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.