[This is a transcription from the Clickx Marketing Hack of the Day video series.]
There’s Value In Creating A Consistent Editorial Calendar
Hey everybody! I’m Solomon with Clickx. For today’s Marketing Hack of the Day, I’m going to be talking about how to use an editorial calendar to grow your business to make sure that you have a system in place to be able to drive more content on a regular basis!
As a marketer I can tell you how important this is! This has pretty much saved my life! Let me tell you from a content creation perspective. I want to teach you all about it and why you need it! I’m going to give you a couple reasons why you really should change your process, if you don’t currently have an editorial calendar! So let’s get started!
It Reduces Inefficiency & Improvising
First and foremost, the reason why you need an editorial calendar, if you don’t have one yet, that is it reduces inefficiency! Alright! I am all about being more and more efficient day after day, week after week with my content marketing or any marketing for our projects or whoever I’m working with. I want to make sure that I’m extremely efficient, because let me tell you efficiency is going to make you or break you. Alright! So, for that reason I want you to start planning, really think of it from a strategic planning perspective. This is extremely important! And I think if you can plan more, you’ll be much more successful after the fact. Right! If you don’t plan it, you’re just going to start wing in it and if you start winging things, what happens to your marketing results, marketing ROI is going to be winging in it too. Alright! And that’s now a successful strategy. So, you know you need to publish content on a regular basis, you know you got to do that on time, every single time that’s how editorial calendars are going to help you stay on track and make sure that you have accountability.
So, let’s say that you have somebody else in your team who’s writing the content and they start going sideways. They go, oh! I’m going to do this on Friday. Oh! I’m going to do this next week! Do you see my chart here! You see how beautiful I’m drawing! That’s what happens, if you don’t have a solid calendar! And what that means is that your strategy is not going to be what you really envisioned, because nobody is following any sort of process in your team!
So, not only that you know every single content that you create; you have to think about your call to action! What am I going to have the people do with this content? Maybe that call to action requires another checklist, maybe you need to go and an e-book, maybe you need to have some videos that go with that content! So, if you don’t plan, you’re not even going to get the call to actions. Right! So, I like to work backwards. I go work on my call to action first and then work on the content that goes around it because guess what, it’s a lot easier to write the content but very hard to come up with that really valuable premium offer. Alright!
Make Sure You Have An Annual Content Plan In Place
It takes a lot of time a lot of money a lot of resources a lot of teammates are involved and with that said you need to make sure that you actually have a plan in place. How about this, you have the content, the premium content, you work so hard creating an e-book or a checklist or a webinar or whatever, but you have no content to promote it! Any way you look at it, you’re going to need to come up with an editorial calendar. It’s so important!
Again, I’m not giving you some sort of hack that you just go in and do this and immediately you get 300 percent ROI. Alright! So think about the industry events that are happening in your industry this year! So you could work backwards know that your industry vendors in March or it’s in August or November it gives you the big-picture view on what’s going to happen this year, so you work backwards and building editorial calendar to give you some sort of bird’s-eye view on what’s happening the whole entire year!
Alright! I like to do that, because I already know where I’m going to be in March, I know where I’m going in April, I’m going to go in May, different conferences I want to attend, I want to make sure that I either plan for it. I know what it’s going to come even when I’m not there, even the blog posts are going to go live, even when I’m not physically in the office. And in order to do that you have to be working on some sort of plan or another!
Understand What Content Is Driving Rankings & Traffic
Now, another thing I like to do for my content marketing projects is to know what keywords are actually driving traffic, know which content is actually driving traffic and I will know which keywords we rank for, we don’t rank for and create content accordingly for the kind of keywords that we want to show up for! Alright!
Now, you can’t do that without some technology and using some tools to help you up like the ones, we are building here, but if you do have a system in place and you know exactly what kind of content that you rank for, what kind of content you don’t rank for!
My goodness! I have writers that are working on different projects they’re in different states, they are may be in different cities, they don’t talk to each other; we all jump into the same system, we all know exactly who is working on what type of content!
Create A Simple Editorial Calendar & Get Started!
I’m talking about different projects that I’m working on, different businesses that I’m involved in how I manage that it’s all through technology! Just by planning who is working on what content when and what is prioritized, when I would like to see this going live and how I like to repurpose the content, how we are going to promote such-and-such events! Let me tell you, I wouldn’t be able to do any of that, if I didn’t have some sort of basic planning and we use Google Calendar, nothing super complicated! Right! Anybody can use a Google Calendar for their content marketing!
So, if you’re not doing it yet, you need to get to it. I don’t care, if you use Google sheets, Excel spreadsheet! You could email your friends. I don’t know how you want to track it! It doesn’t matter! You can even use a paper and pen planner, if that’s what it takes!
So, thank you again for watching another edition of marketing hack of the day!
I hope and wish you nothing but great success in your content marketing in your coming days.
Thank you again!
