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Chapter 10

The Content Calendar

You can have it all. You can’t just have it all at once.

OPRAH WINFREY

No matter how good we are at what we do or how many years we’ve been doing it, we all seek the elusive “better way” to accomplish our everyday tasks—new tools to explore, new techniques with which to experiment, new information to take into consideration. Innovations are constantly emerging to help people do what they do in less time, with less wasted effort, and with greater success. Reinvention is practically a commodity we trade these days to keep pushing our digitally enabled society forward.

Even the most steady and stalwart of tools in the content marketer’s arsenal—the editorial (content) calendar—has transformed itself over the years, from a simple spreadsheet for tracking what we publish to an essential component for managing the entire life cycle of our organization’s content marketing program.

All Content Inc. entrepreneurs have one thing in common—they keep and run their workflow through a content calendar. Let’s get started.

THE BASICS

Start by gathering the Content Inc. strategy information on which you will be basing your content creation efforts. Your answers to the following questions will help you determine what you need to track in your calendar, as well as help you stay focused on your marketing goals as you plan your content creation.

Whom are you creating content for? Keeping your target audience top of mind as you create your calendar will be essential for planning how to deliver on its needs through your content marketing.

Why are you creating content? Your content marketing mission and goals will impact what you publish, where you publish, and how often, as well as how your team prioritizes, organizes, and categorizes, and tags its content creation efforts. For the most part, your content’s success will be based on getting or keeping subscribers (see Chapter 14).

What resources do you have at your disposal? Whether you have a dedicated team of writers and videographers, a stable of industry pros looking to share their insight, or just a handful of reluctant execs who will need some serious content creation hand-holding, the formats, frequency, and overall workflow you track in your calendar will likely depend on who is writing and where his or her expertise lies.

How can you stand out? What unmet industry needs can be addressed with the content you create? What gaps exist in your current content creation efforts—or the efforts of your competitors? What industry events happen throughout the year to which you can tie your content for added exposure potential? Knowing where you can play a lead role in owning the audience’s attention will help you fill your editorial calendar with impactful content that helps you meet your business goals.

SETTING UP THE CALENDAR

There are a number of paid and free calendaring tools that can help you set up your calendar. A few of these include: Trello

Divvy HQ

KaPost

Central Desktop

Workfront

However, it’s perfectly fine to start out with a simple Excel spreadsheet or a shareable Google Sheet to track your content’s progress through your editorial process.

Shanna Mallon, a writer for Straight North, offers some suggestions on a quick, easy way to build a content calendar that maps to your sales cycle. At the most fundamental level, we recommend that your editorial calendar include the following fields: The date the piece of content will be published

The topic or headline of the content piece

The author of the content

The owner of the content—i.e., who is in charge of ensuring that the content makes it from ideation to publication and promotion The current status of the content (updated as it moves through your publishing cycle) Depending on your company’s content niche and mission, your team’s workflow, the formats and platforms with which you plan to work, and the volume of content you will be creating, you may also want to track these elements to help you stay organized and on course over the long term: The channels where your content will be published. This can include only your owned channels (such as your blog, website, e-mail newsletters, etc.), or you can expand your tracking to include paid and social media channels, as well.

Content types. Is it a blog post? A video? A podcast? An infographic? An original image? To get more mileage from the content you create, you might want to consider repurposing it into other formats at some point (see Chapter 13). So it’s helpful to keep tabs on the types of assets you have on hand right from the start.

Visuals. Speaking of assets, it’s important that you don’t overlook the appeal that visuals can lend to your content, in terms of both social sharing potential and overall brand recognition. Tracking the visual elements you include in your content efforts—such as cover images, logos, illustrations, charts—will make it easier to ensure that your work has a signature look and cohesive brand identity.

Topic categories. This helps make your calendars more searchable when you are looking to see about which target topics you already created a lot of content—or which you haven’t covered often enough.

Keywords and other metadata. Metadata would include metadescriptions and SEO titles (if they differ from your headlines), which will help you keep your SEO efforts aligned with your content creation (more in Chapter 15).

URLs. This info can be archived as an easy way to keep your online content audits updated or to link to older pieces of content in the new content you create.

Calls to action. This helps you ensure that every piece of content you create is aligning with your company’s marketing goals.

Audience outcome. Perhaps my favorite part of the calendar, adding a reader outcome is important if you are working with multiple content creators. Listing the outcome means you are specific with what you want your audience to get out of your content. Is it to get a better job? Learn a specific task? Live a better life in some way? Having that listed will help any person or team creating the content understand the true purpose from the audience’s point of view.

It may be helpful to have more than one editorial calendar—for example, you might have a master calendar where you can see everything at a glance and separate calendars for specific activities. The CMI editorial team uses a similar method: We created a spreadsheet with multiple tabs so that all the various editorial information we track can be found in one document.

Figure 10.1 shows our sample editorial calendar template, which you can download at http://cmi.media/CI-caltemplate and customize to your specific needs.

KEEPING YOUR CALENDAR FILLED AND FOCUSED

As we discussed in the previous chapter, content ideation is an ongoing and important process. As your content ideas become more refined, the place for them is your content calendar.

As you can see in the sample template in Figure 10.1, the CMI team also uses our calendar to track the topic ideas we want to try to cover in future content pieces (under the “Blog posts – Ideas” tab). Keeping a running list of ideas within our calendar spreadsheet makes it an easy reference tool when we need some topic inspiration or starter ideas for brainstorms.

Figure 10.1 A simple example of an editorial calendar in Microsoft Excel.

Again, the fields you set up in your spreadsheet can vary by need, but at the very least we recommend that you track: The topic idea

The owner of the idea

The target keywords and categories to which the content would map (see Chapter 15) Who might be available and qualified to author the piece

A time frame for when you will publish it

Michele Linn, CMI’s VP of content, recommends adding additional tabs to your content calendar spreadsheet, including: Existing “brick” content (downloadable e-books or white papers used to attract subscribers) that can be used as a call to action in new content pieces Ideas for content that can be repurposed into multiple content pieces Content that can be compiled and curated

WORKING AHEAD

A common question from entrepreneurs pertains to timing. Exactly how far ahead do we have to plug in our editorial calendar?

While there is no “one right way” to do this, content teams will generally: Meet once per year to discuss the overall direction and editorial strategy. This gives you a general sense of your content direction as it aligns to your vision.

Meet quarterly to compile the content themes for the upcoming quarter. This takes your general content and gets specific with weekly themes, contributors, and production schedules.

Meet weekly to make changes as needed. This gives your team the opportunity to take advantage of fresh content that may need to find a home in the schedule or perhaps to take advantage of industry news (called real-time marketing).

The best editorial teams have a great idea of what they will publish over the next month—and know exactly what they will publish over the next two weeks. If you and your team are getting up not knowing what content will be produced, this will lead to lackluster content and process mistakes that will take a toll on your model.

CONTENT INC. INSIGHTS

Without a content calendar, your strategy will not succeed.

Although just one major editorial planning meeting a year may do, the content team should meet multiple times per month.

Adding an “outcome” field to your content calendar will give content creators clarity about the ultimate mission of each content asset.