Businesses today have more options for marketing themselves and communicating with customers online than ever. The problem, despite the myriad solutions now available, is that the internet can still feel frustratingly compartmentalized at times. It offers countless platforms on which to provide value and interact with customers, yet each of these feels distinctly apart from the others. An editorial calendar is a great solution for staying on top of your business’ content schedule while providing a holistic view of your efforts.
How an Editorial Calendar Can Help
An editorial calendar can be incredibly useful whether your content strategy is managed by a single person or an entire team. It creates one definitive location where every tweet, blog, press release, or post can be stored and accessed. This is useful for organizing your future posts, maintaining a consistent schedule, and analyzing past efforts.
Plan Future Posts
Being able to see your content in one place allows you to implement your strategy more effectively. Imagine you have a big day coming up, perhaps an award ceremony or recognition. With an editorial calendar you can plan to send out a press release, send a tweet or two from the event, and post a picture to your Facebook page. Now you may have done this in the past, but now you have one easy place to verify that messaging is consistent but not repetitive and that each post is appropriate and adds value respective to its platform.
Now imagine that your company is on a number of additional platforms possibly even multiple times daily. You may even have more than one person helping to manage this task. How can you be sure that posts aren’t redundant and that each provides additional value towards whatever your goal may be? Having a central location for this information is an invaluable resource.
Maintain Your Desired Schedule
Whether you need help being reminded to post on a regular basis or if you tend to post inconsistently, a calendar can help you keep a regular cadence if that is your goal. By laying all of your content out on a screen you can easily see what days and on what platform you’ll need additional content. You can also easily look backwards and see where you could use improvement.
Analyze Past Efforts
A calendar is not only useful for planning but for reflection as well. It is a repository of everything you put out on the web. In this sense it can be used as a tool to assess past cadence and tone. In conjunction with analytics from your website and individual platforms a calendar can be used to help judge effectiveness. With this information you can make more informed decisions about your content strategy moving forward.