While content marketing is a proven strategy for boosting business growth and overall web presence, few businesses are taking advantage of all the benefits an editorial calendar has to offer. By planning your content in advance, you can ensure that your sales funnel is strengthened and optimized. Plus, it makes your inbound marketing efforts much easier! You’ll be surprised at how much an editorial calendar and the content you generate can successfully convert potential leads.
Here are key elements of any successful editorial calendar:
- Focus. Whether it’s long-term focus that looks weeks or months in advance or a short-term focus that looks at your content marketing for the next week, an editorial calendar allows you to focus. Why does this matter? Because if you continuously publish articles, blogs and content without any plan, your audience will realize that you’re simply posting content without any overarching purpose. Instead, by creating a content roadmap that your consumers can easily follow, they’ll also follow you through your sales funnel.
- Efficiency. Sure, planning an editorial calendar might be a lot of work up front. After all, you have to spend time thinking about future posts, strategy and how everything ties into your sales funnel. Fortunately, once the editorial calendar is in place, all you have to do is follow the roadmap. How convenient! And because you’ve done all the heavy lifting upfront, your content marketing efforts will be much more efficient. You’ll find yourself spending less time writing and more time focusing on other aspects of your business.
- SEO. One of the greatest considerations of an editorial calendar is how it affects your SEO and can help drive traffic through your site. Planning content in advance allows you to target, research and focus on specific keywords to enhance your SEO efforts. By strategically planning everything such as your content, keywords and content marketing, you’ll find that SEO improvement is a natural benefit that appears on its own.
- Flexibility. Just because you’ve planned an editorial calendar, it doesn’t mean that it’s set in stone. In fact, there’s a lot of room for flexibility. You can take advantage of trending news stories in your industry to allow your brand to be heard as a leader. A successful content marketing strategy is one that is both static and responsive.
- Integration. Aside from providing your website with fresh content for your customers and for SEO efforts, an editorial calendar gives you the opportunity to enhance your social media marketing efforts. After all, once you publish something from the editorial calendar, you’ll want to engage in content marketing by promoting the piece on all your social media channels. By doing this, you’ll have an easier time keeping all your social platforms active with useful content.
- Growth. Having to think of blogs, articles and posts for your editorial calendar can even help you grow in your career or understanding of your industry. By having to consistently think of new topics or issues to write about, you’ll find that you’re naturally learning more about your industry than you knew before!
- Style. An editorial calendar allows your business to develop a style and voice unique to the brand. It’s a voice that customers will recognize, respect, and look to when they need specific products or services.
