In our webinar, “A Marketer’s Guide to Thinking and Acting Like a Publisher” earlier this week, we talked a lot about the importance of developing and managing content that meets customer needs as well as your brand and specific business objectives. One tool publishers use to maintain timely, relevant and useful content is an editorial calendar. To continue the conversation started in the webinar, here are four inputs businesses should consider in developing their editorial calendars: Customer, Marketing, Merchandising, and Seasonality.
Customer inputs:
What are your customers talking about? What are they interested in? You can find out by simply reviewing your internal search logs for keywords your customers are using, or you can dig deeper (and wider) by employing digital listening tools like Radian6 and SM2 that scour social media channels and compile data on the conversations going on. These tools allow you to not only get a better sense of what people are talking about, but the sentiment around those topics. All of which can help you develop content that will resonate with your target audience.
Marketing inputs:
Consider your upcoming marketing events and activities as fodder for content. Most companies plan out marketing events in advance so review what your company has coming up as a potential topic of interest. Do you have a new commercial airing? Are there any contest coming up? Map out what you have now so you’re not scrambling to create content for it at the last minute.
Merchandising inputs:
Product development is an expensive and timely process. The upside of that is that you have plenty of notice for when new products and services are rolling out. There are also those times when you’re looking to reduce inventory of a particular product or raise the awareness of another. Identify the times and details of these merchandising objectives as additional input into your editorial calendar.
Seasonality inputs:
Most of us think about the big seasonal cycles: Holidays. But there are several lesser known seasonal inputs that make for great inputs into your content creation process. Launching of product updates, annual conferences, service reminders…think about the business and personal cycles of your customers and identify those regularly occurring events.
Once you have your inputs gathered, you want to identify where the customer and business interests intersect. If you’re a supermarket and you have oranges to unload and you know that with the rising summer temperatures your customers are interested in unique ways to cool down, consider a blog post or article listing your top ten favorite orange drinks and treats with a downloadable coupon for your discounted oranges.
Publishers don’t just hope they can come up with content, they plan for it. Having your editorial calendar built out in a way that considers your audience’s interests and mindset as well as your business objectives can help you create better content that drives results.
Have you developed an editorial calendar for your brand yet? Are you struggling with maintaining the one you’ve got? As always, we welcome any comments below. Or, feel free to follow this conversation and others relating to content strategy on Twitter: #CMCS.
