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.