MARKETING ESSENTIALS: DEVELOPING A KICK-ASS EDITORIAL CALENDAR

Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

FROM BIG IDEA TO ACTIONABLE PLAN

An idea can only become a reality once it is broken down into organized, actionable elements.
Scott Belsky, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality

Implementing a robust content marketing plan can be daunting for any enterprise, whether youre a large, B2B rm serving clients across the country, or a small business trying to build a customer base in a single location. What to post, when to post it, who will create it clearly, theres a lot to consider if youre trying to create meaningful engagement with your target audience. Regardless of the size of your enterprise, having a content calendar that captures the what, why and how of your content creation eorts will be critical to the success of your entire marketing plan. Content marketing is a long-term strategy that requires organization and structure; without a wellplanned content calendar, you risk wasting time and eort creating and distributing content that doesnt support your overall marketing objectives. As Belsky notes, there needs to be a scheme that consists of organized, actionable elements if you want your big ideas to y. This guide will help you get started.

Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

STEP ONE

KNOW YOUR STORY

Before you start creating content and building your content calendar, you (and others who will be creating content for you) need to have a solid understanding of your:

INDUSTRY

BRAND & PRODUCT(S)

UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITION

COMPETITIVE MARKETPLACE

BANDWIDTH & RESOURCES

Every product and service has a story; learn yours, and you will be better prepared to be an eective content marketer.

PROTIP

To gain real-time insights about whats happening in your industry, you can set up a few Google Alerts, using appropriate keywords, or use tools such as Social Mention or HootSuite to track trending topics.

Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

STEP TWO

KNOW YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE

Before the nuts and bolts of assigning tweets, posts, blog posts, white papers or podcasts can begin, make sure that you have a thorough understanding of your target. Know your audience: What are their consumption habits? What are their pain points? What motivates them? Identify their action triggers. What online platforms are they most active with? If they are most active on mobile, do you have a strategy for that?

GUIDE 5 Steps to Building a Search Persona WEBINAR Using Personas to Boost Online Marketing and SEO

PROTIP

It can be helpful to imagine your target audience not as a faceless crowd, but as a specic persona. Personas are widely used by experienced marketers to help develop messaging that will resonate with the likely buyer. Whether you determine that your prototype buyer is George, a single, 35-year-old urban dweller who owns a dog, a hybrid vehicle, and vacations in Costa Rica, or college educated women, ages 25-30, the more insight you have about your audience, the more relevant your content marketing e orts will be.

Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

P STEE E
THR

KNOW YOUR CONTENT ECOSYSTEM

Your content marketing calendar will consist of items that are produced by your own subject matter experts, as well as content that you share from thought leaders and inuencers from your industry. Based on your unique marketing objectives, and your resources, you will need to decide: Who will be involved in brainstorming and/or creating content? What type of content do we need to > drive meaningful engagement? > establish thought leadership? > elevate our brand? How frequently should we distribute content? Begin by auditing your existing content to identify content that can be refreshed or repurposed, and to discover content gaps that indicate potential topics for new content. As you review existing content, look at ways that you can creatively leverage the material: a blog post could become a slide deck or infographic, for example.

PROTIP

Understanding the content marketing produced by your peers and competitors will be helpful to you as you begin to curate and solicit material for your own content calendar. Proactively build connections with the online community and establish a presence with the inuencers in your industry niche. This way, you will build credibility for your brand and the content that youll be publishing.
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Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

STEP BUILD THE BIG-PICTURE R U O F

ROADMAP
Just like you need a travel itinerary to guide a trip, youll need a tactical document, or roadmap, to capture a high-level view of your content marketing plan before you begin assigning specic topics, authors and dates to a master calendar. The worksheet below is a roadmap for a rst generation content marketing plan. It can be customized to reect your own tactical plan. In this example, platforms are shown, with the target audience for each. The key messages and themes are the same across categories. Initial goals are stated in general terms; as more meaningful metrics are obtained over time, goals will become more specic. Note that daily posting topics, hashtags and themes are shown, but specic details of the posts are not. This information will be captured in the master calendar.

Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

STEP FIVE

MASTER CALENDAR BASICS

Youve done your due diligence and youre condent that you know your industry, your product, your audience, your marketplace and your capacity for creating content that your audience will want. Youve determined the platforms and messaging, and youve created a roadmap to guide your eorts (see Step Four). With a plan and concept in place, youre ready to develop a working content calendar. The categories that you choose to include in your calendar will be determined by the types and volume of content that youre planning to create. A simple calendar might include these categories: > > > > > Title Description Due Date Publication Date Platform(s) > Author > Status > Keywords > Digital Assets > Tags > Call to Action > Repurpose Content? > Tie-ins with other marketing campaigns or milestone events > Engagement Highlights (Metrics)

PROTIP

An Excel or Google spreadsheet is the most common tool for organizing your calendar. Depending on the size of the team that needs to access or edit the information, you may wish to use an online sharing tool, such as Google Drive. Create the calendar with access and collaboration in mind. Its important that content marketing objectives are known and understood across your organization.
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Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

Below is an Excel spreadsheet that can be modied to reect the areas that matter the most to your content marketing eorts. Depending on how much content youre planning for, you may wish to create a tab for each month. Adding a brainstorming page might be helpful as ideas develop organically over time. Customize and tweak your calendar until it supports your unique objectives.

CLICK TO ENLARGE

Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

STEP SIX

THINK LIKE A PUBLISHER

Whether your calendar is a quarterly, monthly, or annual document, you need to anticipate and plan for content that aligns with your organizations milestone events. If youve been given a marketing plan for the entire year, use it to guide your content calendar! Think like a publisher; whats happening in your organization, in your industry, or with your leadership that might engage your audience? Be creative: turn events into opportunities to develop innovative content. Rather than a standard blog post about a success story, create a video or a Pinterest board based on elements of the story. With practice, youll see the potential for good content marketing material in the day-to-day life of your company, as well as in popular culture: Product launches Selling cycle-specic content Cartoons, memes and humor Is there a magic formula that will deliver the best ROI? Not necessarily, but according to Paul Chaney, a common best practice is to follow the 70/20/10 rule: 70% of your content should focus on your customers needs and interests, 20% should be content that you curate from other sources, and 10% should be promotional in nature. As your plan evolves, youll discover the mix that works right for you.
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Quarterly sales goals Company events

Seasons Holidays

Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

CONTENT MARKETING RESOURCES How to Create a Business Plan for a Corporate Blog Strategy Tips for Creating Compelling Content B2B Content Marketing Trends

PROTIP

Think visually. Pictures, graphics and images will drive the most engagement and are the most shareable. Develop evergreen content material and information that has value to the target audience that can be updated and retrotted for ongoing use. Keep in mind that a good calendar is exible enough to accommodate unexpected developments, such as new branding initiatives or changes in the marketplace. As you create your calendar, you should strive to build a content plan that will engage your audience in the way thats most authentic to your brand. Certain types of engagement will develop organically responses to a blog post, for example so your plan needs to be exible enough to accommodate spontaneous developments. Remember that social media is a conversation your content should be positioned to instigate or encourage a wider conversation, rather than be a bullhorn for your brand.

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Marketing Essentials: Developing a Kick-Ass Editorial Calendar

#BrandAwesome
No, CNN may not always pick up your content, and it may not go viral on YouTube, no matter how clever or well-planned your calendar may be. But implementing a calendar, iterating on it, repeating what works and discarding what doesnt, will help you create content that resonates with your audience. Keep in mind that your distracted, ckle and information-thirsty audience is looking for shareable, useful and entertaining content from the brands they care about12 months of the year. A robust content calendar thats tied to your marketing goals will deliver results: IMPROVED SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS INCREASED LEADS TO YOUR WEBSITE PIQUED INTEREST OF BLOGGERS IN YOUR NICHE SOLIDIFIED SOCIAL MEDIA PRESENCE INCREASED AWARENESS OF YOUR BRAND

What are you waiting for? Your audience is already online, waiting for you. Go get em!

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