Editorial Calendar Building

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

Editorial strategy

The basics of an editorial strategy include:

• Creating an editorial calendar to ensure even coverage of all your target topics, so they all get coverage and there’s enough variety to hold users’ interest.
• Using analytics to determine the highest traffic times and publishing content during those windows.
• Educating copyeditors on SEO best practices, as well as common grammar edits, which makes content easier to read and more intuitive for users and search engines. Encourage them to use tools like Grammarly and Hemingway to help scan for errors.

Using an editorial calendar

Build columns for each type of content for each day/week using an editorial calendar that plans out your content each month, based on your data, goals, and regular meetings. (For an example of an editorial calendar, see slide ‘Using an editorial calendar’.)

Ensure your content calendar is accessible to everyone working on the content.

Assessing how your topic needs have shifted

As you work through your editorial calendar, it’s important to stay on schedule and to ensure everyone on the team knows what they are responsible for.

To assess if your needs have shifted:

• Use the notes from your regular meetings to check whether you accomplished everything that was supposed to be accomplished.
• Review your social media data. Check on the social media shares of your content to see how titles and topics have been performing. Take action by coming up with more topics surrounding highly shared content.
• Assign new content topics and types to team members.

Team collaboration and cross training

There are four main departments in most companies that are important for SEO writers and content creators to work with. When these departments all work together, it can help to fuel really great content:

• Sales: Sales can give topic ideas for SEO content based on customer feedback, and the content team can educate sales on products and services using existing content.
• Customer service: Customer service can give topic ideas for SEO content based on questions and comments they receive from customers.
• Product development: This department identifies new products and services that need to have content written about them, which will shape what content is going to be written over the next week, month, or quarter.
• Advertising: A paid search can tell the content team which keywords are getting the most clicks on ads, which can offer ideas for more content. Other traditional ad types, such as radio commercials, will need input from the content team to have consistent branding and messaging across content and advertising.