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3 Tools to Make Your Editorial Calendar More Effective

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By Ann Smarty

A few short years ago, simply writing useful articles regularly was enough to keep your audience engaged and see your SEO rankings steadily grow.

Now, consumers are more demanding and the Google algorithm is more advanced. To accommodate both, you need to be always testing new tools and tactics.

With content marketing becoming more complicated and integrated, your editorial calendar should grow up too. It’s no longer enough to document your planned content assets. Today’s editorial calendar should involve team collaboration aspects and advanced analytics steps to make higher-level content management possible.

Your editorial calendar should involve collaboration, analytics #tools, and more, says @seosmarty. Click To TweetThis roundup features three innovative tools to create a new content marketing routine to better adapt to an ever-changing digital marketing world.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Editorial Calendar Tools and Templates

1. Use ContentCal to diversify content you market

Creating and marketing diverse content is a necessity. You always must surprise your audience, as well as find new ways to engage your readers. Some out-of-the-box content types include:

With all those multiple and diverse content assets being created and so many (remote) teams being involved, how can you ensure that each of them is marketed effectively?

ContentCal (free and paid versions) is a good way to keep your team involved as well as to ensure that your weekly and monthly calendars are diverse and balanced:

.@ContentCal_io can help ensure that your weekly & monthly editorial calendars are diverse and balanced, says @seosmarty Click To Tweet

  • Your team can add updates to your calendar using the “Pinboard,” then you (or your social media manager) can drag and drop updates throughout the calendar ensuring both content diversity and balance. It’s helpful because the Pinboard can be the central point for each team member to craft updates for each content asset they are responsible for (press releases, interviews, videos, articles, etc.).
  • The calendar uses color coding to help you quickly see how your content types and assets are spread out throughout a week or a month.

Once updates go live, you see your content tags in the reports and can filter your reports by the content type, making it easier to distinguish the most successful content formats based on social media engagement:

Overall, ContentCal provides a clutter-free dashboard encouraging you to build both diverse and balanced editorial calendars.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 5 Brands Share Their Content Marketing Process

2. Use Rankedy to track all your content changes and updates (and their impact)

Content marketing involves so many tasks and steps (e.g., planning, outreach, writing, link acquisition outreach, social media promotion), that it can be hard to identify the steps that really impact your ROI. Not many solutions can collect, aggregate, and analyze all your data in a way that allows you to understand which of your micro-tactics work.

The only solution I have found is Rankedy’s Journal feature, which records all the little things happening to your site and content and shows Google ranking movements after each change.

Rankedy lets you see how Google rankings change when you make changes to your site & content. @seosmarty #tools Click To TweetTo use Rankedy Journal for content analysis:

  • Record all your changes and updates to your site and content you are implementing
  • Watch the Google position movement for your keyword

Rankedy also uses color coding to help you easily distinguish between content formats you created and change types you implemented.

This feature makes it easy to find micro-tactics that work for your content and capitalize on those.

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3. Use Alter to personalize in-content CTAs and learn from engagement metrics

Content marketing offers great lead-generation opportunities. Many customers who discover your brand through your content are not ready to buy but may be willing to opt in to download your brochure or white paper.

How can you catch or keep their attention? Advanced (content) personalization is the answer. In fact, Segment found that half of consumers expect a personalized experience when interacting with brands. Personalizing your content means meeting your customers’ expectations.

50% of consumers expect a personalized experience when interacting w/ brands via @segment. Click To TweetYet, a report by Pure360 revealed that most brands still fall behind in marketing personalization, so now is a good time to boost your digital marketing performance with personalization.

Alter (paid version) is a new solution for small businesses allowing you to easily create and integrate personalized user experience sitewide (including your home page, landing pages, content pages and more).

.@AlterSoftware lets you easily integrate personalized user experiences sitewide, says @seosmarty. #tools Click To TweetIt’s a good idea to use Alter in two ways:

  • To personalize your best performing content pages (to test, collect data, and boost their performance)
  • To use the collected data to better plan your content (Alter tracks which personalization tactic drives more engagement)

To use Alter, simply create a trial account, add its tracking code to the site, and use the visual editor to personalize your pages. Alter has an incredible number of parameters to define your audience for personalization. Examples include traffic sources, users’ interaction with the site (e.g., how many pages they viewed), users’ interaction with a specific link or call to action, their devices, etc. You can combine any of these parameters to create even more tailored experiences.

The reports are enlightening, giving you a glimpse into what helps and what hurts content performance:

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: 12 Expert Ideas to Improve Your Content Marketing for Better Leads

Bonus: Use Serpstat to include these tools in your content planning routine

ContentCal, Rankedly, and Alter are new tools in the industry and provide a fresh look into how you can manage and analyze content. Adding these micro-management tasks to your regular to-do list is the best way to ensure that the tools will help you rethink and reestablish your content marketing routine to the maximum capacity.

If your team is smaller, you can manage this system with a reusable planner in Google Spreadsheets or simpler to-do list management tools.

For larger team management, you may need a more advanced collaborative solution. I use Serpstat (paid versions) checklists. You can create and reuse a template for each upcoming content asset and the team can check off their tasks until everything is done.

In-team collaboration makes content asset planning easier because:

  • A new checklist – based on the same template – is set up for each project (e.g., an article, an infographic, an influencer interview).
  • You can break each checklist into sections to cover all the steps before, during, and after the publication process (e.g., keyword research, writing, designing graphics, proofreading, social media marketing, and outreach). Once everything gets checked off, the project is considered complete.

You can read more about Serpstat checklists here.

Are there innovative content marketing tools you’ve discovered lately? Which ones get you most excited? Please share them in the comments.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

Feature Image Credit: Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

By Ann Smarty

Sourced from Content Marketing Institute

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Your Editorial Calendar is Not Your Content Marketing Strategy

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By Michele Linn

Editor’s note: You may have missed this article when CMI published it last year. We’re sharing it now because the misperceptions about editorial calendars and content marketing strategies are still common.

Marketers often talk about how they have a strategy … then proceed to say they are set because they have an editorial calendar.

At the risk of sounding ranty, I’d love to yell from the rooftops: An editorial calendar is not a content marketing strategy!

An editorial calendar is not a #contentmarketing strategy, rants @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

While this conflict may seem like semantics, the meshing of these terms points to a bigger issue.

You need to have both a strategy and an editorial plan or calendar. And you need to understand how they differ because the absence of one may explain why you are experiencing uncertainty in your content marketing efforts.

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:  Road Map to Success: Resources to Refresh Your Content Marketing Program

Architect and civil engineer

Let’s say you are building a home. An architect leads the design of the structure by creating an architectural plan. But a civil engineer makes the design possible – implementing and adjusting the plan to realize the architect’s vision.

Do you need an architectural design for your new home? Absolutely. It’s the vision of what you want to achieve. You help your architect understand your needs (your why) – your strategy. Where do you want to move? How big do you want your house to be? Do you want room to grow or something more compact? How much do you want to spend? These are some of the questions you need to answer before the architect creates a plan for your house.

The architectural phase of your new home is akin to your content marketing strategy.

The architectural phase of a new home is akin to your #contentmarketing strategy, says @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

With that architectural strategy, the civil engineer can create a building plan to implement the vision. That’s akin to your editorial plan or calendar.

In short, just like when you are building a home, you can’t have an effective building plan without an architectural strategy, and you can’t execute your strategy without your plan. (And, if you are designing a house with your spouse, you both need to get on the same page as well – just like your team needs to get on the same page with your strategy.)

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Want More Productivity? Make Your Strategy Visual

First comes the content marketing strategy

If your editorial plan isn’t feeling quite right, chances are you don’t have a solid strategy – or your team doesn’t have a shared understanding of what that strategy is.

If your editorial plan isn’t feeling quite right, chances are you don’t have a solid strategy. @MicheleLinn Click To Tweet

In simple terms (this doesn’t account for all the nuances), your strategy needs to answer these three questions:

  • Who are we educating/helping? (Note: I did not say “targeting,” as your goal should be helping. Creating a persona is one way to do this.)
  • How can we help them in a way that no one else can? (This is your content tilt.)
  • How will we know we are successful? (These are the business goals of your strategy.)

You need to clearly understand the answers to these three questions – and having this clarity isn’t as common as you may think.

In our most recent content marketing research, 37% of B2B marketers say they have a documented content marketing strategy, with 38% indicating they have an undocumented strategy. (I won’t rant about the importance of documenting your strategy … but you should do it.)

But not enough of their strategies have a content mission, a deep understanding of their personas, and goals tied to their content. If you don’t have these things, something is going to feel off. And, while your strategy typically comes from the leadership team, don’t make excuses if you don’t have one.

Your #contentmarketing strategy should include a content mission, personas & goals, says @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

Here are a few other things to consider:

  • Does everyone on the team have the same understanding of the strategy? Ask your fellow team members the three questions above and see how consistently everybody communicates the strategy.
  • Post simple answers to the three questions on each team member’s wall (or close by). You want team members to internalize the answers. I can’t stress this enough: If you don’t stick to your audience and mission – with a focus on your goals – you will flounder.
  • Unlike your plan, your strategy is relatively set in stone and won’t change often.
HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT: Road Map to Success: Content Marketing Strategy Essentials

Then comes the editorial plan

Each item you publish and communicate needs to support the three key items in your strategy. Every. Single. Thing. And that’s where your editorial plan comes in.

Your editorial plan is tactical and detailed. It explains what you are going to do and who will do it.  If you have your big ideas nailed down and are struggling with execution, chances are you need to spend some time with your editorial plan.

Spend time on your editorial plan if you’re struggling with content execution, advises @MicheleLinn. Click To Tweet

While you must consider many details, include these activities in your editorial planning (many of which should show up in your editorial calendar):

  • Five to seven key areas or categories for editorial coverage
  • Topics in those categories to cover
  • Team members’ responsibilities – who will do what
  • Key pages from your site that require ongoing attention (Not sure which pages require your attention? Learn about the four key reports to help you, as well as the five opportunities to consider.)
  • Content to update and republish (Learn about a system to decide which posts to republish as well as details on how CMI does it.)
  • Social media marketing plan
  • Measurement plan (See a template CMI has used to share insights with the team on a monthly basis.)

As you can see, all these details are tactical and important. A high-level strategy is necessary, but without an editorial plan to support it, your content marketing program will have a tough time gaining traction.

Without an editorial plan to implement your #contentmarketing strategy, you’ll have a tough time. @MicheleLinn Click To Tweet

Remember, you need an architect to draw your vision of a new home (the strategy), but you also need the civil engineer to create the construction plan to practically implement the vision.

Do you have both strategy and a plan? Does that create a comfortable home for your content marketing? Or do you have a plan, but without a strategy – your content marketing program lives day to day but it doesn’t live up to your vision?

Where are you feeling discomfort in your content marketing program? Would it make sense to fine-tune your content marketing strategy or your editorial plan – or both?

HANDPICKED RELATED CONTENT:

Want help in designing and building your content marketing home? Or maybe it’s time for some renovations. Register today to attend Content Marketing World Sept. 4-7 in Cleveland, Ohio. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

By Michele Linn

Michele Linn is the co-founder and chief strategy officer of Mantis Research, a consultancy focused on helping brands create and amplify original research they can use in their marketing. Before starting Mantis, Michele was head of editorial at Content Marketing Institute, where she led the company’s strategic editorial direction, co-developed its annual research studies, wrote hundreds of articles, spoke at industry events and was instrumental in building the platform to 200,000 subscribers. In 2015, she was named one of Folio’s Top Women in Media (Corporate Visionary). You can follow her on Twitter at @michelelinn.

Other posts by Michele Linn

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