reminding you to proactively plan what kind of content you want to create and why.
How to set up your content calendar
Step 1: Establish your content marketing strategy
Determine your content marketing objectives:
- What do you hope to achieve with your content?
- What does success look like for you?
- Common targets include:
- Increased traffic
- Increased brand recognition
- Increased marketing leads
- Establish your KPIs and create your baseline to track your success
- Establish your tone (i.e. helpful, authoritative, quirky, approachable)
- Determine how you want to leverage content to drive your overall strategy
Step 2: Plan your content
One simple strategy you can use is boulder, stone, and sand to come up with content ideas and plan each piece of content.
- Boulders: Thought leadership piece (eBooks, white papers, videos, and article)
- Stones: Infographics, how to guides, blog posts, webinars, checklists, interviews, newsletters, and podcasts
- Sand: Social media posts, email marketing campaigns, nurture sequences, GIFs, and memes
A sample breakdown of content for three months could be: (1) boulder, (4) stones, and (many) sand pieces.
With your content plan, the important thing is to establish what you are going to create, why, and how often.
Step 3: Brainstorm Ideas
Gather your team to brainstorm. Check out our free mind map download to facilitate the discussion. Some main topics to cover include:
- What are your customers’ biggest pain points?
- What are their concerns?
- What keeps them up at night?
- What would they love to ask you (and get an honest, non-salesy answer)?
- What objections do they have?
- What information do they need to sell your company to their boss?
- How can you entertain, educate, or make them look good?
- What keywords should you focus on?
- What can you share about your company, its why, its product, and all the things that make it special?
- This part is important to help people connect with the heart of your company
- Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk is an excellent resource to learn more
- Methods:
- What are the best ways to connect with your audience?
- What do they read, listen to? What content do they gravitate to?
- What content can your team produce? What content would you like to produce but need help with?
- Common methods include white papers, eBooks, blogs, case studies, videos, infographics, and tutorials
Step 4: Create Your Content Calendar
Once you have your strategy set and know what you are going to create and why, the next step is to set up your editorial calendar. This serves two purposes:
- It keeps your team organized.
- It holds your team accountable.
We have created a free content calendar you can use. Simply click on the link, save it to your google drive and update it with your details. Here’s the link.
Once you have input your information, share the calendar with your whole team. This helps everyone understand what is happening on the marketing front and how to best support those efforts.
Closing Thoughts
Content calendars are gold.
We hope these resources have been helpful for you. If your team gets stuck, has any questions, or would like some help creating content we’d love to hear from you.
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