Content marketing is becoming an increasingly efficient and powerful strategy when promoting companies and businesses. For an even more effective plan, developing an editorial calendar is critical. ContentsWhat is an editorial calendar?How to create an editorial calendar?1. Define your persona or target market2. Identifying the stages of the marketing funnel3. Research keywords4. Work with social networks5. Put […]
Content marketing is becoming an increasingly efficient and powerful strategy when promoting companies and businesses. For an even more effective plan, developing an editorial calendar is critical.
Contents
What is an editorial calendar?
Nothing short of than a tool to make your job even easier. Using it will help you plan your blog content and indicate the best time of publishing each article.
Apart from that, you will increase your organic traffic, highlighting the ads that are running on your blog, increasing your monetization.
How to create an editorial calendar?
Check out the tips below:
1. Define your persona or target market
You need to start building your editorial calendar even before you create your blog. That’s why creating your persona is essential: but, what is persona? It is an archetype of a possible client that represents the ideal buyer. It’s used by blogs that aim mainly to sell a product or service.
The target market is a segment of the population that could be interested and benefit from the content generated by your blog.
Defining the persona or target market is important for several reasons, including: the language to be used on your blog, the type of content it will generate, the size of the content, social networks that should be used to promote it and the types of advertisements, as the case may be.
This tip is especially useful for creating engagement, through content that is really relevant to the reader, creating a positive image about you or your company.
2. Identifying the stages of the marketing funnel
Now that you have defined your persona, a strategic part of the editorial calendar is getting to know the marketing funnel or sales funnel.
The funnel is a process of accompanying and leading your public, from the moment they see your content up to the final product purchase decision.
It is represented by an inverted pyramid showing the sales processes, as follows:
• Top of the Funnel (ToFu): The top of the funnel is it widest part, where only introductory content is used with the aim of turning a visitor into the lead.
• Middle of the Funnel (MoFu): Now that the client has shown some interest in your product, it’s time to produce more in-depth content, with a view to strengthening customer relationships and positioning the company as an authority.
• Bottom of the Funnel (BoFu): The final stage of the process, where the lead is now ready to make a purchase. At this point, the material should show case studies, clearing doubts and addressing objections, convincing the client that your product is best choice for them.
How will the sales funnel help your editorial calendar? It’s easy, by using this strategy you will know which kind of content that your blog should offer. The more in-depth content could be an e-book or a webinar, but by using the funnel you will know which content to create.
3. Research keywords
In order to ensure that your blog reaches readers, your choice of keywords is crucial to gaining organic traffic. You can research this on Google Keyword Planner or in SEMrush.
With these keywords, you need to work SEO into your content, improving the text structure to gain better positioning among search results.
But there’s no point in inserting keywords for the sake of it, they need to be appropriate for the content and be original. The size of the material is also taken into consideration by Google, as well as mobile friendliness and link building structure, generating more traffic and authority.
Social networks are powerful tools for promoting your blog. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and LinkedIn, are the ones that generate more engagement.
However, people behave differently on each social network. On Facebook, people share how they see life, being a platform where everyone says what they think. On Instagram, people share their way of life, making it a less intensive social network, and on YouTube, people seek solutions to their queries. On LinkedIn, content has a more professional focus.
According to Forbes magazine, user interaction with brands is 58 times greater on Instagram than on Facebook. In addition, the social network has more organic reach than Facebook. A great way to create engagement for a blog.
YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world and is directly linked to Google, so it works with video SEO. Use keywords with the biggest search volume according to your video’s segment.
5. Put all this information on spreadsheet
Now that you have all of this information to hand, it’s time to build your editorial calendar on an Excel spreadsheet. Google users are offered a free tool, Google Sheets, which are automatically saved in the cloud.
If you don’t have this Google application, other options such as Microsoft Office or OpenOffice are also available. But if your blog was created in WordPress, you can create your editorial calendar using the Editorial Calendar plug-in.
The editorial calendar should have information such as:
- # Format of the content to be created;
# Keywords to be used
# Date and time that content will be published
# Frequency of blog posts
# Category in which your blog will be classified
Based on all of the above information, you can now create the full editorial calendar and maximize your blog results.
If you’re stuck for ideas you can find inspiration in marketing and social media calendar 2017 with hundreds of dates and reasons for you to communicate with your clients.