Creating An Effective Customer-Centric Editorial Calendar In 7 Steps

A strate­gic edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar will help you meet busi­ness goals, tell great sto­ries, and add depth, val­ue, and cohe­sion to the cus­tomer jour­ney.

Lisa Williams By Lisa Williams from Sustainable Digital Marketing. Join the discussion » 0 comments

It’s hard to make time to cre­ate a strate­gic, inte­grat­ed edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar that meets busi­ness goals and adds val­ue for your cus­tomers, but time spent in plan­ning will add depth, val­ue and cohe­sion to the cus­tomer jour­ney and mea­sur­able KPIs. Plan­ning an edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar and map­ping the con­tent will help increase effi­cien­cy because you won’t spend time cre­at­ing con­tent that does­n’t track to a busi­ness goal or a cus­tomer need. Suc­cess­ful brands don’t cre­ate con­tent for the sake of cre­at­ing con­tent – they cre­ate con­tent with a clear pur­pose that puts cus­tomers first.


Great edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dars don’t start in a plan­ning ses­sion in a con­fer­ence room. Invest­ment in map­ping your con­tent to buy­er ques­tions and the sales process and cre­at­ing con­tent pil­lars are great foun­da­tions to build­ing an effec­tive cus­tomer-cen­tric edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar.

Once your busi­ness goals and cus­tomer needs are aligned with these exer­cis­es you can begin craft­ing an edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar that inspires and con­nects your whole mar­ket­ing team to cre­ate con­tent that delights your cus­tomers and fuels the sales fun­nel.

Here’s how to devel­op an effec­tive cus­tomer-cen­tric edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar in sev­en steps.

1. Leverage All Marketing Resources In The Planning Phase

Keep all edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dars in one loca­tion.

It’s great to use tools like Kapost & Com­pendi­um if you have the bud­get to invest in a plan­ning tool, but you can still plan effec­tive­ly with a Google Sheet (though you’ll miss all the effi­cien­cies cre­at­ed with a plan, pub­lish, pro­mote, and mea­sure tool in place).

The oppor­tu­ni­ty to serve and grow your audi­ence grows expo­nen­tial­ly when teams have a bet­ter under­stand­ing of mar­ket­ing efforts across the orga­ni­za­tion.

2. Know Your Audience

Large brands with mul­ti­ple audi­ences may use sep­a­rate edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dars, but there’s often oppor­tu­ni­ty for cross-over so it’s great to keep all cal­en­dars in one loca­tion acces­si­ble to all teams.

If you have very dif­fer­ent tar­get mar­kets (e.g., if your prod­uct is mar­ket­ed to a small-office/home-office audi­ence as well as enter­prise-lev­el) those cus­tomers may have dif­fer­ent ques­tions and need dif­fer­ent con­tent devel­oped.

Spend­ing time with sales and cus­tomer ser­vice is a great way to bet­ter under­stand your audi­ence. In many cas­es, no one in the com­pa­ny knows more about the cus­tomer than these teams.

Involv­ing mul­ti­ple teams in the edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar cre­ation process helps you get buy-in and the cre­ativ­i­ty of a lot of smart peo­ple who know your cus­tomers in dif­fer­ent ways. Your email team may be able to shed light on con­tent that encour­ages refer­ral or your tech­ni­cal team may be able to share new tech­nolo­gies that help iden­ti­fy more of your “per­fect cus­tomer” so you can share your great con­tent with new prospects from paid media.

3. Let The Storytelling Shine

Con­tent pro­duc­ers who are involved in the con­tent map­ping and con­tent pil­lar phas­es will bet­ter under­stand your goals and the prob­lems you’re try­ing to solve for your cus­tomers. The goal of the edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar is to cre­ate con­tent that helps your cus­tomers.

Involv­ing oth­er teams in your edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar plan­ning process helps them let their sto­ries shine.

  • If your prod­uct mar­ket­ing team has a trade show, how can you cre­ate con­tent for the cal­en­dar that helps tell the prod­uct sto­ry and sup­port them?
  • If your social team spon­sors a Twit­ter chat or Google+ Hang­out, incor­po­rate that con­tent into your cal­en­dar.
  • If your com­pa­ny hosts LeanIn Cir­cles or C‑Suite Book Clubs or oth­er pro­grams that illus­trate their com­mit­ment and help share great sto­ries, don’t leave that out of the edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar.

No sin­gle sto­ry­teller can tell the full sto­ry of a tribe.

4. Include Channel Integration

Airbnb does an amaz­ing job of lever­ag­ing mul­ti­ple chan­nels to share their over­ar­ch­ing sto­ry of con­nect­ing trav­el­ers with afford­able, mem­o­rable, and some­times unusu­al rooms. They con­nect and strate­gize first around the prob­lems they are solv­ing, they include the peo­ple (hosts and guests) that joy­ful­ly solve those prob­lems and then lever­age chan­nels, such as print media for their Pineap­ple mag­a­zine or Insta­gram to encour­age trav­el­ers visu­al sto­ry­telling.

When you know your goal and cre­ate pur­pose­ful con­tent before defin­ing chan­nels for exe­cu­tion, you allow for a more cohe­sive cus­tomer jour­ney.

A chan­nel inte­gra­tion plan with a focus on sto­ry before chan­nel helps you focus on solv­ing a cus­tomer prob­lem rather than serv­ing a sales or mar­ket­ing func­tion.

5. Leverage The Editorial Calendar To Build The Conversation Calendar

Stephen Cov­ey’s famous quote, “Most peo­ple do not lis­ten with the intent to under­stand; they lis­ten with the intent to reply” is enor­mous­ly rel­e­vant to plan­ning your con­ver­sa­tion cal­en­dar.

It’s great to cre­ate nuggets of insight and inspi­ra­tion. As you spend more time lis­ten­ing than talk­ing in the con­ver­sa­tion you’ll also begin to notice and bet­ter under­stand your influ­encers.

Cre­at­ing a con­ver­sa­tion cal­en­dar with the con­text of an edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar increas­es the like­li­hood that con­ver­sa­tions are con­gru­ent with your brand strengths and sto­ry­telling.

6. Revisit The Process Quarterly

It will take some time to encour­age mar­ket­ing teams and even con­tent pro­duc­ers to lever­age your edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar, but keep press­ing for­ward.

Include the cal­en­dar in quar­ter­ly cam­paign plan­ning and make sure impor­tant stake­hold­ers are aware of how it’s help­ing fuel the sales fun­nel (or achieve oth­er iden­ti­fied busi­ness goals).

Align­ing cam­paigns quar­ter­ly helps cre­ate effi­cien­cies and reduce costs, includ­ing media spend.

7. Measure the Success of Your Calendar

Noth­ing inspires more fear in lead­er­ship than hav­ing peo­ple invest in strate­gic plan­ning and then not show how that plan­ning impact­ed the bot­tom line. Mea­sure the suc­cess­es and fail­ures of your cal­en­dar and share them often so your team begins to see the val­ue of plan­ning.

Don’t just share impres­sions, vis­its, and rev­enue. Ana­lyze con­tent from your cal­en­dar that helped with oth­er micro goals that assist­ed larg­er busi­ness goals, such as turn­ing pas­sive read­ers into pre­mi­um sub­scribers, increas­ing refer­ral rates, or improv­ing shop­ping cart val­ue.

Even quan­ti­fy the finan­cial val­ue of inte­gra­tion where pos­si­ble to share with lead­er­ship. If three dif­fer­ent prod­uct teams use dif­fer­ent video pro­duc­tion and cre­ative teams, show how lever­ag­ing the edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar illus­trat­ed the need to assign one pro­duc­tion team or agency, sav­ing time and costs and cre­at­ing effi­cien­cies.

The best way to keep your edi­to­r­i­al cal­en­dar rel­e­vant is to mea­sure unmer­ci­ful­ly and share your wins and loss­es with lead­er­ship. Although sto­ry­telling and its plan­ning is art, its impact will ulti­mate­ly need to be finan­cial to be sus­tain­able.

Lisa Williams

Written by Lisa Williams

President, Sustainable Digital Marketing

Lisa Williams is the President of Sustainable Digital Marketing. She is a 19-year veteran of online marketing and has been featured in Kiplinger Magazine, Glamour Magazine, Boston Globe and The Oregonian. She recently authored her first book, "When Everybody Clicks: Sustainable Digital Marketing". Lisa is on the SEMpdx (Search Engine Marketing Professionals of Portland Oregon) Advisory Board. She speaks at regional, national and international conferences on the topics of digital strategy, marketing integration, team development and leadership. She is available for training and consulting.

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