How to Use an Editorial Calendar For Business Blogging

The rise in content focused blogging oftentimes frustrates businesses because it strays from the idea of task centric activities. For ages business have been able to outsource, insource, and back source multiple website tasks without considering editorial management and organization. However, today’s blogging requirements take on a new face that’s incredibly relevant to thriving business models. The new face of business is editorial, content focused, reader centric, and highly demanding. Traditionally, a few magazines would compete with each other in a specific region or industry type whilst B2B and B2C companies line up to advertise in content centric publications that they do not have to create themselves.

Today’s businesses are now facing the adverse situation where the effectiveness of their marketing messaging is not simply based on advertising, but also the content behind the advertising. Today’s businesses must also be information ambassadors. Creating an editorial calendar carries a business through content distribution strategy from blog planning, content characterization, content distribution, and content management. Ideas for business blogging need to be managed. This is far from the conceptual ideology of idea planning and straight into concepts embraced by project management experts and editorial geniuses. If you’re conducting any form of business blogging, the editorial calendar will become your best friend and closest confidant.

The inner workings of an editorial calendar

If you’re a business or software buff the editorial calendar is quite similar to the business planning or software life cycles. If you’re not, don’t worry, because  you don’t need to understand those concepts. Basically, the editorial calendar begins in the planning stage.

First, determine the editorial calendar period. It’s more efficient to this in terms of years vs. weeks or months. Although this is based on preference and of course for long term planning, flexibility within the plan is required. Regardless of the decision the key is to define a relevant period or term. You begin with your team or yourself (depending on the size of your business and creative team), to outline content details including type of content (e.g. How-to’s, News, ebooks, whitepapers, reports, top of the funnel offers, etc.), content subject (e.g. social media, lead generation, etc.) length requirement, keyword/s requirement, keyword density preference, and content components (e.g. data, charts, images). You then build the content delivery schedule. An excellent idea is to segment the content delivery as if you were creating a Gantt chart that incorporates concomitant activities. This will allow you to edit and approve weekly/daily content prior to date arrival. The goal here is to organize content generation activities that keep your blog ahead of schedule and consistent in terms of content delivery. Don’t forget to plan the frequency of new offers like reports, whitepapers, and e-books. Finally, after the planning stage is complete you move on to implementation and management which in this case occurs simultaneously. Here’s a brief  summary that brings it all together.

1. Planning 1: Determine the relevant period; be strategic about your determination.
2. Planning 2: Record Blog Content details.
3. Schedule: Organize activities to keep your blog ahead of schedule. Think Concomitant!
4. Implement and Maintain: Start delivering content and be prepared to deal with hiccups along the way.

Why creating an editorial calendar will statistically improve lead generation

We are not simply suggesting you create an editorial calendar simply because it’s work for work’s sake. Creating an editorial calendar will actually help improve consistency rates on your blog and help you both build and manage a high efficient lead generating machine. According to a study performed by Hubspot, blogs that consistently generate content acquire more leads than those who do not. Take a look at the chart below for a more detailed illustration. Hubspot actually took the concept a step further by defining not just the pool of unqualified leads but instead they actually documented customer acquisition based on blog post frequency. Note that companies who blog daily have a 90-100% acquisition rate.  Essentially, this  means blogging consistency is a fail proof plan to profits. Overall, an editorial calendar will help you record, maintain, and improve your primary marketing activities. For a detailed explanation of how to compile an editorial calendar, just contact us and we’ll make sure it’s the most full calendar you’ll ever abide by.

Need Help?

If developing an editorial calendar for business blogging is something that you are interested in but don’t know how to get started, contact us today to schedule your free marketing analysis.