A Content Marketing campaign gains the right momentum when the entire content creation process has been scheduled in advance. The chief objective of having an editorial calendar is to showcase your content before the right audience at the right time. An ideal content calendar lets you save time while ensuring consistent content creation and repurposing. A key content marketing tool, an editorial calendar is instrumental in tending to your web properties as it lets you plan beforehand in more ways than one that we have covered here.
# Get a grip on your Basics : Let the Ideas germinate
Before you go about the task of filling in the entries for a content creation schedule, it is crucial that you take stock of the who’s,hows and whys of your Content marketing strategy. After you have identified your target audience and the motive behind content creation, the ideation phase lets you come up with probable content ideas and formats that are ideal for content generation. The Editorial Calendar must be designed in a way to keep the content contributors and the key stakeholders in the loop about how the Content Marketing initiative is progressing.
# Plan ahead : Calendar for Content Strategy
The more well-defined your target, the clearer is your content strategy. While creating content for a specific audience the focus should be on the generation of marketing content that is customer centric. An editorial calendar brings in a disciplined approach that lets you attach a time frame or a deadline for your content marketing efforts. A regularly updated publishing schedule will make it easier to keep track of your content plans. If you are planning a viral marketing campaign on popular social marketing platforms, a content calendar that keeps track of the content generation and the frequency of social media postings is exactly what you need.
# Repurposing Content : Recycle your Best Content
An editorial Calendar affords you the much needed luxury of repurposing your content. As you keep repeating your valuable content in varying formats, the content marketing initiative receives a major boost as the shelf-life of your content increases. It lets you minimize the time lost in the ideation and creation of fresh content. For instance a blog post can be repurposed into a slideshow or an infographic while multiple blog posts from a particular series can be clubbed together to create an E-book.
# Master Editorial Calendar:Get an Overview
A Master Editorial Calendar is meant to provide you with a monthly/weekly overview of how your content marketing efforts have paid off. It lets you create a Content Timeline on a monthly,quarterly or annual basis. A content log helps you keep track of the changes made in the content based on date it was published on.You could also add data from analytics tools like Google Analytics to the calendar and track the performance of all your content items on different platforms.
# Track new ideas using a Content Calendar
An Editorial Calendar lets you record content ideas generated during all those brainstorming sessions or the inspirational moments in the ideation phase. Editorial Calendar tools cater to both SMEs and major organizations alike as they play a major role in keeping the content consistent and relevant. Google Doc is a widely used Editorial Calendar solution for its ability to support collaborative editing while you go about scheduling your weekly/monthly content calendar.
Kapost is another popular editorial calendar tool that helps you track the workflow of your content marketing strategy through the ideation, execution and promotion stages. This software would be an ideal choice if you plan on generating large volumes of content. Content Marketing tools like Gather Content can be used in sync with editorial calendar solutions like Excel spreadsheet/ Google Spreadsheet.
The current process of planning a content marketing initiative revolves around content amplification strategies that are executed in accordance with the schedule in a content calendar. Although there are multiple Editorial Calendar formats available to choose from, you should ideally stick to a single format that you have zeroed in on based on your business model.
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