Editorial calendars are used by savvy marketers to plan their commercial activities and support their overall marketing strategy. And being thoroughly aware of how your editorial schedule can impact various facets of your business makes you better able to modify it whenever you need to.
If you are looking to use an editorial calendar to enhance your affiliate content, here are five guidelines to help you get started.
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Get extra hands
The first step in expanding your editorial calendar is to involve more subject matter experts (SMEs) in your content, even if they are not content creators. Collective ideas make content more beautiful.
Your subject matter experts may be gurus on subjects that interest your target audience. This is why it’s advisable to reach out to every subject matter expert in your organization. And that could include your product designers and manager, your operations department, your developers, and every other expert that can contribute to enriching your content. make great “faces” for your business and may provide the in-depth insights your audience is looking for.
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Your calendar can be used as an indicator to manage C-suite expectations
When it comes to marketing, the C-suite is constantly seeking the bottom line because they want to understand how marketing relates to the company’s financial situation.
An editorial calendar can help you change that perception by showing how it affects the company’s strategic direction. Your content calendar should list the objectives you hope to accomplish with it, such as shares, views, scheduled meetings, etc. When the objectives and the available content assets are in line, it is easier for executives to understand how content marketing will contribute to the overall business.
Your editorial calendar can also do the following to meet or exceed executive expectations:
- align your editorial calendar with your business’s sales funnel so that management can quickly understand how it helps with revenue.
- track the results of your content using metrics and KPIs to provide executives with a performance summary since they frequently require a summary and bottom-line numbers.
- align the marketing indicators you are measuring with overarching marketing or business objectives to make it easier for executives to see the connection between the calendar and the company’s bottom line.
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Make data-driven content decisions
Given how quickly digital marketing is evolving today, metrics and KPIs can help marketing directors make difficult decisions. Instead of getting caught up in implementing new strategies or keeping up with the latest trends, you can optimize marketing by determining its true impact on revenues.
The following are some examples of how metrics might affect your editorial calendar.
- Take your customer lifetime value (CLV) into account and align your content with the times of the year when your customers are most likely to make purchases. At each point of the client lifecycle, publish content that speaks to them, for example, more instructive information for new customers and benefit-driven content for middle to long-term customers.
- To decide where to spend more money on content, use marketing ROI figures. To establish each touchpoint’s messenger ROI and assess its performance, think about giving it a value or weight. Eliminate expensive content with a low mROI and increase the amount of high mROI content by comparing the mROI to your editorial calendar.
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Choose the ideal combination of content for your brand
The majority of marketers find it challenging to choose the best combination of content to publish, particularly when it is related to matching your editorial calendar with the customer journey and sales. Only if the intended audience connects with the information will it be effective. Because readers need to understand what your business offers and how the product is tailored to their needs. It will be wasteful if you release it in the wrong medium or at the incorrect moment for them.
Here are a few strategies for doing it right:
- You must research your audience to be more strategic with your content. You can do this by looking at your analytics (if you’ve already used content marketing on your website) and by using tools like Hootsuite and Sprout Social to analyze the best-performing content in your niche
- Track the downloads and views of your content to determine the most effective formats
- Monitor the time of day your content is most frequently accessed to determine any changes, especially when posting on social media. Otherwise, your information can be overlooked
- Request information from customer-facing teams on the most frequently asked questions. Then, check your content to see if it matches anything there. For instance, if customers often request information about a feature of a recently released product, you might write a blog series outlining the features and benefits. By doing this, you’ll help your clients locate the information they need and reduce the volume of calls that your support staff receives.
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Match content to product upgrades or marketing campaigns
The admirable aspect of this is that you can maintain meeting your prospects’ expectations while also assisting the product team’s efforts. It will be beneficial to get in touch with the product teams to ask about upcoming new features or products while speaking with the customer-facing teams.
Additionally, the rest of the company’s sales initiatives can be coordinated with your editorial schedule. Asking sales to include marketing in the high-level planning will allow you to schedule supplemental content on the same calendar as the main content. By signing up for your company’s newsletter or other sales-related emails, you can learn more about the details provided and the timing of any sales or other promotions.
When working with several teams, you can create your editorial calendar better because it will assist the whole business and increase the bottom line of the organization.
These five strategies can help marketers publish the right content at the right time, make better data-driven decisions, and collaborate often enough to create valuable content. Using an editorial calendar like this one raises marketing’s profile in the organization and helps executives understand how marketing contributes to the bottom line in ways other than just being a cost center.
Need help planning your editorial calendar? Get started here.
