An editorial calendar is an organized way to create and manage content and streamline content production. When used correctly, it can help drive traffic to your website and increase conversions by engaging with visitors and providing them with interesting content that appeals to them. Planning content via an editorial calendar helps marketers in several key ways:
Content Equals Engagement
Regular communications via new content keeps an audience engaged and keeps buyers coming back for more. An editorial calendar ensures that content is scheduled at regular intervals
Improved Storytelling
When marketers have time to sit and plan for content, it typically means better content that has a logical flow and order to it, rather than a mish mash of disjointed ideas. It allows for true storytelling to occur which is better for engagement because concepts have a cohesiveness to them
Achieves Goals
At the end of the day, conversions are king. The more content, the more traffic, the more conversions. An editorial calendar allows you to achieve the goal of more conversions and newsletter sign ups because content is planned and organized. The calendar allows you to meet critical milestones and can help with promotional activities at the right time.
An editorial calendar helps to keep content on track by planning in advance, step by step. By creating a backlog of content, you are better able to track your ideas for communications. A content strategy via an editorial calendar allows you to focus on some key metrics:
- How much content do you want to produce each month?
- Who will be responsible for developing the content?
- Where will you distribute the content for maximum effectiveness?
- How long should various content pieces be?
- What is the promotional strategy behind the content?
- What will it cost to produce the content?
An organized approach to content production reduces time and helps you publish better quality content. Although it may sound like a lot of work, setting up an editorial calendar is not difficult and will allow you to seamlessly produce quality content on a regularly scheduled and consistent basis.
There are many tools available to assist with developing an editorial calendar, some of which are free, others are paid. Whichever route you choose to go, an editorial calendar can help you be more consistent with your flow of content which would ultimately help drive more traffic, and help increase conversions.
