Editorial Calendar: Content Scheduling Made Easy

Editorial Calendar: Content Scheduling Made Easy

Content distribution, mainly when performed across multiple platforms is both complicated and challenging. With numerous postings and marketing actions needed daily, keeping track of everything becomes tedious. Despite the hardships, scheduling content is an absolute necessity. In fact, content timing is a crucial factor in the success of any content marketing strategy. Distribution and positioning of content in multiple platforms require precision and accuracy to avoid delivering the message to the wrong platform or providing it at the wrong time.

One useful tool that helps content marketers quickly perform content distribution is an editorial calendar. Scheduling content and providing essential information regarding each distribution, a content calendar serves the purposes of ensuring consistency and quality. This organized way of curating content provides your marketing team with an edge. It also ensures that the targeted marketing message is distributed correctly across all platforms.

Providing User Engagement Through Content Scheduling

User engagement is the driving mechanism that makes content an excellent tool. In fact, the birth of social media paved the way for an era where digital marketing outperforms traditional marketing platforms. Driving the movement is user engagement. Allowing the users to communicate with your brand through your content helps your reputation grow dramatically.

More often, it’s the lack of scheduling that limits the effectiveness of your content. User engagement requires that your content reaches the users at the right time and in the right platform. For this reason, the need for a content calendar can be viewed as vital to your marketing strategy achieving results. By utilizing one, you’ll have a better way to assess which type of content works best and what platforms are doing well. Also, you’d be able to ensure that your digital marketing mission statement is properly integrated.

Social Media Scheduling and Content Automation

With the advent of the internet and social media, your audience has now expanded to include the whole world. This miraculous 24/7 availability of a potential audience is another reason why you must schedule your content right. Marketers need to explore alternatives that provide a workaround for the challenges they face. Scheduling and content automation is the most viable solution to these common problems.

Prescheduled posts can help provide you consistency regarding content placement. Also, it allows you to develop a user following and boost user engagement among your platforms. Scheduling content also helps you assess user behaviors. For example, with content placed on a timed basis, you’ll eventually find the best time to distribute your posts. Site metrics also make more sense and provide meaningful statistics when you consistently follow a schedule.

Social media websites like facebook and twitter require real-time, up-to-date and consistent posting. In these channels, the availability of cross-platform technology and content sharing feature makes content distribution reach a broader audience. Maximizing this potential audience size requires an automation mechanism that allows you to position content at the right time while keeping track of what’s trending and what’s hot. Adding more responsibilities is a burden and if not handled well, turns into an unmitigated disaster. So, what should you do? Simple, have an active calendar that’s able to outline, reflect and deliver your content marketing mission efficiently.

Building an Effective Content Calendar

A content calendar provides your marketing team with a holistic view of the distribution of content across your channels. It should contain vital information regarding your output such as the items found on the list below.

• Content Type: Your calendar must determine what specific content you need to deliver. Whether it’s a video post or a short tweet, proper labeling makes curation a lot easier.

• Platform: You should emphasize upon which platforms the content must be made available. Knowing what platforms the content is intended for also gives your content creator an accurate idea on how to provide more meaningful shares.

• Date and Time: You must be very particular with this aspect of the calendar. Ensure that your marketing team follows the schedule and if possible is accomplishing their activities on a pre-scheduled basis so that you won’t have gaps in your coverage. It’s also important that you provide a separate and an advance date to which they must submit content that needs review and approval. Two things are said to be indispensable in content creation, and those are timing and quality.

• Staff Assignment: Make sure that you assign your content to the right person.

• Topic: Creating content is a lot easier and more meaningful if you have planned the topics ahead. This way, you can provide continuity and reduce redundancy.

• Keywords/Tags: This helps emphasize important terms to integrate within the content. It also provides a better way of curating and classifying content.

Having a Content Calendar Makes Outsourcing Content Easier

Outsourcing is one of the most favored ways of ensuring that good and diverse content is consistently being created and shared. While there are known risks from outsourcing, they’re addressable when you have the right tools. One of the most essential of these is having a content calendar. When you work with a contractor for your content, you can always share your calendar with them so that they understand the bigger picture of your content marketing strategy. You can also use your calendar as a tool to monitor the submission of posts and know which ones are under review. Lastly, the use of this tool helps improve collaboration, making the process more fluid and dynamic.

Create Your Content Calendar

Different companies under different niches require a different schedule. Some need complex ones that outline every detail while others can rely on generic or basic info and still get the job done. Instead of buying one, it’s advisable that you devise your own. It doesn’t require too much effort to create a content calendar. Tools like Google spreadsheet are available for free. The important thing with an online spreadsheet is that you can share them with other people enabling collaboration. If you’re too busy to create one, you can even ask your dedicated content marketing team to do the job for you. This simple requirement is also a good way to gauge the ability of the team you’re using and will give you more avenues to collaborate with them.

Do you have any questions about creating a content calendar? Talk to us now. We can help you craft a content calendar that will work best for your brand.