An editorial calendar is a roadmap for content creation; it tells you what, where and when to publish, and which personas you should be targeting. Keeping the calendar up-to-date, however, can be a struggle.
Whether it’s the team’s workload, confusion on responsibilities or inconsistent publishing, bumps in the road can cause a perfectly good plan to fall apart. Your content marketing is too important to let the content it needs get left behind.
Your strategy for keeping on top of a calendar needs to be in place every step of the way, from generating ideas to hitting publish.
Generating topics is a constant battle between having enough ideas, making sure you don’t repeat topics and keeping every potential post relevant to your prospective buyers. To achieve the trifecta, you can:
It’s important that all those great ideas you generate don’t come out looking like creative vomit on your blog and social media channels. You want consistency in both publishing and content themes.
Some recommend planning an entire year at a time, but you may work best on a quarterly basis or thrive when creating monthly themes. There’s nothing wrong with rotating the focus between personas on a weekly or fortnightly basis, either. Whichever method you choose, you need to look at the big picture and plan your content long term. This allows you to capitalise on certain topics for seasons, events or holidays.
As we’ve said, you don’t need to outline every topic, but a well-planned editorial calendar will always contain certain information, like:
You may adapt some of this to suit your agency, but your team will be more effective if they know who is responsible for what, and when it’s due.
Schedule the final version of each piece of content to be written and edited before the date you expect to publish. This gives you breathing room in case of unexpected projects or sickness and vacations on your team.
The critical point of a successful editorial calendar is that it must be accessible to the whole team. Use a web-based manager like Basecamp, Asana or even Google Spreadsheets so that the whole team can look ahead to see what’s coming.
It’s a writer’s job to generate relevant, remarkable content before the deadline – even if it wasn’t in the original plan. It’s your task to help them do that. Keep an open dialogue to make sure the content you publish is all it can be. Tweak topics, change the course of research or add in new content as it comes up.
Sometimes, your staff is truly busy and lacks the capacity to write remarkably. Use your calendar to anticipate those times and sprint ahead on content writing, or know when it’s time to outsource. The effect of content marketing is well worth the resources it takes to keep up with it.
Don’t let your calendar dissolve into chaos when a few things change. Adapt your calendar as new topics are introduced or unexpected posts are published. If you’ve put your calendar in a web-based manager, this will be easy.
The success of an editorial calendar – and by extension, your content marketing – comes down to strategy. You must be able to generate plenty of strong topics, create a plan to consistently generate content based on those topics and ensure commitment to that plan from the whole team.