If you’re a social content marketer, your marketing plan doesn’t end when you schedule your promotions and strategies. You also need an editorial calendar, which serves as your content communication plan.
In this post, I tell you how to create a plan that keeps your content on track while still giving you the flexibility to respond to changes in the industry, so your blog remains up-to-date and relevant.
Start with your business objectives
If you haven’t already set your business objectives for 2013, you need to do that now. Take a moment to read Get a Head Start on Next Year’s Marketing Plan if you need help.
If you already know your marketing objectives and the campaigns you want to run next year, you’re ready to move forward.
Your next step is to plan content that provides editorial support for your plan. Here’s what you need to think about:
- What issues or topics relate to your business objectives?
- What ideas do you need to talk about to start discussions around these topics?
- What types of content could you create to discuss them?
Your answers to these questions will give you a rough idea of the content you need to create. Now begin to drill down to the details.
Plan blog posts to support your marketing calendar
For well-integrated marketing, you need to think like a publisher. That means your content and promotions should support one another.
If, for example, you’re promoting product XYZ in February, create blog posts for the month that talk about topics and issues related to XYZ.
Link to your landing page in the articles or place an ad at the bottom of them. Then use social media to promote the articles so you can generate traffic for your website and your landing pages.
Start by brainstorming topics related to each promotion in your marketing plan. Ask yourself:
- What ideas relate to the product you promote?
- What problems does your product solve?
- What questions do people have about the topic?
Use your answers to create a list of blog posts you could publish before, during and after each promotion. Your ideas don’t need to be fully developed at this stage. They may only be general topics, not titles.
Fill out your editorial calendar
As you develop ideas, enter them into your editorial calendar. Schedule content to be published at the most strategic times based on your campaigns.
That will take care of the weeks during major promotions, but you’ll likely have weeks in which you aren’t running any promotions.
During those weeks, you can write posts related to the categories you’ve set up on your blog. To figure out what you need to write about, review the articles you’ve written in the past.
- Are there gaps in your coverage of an important topic?
- Have new issues come up that need to be discussed?
- Would you like to provide thought leadership in a particular area?
The answers to these questions should lead to specific blog post ideas that you can schedule in your editorial calendar between campaigns.
Speaking of editorial calendar, you may or may not believe in the benefits of them. But even if you’re the spontaneous type who doesn’t do a lot of advanced planning, I encourage you to try one out.
Content creation can either take over your business or become an afterthought, which, in most cases, means it doesn’t happen. A good editorial calendar can save you tons of time by solving the problem of “what do I write about this week?”
When designing your editorial calendar, you can use a list or a monthly calendar. My preference, which I tell you about below, uses a combination approach that’s very effective.
Keeping your plan relevant
Content needs to be timely and relevant so, unfortunately, you can’t finalize your plans too far in advance. My editorial calendar is an Excel document with three tabs:
- One is my idea log. I use it to jot down ideas for blog posts and other content that I’m not ready to schedule yet.
- One is my editorial planner, in which I schedule and flesh out my ideas, then record results after they’re published.
- One is the editorial calendar, a yearly calendar that lets me see my entire marketing plan: editorial, promotions, social media and emails. That way I can easily see any gaps in my plan and how my communications fit together.
I may enter content ideas for the entire year based on the promotions I’ve planned, but I don’t try to flesh out my plan for more than six months at a time. Even then, I always reserve the right to interrupt my plan if a topic comes up that needs to be discussed, such as a new Google update.
Typically, I enter a rough idea of what I want to write about on each publication date. This is tied to my marketing plan. Any time I have ideas for how to develop a post, I can go into my planner to add them to my original idea. That way, when it’s time to write, I may already have an outlined half-way developed.
Once a month, I take a few days to review the next month’s plan, finalize it, come up with engaging titles, and create my content.
You could work further out than that, writing an entire quarter at a time if you wish. That’s up to you. But you’ll still need to watch the industry for relevant and timely topics that need to be covered.
Finally, plan other content
Once your blog posts are planned, think about other content you should create.
- Do you need to create content for specific business goals such as list building, prospecting or sales?
- Would a special report, ebook or book build credibility or name recognition?
- Can you create special content for your VIP customers or newsletter subscribers?
Enter these into your marketing calendar between other major projects so you have time to create the high-value content your followers appreciate.
Need a simple overview of the process for creating your marketing plan?
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