Are you keeping up with the latest trends in content marketing? Are you feeding those social media pages like a champ? Keeping the website updated regularly to help bring you up in search results? Optimizing your blog posts with SEO? So much to do and there’s not enough time in the month!

That’s where planning, organizing, choosing, and acting, come together. Create your own editorial calendar, or get our free content calendar to help keep you on track.

Developing an Editorial and Content Marketing Calendar

1. Plan  – Every Year /Month / Week

Discuss and plan how you will stay connected with your customers and communicate beneficial services and products throughout the year.

• What are your goals in January? How about
• What services can you post about in March that customers order in April?
• Identify your monthly focus for the whole year. Next determine who, where, what content to provide each week to communicate the monthly focus. If your goals and planning dictate further detail, clarify days and hours content will be posted.

2. Form – Organize / Schedule

Whether you prefer an excel spreadsheet, daily pop-up reminders, or handwritten to-do list, create a reference that is easy to follow.

• For a marketing team of one, create a calendar in a format you will use.
• Larger teams choose a format everyone can access and update. I like to use this content calendar template for my customers.
• The fields included are campaign notes, monthly theme,  week, day plus each platform we will be using.

3. Choose – Social Media Networks with the Highest Return

Once your main campaigns or themes are chosen, determine which networks you will be using. Which profiles or social media networks you choose will depend on your industry, your sales, your budget, and most importantly your company marketing and sales goals. Chosen networks range from  Facebook company pages, Instagram, Twitter, etc.  to blogs, websites, print materials, tv, radio, billboards, etc. If you are a one or two owner shop, or a marketing department in a large organization practice the keep it simple, realistic, and affordable rule.

4.  Act – What content will you post and where?

• All businesses have evergreen content – content that never goes out of style. Mix in branding images, photos, tips, instructions.
• Share other member posts that are relevant to you and your followers.
• Implement content marketing practices such as using hashtags on specific days; #mindfulmondays, #tbthursday or #tacotuesday, etc.
• Interact and comment on other profile posts.
• Mix in funny posts, tips for your industry / clients, completed projects, customer reviews, a percentage of sales copy and calls to actions that suit your goals.
• Follow leaders in the industry on Linkedin, share popular articles inline with your company and of value to your customers and targets.

5. Strategize – Identify how often you will post content

• Reference your editorial calendar that breaks down content monthly, weekly, daily, depending on your goals and budget. It is better to note your monthly and weekly content strategy for the full year and then circle back to add it in per day and hour. Forecasting posts too far out by the hour may not be addressing current events or trends. However, custom hourly content is appropriate during specific sales, events, or advertising and email campaigns.

By incorporating an editorial calendar and our free content calendar you can keep sharing content marketing to your target audience and still have time to do your own job! If you find all of this is overly time-consuming please connect with us today. We are happy to assist customers in all of the above. We can also schedule a consult to help identify where to start.
Stay connected!