3 Editorial Calendar Benefits
An editorial calendar that you create for your marketing team will benefit your marketing program in these three ways. Let's explore them a little bit more.
A plan to create and promote content throughout the year - hopefully you are planning marketing campaigns weeks in advance, not in a matter of hours. A critical part of any marketing campaign is the content you create and publish to support the campaign's goals and objectives. An editorial calendar will be a sub-task of your overall marketing program that will tie in with whatever you're promoting. Since great content takes time to research, write and finalize, incorporate the editorial calendar and share it with your team to see what will be created, who's going to create it and when it'll be published.
A program management tool - your editorial calendar should include the topic, who's writing the draft content, who is responsible for editing and proofreading, and what promotion channels/tactics will be used for each published content piece. Assigning resources and dates, and designating an overall project manager will help with campaign organization and meeting milestones.
Segmenting the content types - you don't always want to just publish blog posts, white papers or special reports. The content you create for each campaign may also be published as interactive content - slide shows, videos, infographics, suveys, etc. An editorial calendar should have a column for the content type, since planning, creating, editing and finalizing infographics, videos and slide shows takes a lot more work than writing a white paper, special report or a blog series. You know you'll need to include more time for interactive content vs. static articles.
What should you use to create and maintain an editorial calendar for your team? Hubspot, a marketing automation software provider has a nifty little template for Google calendars. Learn more about it here.
Your Editorial Calendar & SEO
Your enterprise SEO program impacts the editorial calendar you create. Since content visibility online depends upon finding the right keyword phrases and topics of interest, your SEO staff will need some time to do that research and come up with long tail keyword phrases and topics of interest relative to the campaign you're creating.
Your SEO specialist will need to do the final optimization of any content piece - meta data, alt text tags, URLs, etc. Be sure to give them access to the editorial calendar and include SEO in your project milestones.
Do you want to know more about creating a content strategy that includes SEO? Let Invenio SEO teach you how to set up a content marketing strategy with on-page SEO - contact us to learn more.
You have the option of learning how to do SEO in our online training class now.
Until we meet again, stay safely between the ditches!
All the very best to you,
Nancy McDonald
Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at FreeDigitalPhotos.net
