Editorial Calendars: The Necessary Tool for a Successful Content Marketing Campaign
The not-so-secret key to content marketing success.
There are different factors that can make it hard to achieve content marketing success, like lack of strategy and organization. An effective strategy requires a tactical editorial calendar, as content marketing hits its targets more often when there’s an editorial calendar to work with. But what makes an editorial calendar a great one?
What goes into an editorial calendar?
A great editorial calendar requires several components to do the job, as it’s not only about associating content with dates, content production, responsible parties, engagement cycle and delivery methods. It actually serves different purposes, some of them being:
- Creating a list of content to publish based on your content strategy
- Distributing content across the different channels you use to publish it
- Being able to make different teams, each of them having a different role in content production and promotion (editors, writers, graphic designers, outside agencies, etc.)
- Stocking resources that make up for the possible gaps in your strategy
- Planning a next step after hitting targets, giving your audience a chance to further engage with your brand
To have an effective content marketing calendar, never start without having a content marketing strategy. You should visit this regularly, as it outlines, develops, and curates information based on your company’s marketing strategy. This helps the editorial calendar to have a visual form that makes communication and work between team members much easier.
The first step to creating an editorial calendar is to determine the type of content you will produce. At Impressona, we found out that the best way to do that is to establish the topics you want to put out there, by:
- Assigning goals to them
- Deciding the type of persona that you are targeting with that content
- Determine the amount of content you need to produce during your own content cycle (while keeping a healthy balance of timely material and relevant content, which will help bring visitors back to your channels)
- And discuss the frequency of content delivery to your audience.
Keeping things fluid and flexible
As content marketing needs to have a degree of flexibility, with last-minute updates to adjust to any trend or viral post going around that could help increase your site’s traffic, you should leave room for adjustment in your content. You should visit your calendar to adjust scheduling, or improve your content based on feedback from the team or stakeholders. By using the help of your writers and designers, you ensure that everyone gets enough time to add on to the content without it being rushed.
In conclusion, a genuinely useful editorial calendar starts with really nailing the content marketing strategy. It should help you generate the right topics at the right time, and make a plan to generate related content. That’s the commitment you need to ensure an up-to-date, easy to access, and organized calendar.
