Ever since Google’s Panda update, content marketing has become all-important since businesses have been told that they need to come up with original content for their websites. But the challenge lies in creating that content. If you don’t have a plan in place, you may find yourself struggling to come up with ideas for the next week’s blog post or your company newsletter.
Editorial Calendar Helps You Organize Content
That’s where an editorial calendar comes in handy. An editorial calendar helps you organize what you intend to write about on a monthly, weekly or daily basis. Here are some other reasons why you and your business can benefit from an editorial calendar:
Reasons Why Your Business Needs an Editorial Calendar
Stay Current – Planning your content a few months ahead of time will allow you to address certain holidays, important cultural events or company milestones that need promoting. This allows you to create an action plan around them.
Organize Creative Assets – When you know what your topics will be, you can spend time gathering images, videos or other text to supplement your articles. You can list these items in your calendar, so that you’ll have everything you need when it comes time to publish.
Time Management – Creating an editorial calendar is a big time saver because once you know what topics you plan to cover each month, you don’t have to waste time thinking about what to write. Believe me, as a writer myself, there is nothing worse than being at a loss for ideas.
Lead Generation – An editorial calendar is a vital component of your lead generation strategy since it helps you stay focused on the topics that mean the most to your target audience.
Social Media Strategy – An editorial calendar is also useful for social media marketing. If you use Facebook for your business, plan out what topics you want to share with your followers and then use the Insights feature to monitor which posts get the most engagement. You can revisit those topics at a later time, since they are the ones resonating most with your audience.
It’s not difficult to create an editorial calendar. It just takes some thought into what information will be useful to your audience, and serves their needs. Come back to this blog next week and I’ll show you how to create an editorial calendar for your business.
Image courtesy: digitalart / freedigitalphotos.net
