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.

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