Crafting your plan and editorial calendar

[Reyed Mia (Apprentice, DIU)]

Crafting your plan and editorial calendar

- Once you have a good idea what types of content you will be creating, next, you have to plan your editorial calendar. Before you create your calendar, you need to think about your content mix. What are the different types of content you're creating and how are you gonna fit them in your plan to make a diverse content plan? Think about your content in food groups. This is actually a great analogy developed by Ann Handley to help you determine what should be in your content mix. First, you have your roasts. These are your large content initiatives. This would be if you're planning to create a definitive guide, a large e-book, or anything that has a promotional plan that's extensive behind it.

These would be your big rock pieces. Next, you need to make sure you have your raisin bran. These are everyday pieces of content. They are quick and consumable, like cheat sheets, checklists, and best practices. These should also be a big part of your content mix, in addition to those roasts. Next, we have our spinach. These are content items packed with nutrients. This is your high-level thought leadership. This could be a report that presents findings that you have in a survey.

It could be a really high-level e-book, an executive piece of thought leadership. Either way, you need to make sure that these items are included in your overall content plan. Next, we have chocolate cake. These are your fun, light-hearted, and indulgent pieces of content. This could be infographics, any type of special projects you're creating, fun videos. Ideally, these are pieces of content that you're sharing on a regular basis on social channels. Then you have your Tabasco sauce. This is content with some spice.

Content that challenges, asks hard questions, or provokes responses. Your Tabasco content is often best on a blog post, so definitely take that into consideration, but make sure you're not saying anything that's off brand. A content plan and an editorial calendar can help you stay organized, so you need to make sure that you are adhering to this mix. You don't want your content to be homogenized, and you don't wanna be putting out things that are the same day in and day out. An editorial calendar also helps you increase visibility across your organization so that people in your company know exactly what content you're creating and when.

It also helps to align your teams. You might have different content that you're creating on demand gen versus customer versus brand. So how do you organize your calendar? First, the content mix that we spoke about earlier. Then, you should organize based on different teams, depending on who you're creating content for, any ongoing campaigns that you have to keep in mind, and strategic initiatives. These should all be on your editorial calendar. What calendar platform should you use? There are many options here.

Basically, you just need to make sure that you're putting them down into a calendar form. You can use a calendar in your content management tool, consider a Google calendar that you can share with folks across the organization, or a Google spreadsheet, even, if you don't necessarily wanna put it in a calendar form, or your marketing automation calendar. Many marketing automation platforms today have calendar functionality that you can add your content mix to. Who should see my calendar? Your editorial calendar should be available to marketing, sales, customer service, executives, or anybody else who wants to know what specific content that you're creating.

Here's a few examples of different types of calendars. Calendar example number 1 is a detailed spreadsheet. A spreadsheet could be useful if you have multiple different content types. You wanna include the status, production start and completion dates. Maybe you wanna say what business unit this is for, your persona, what resource section type. If you have lots of different items that you need to put into calendar form, sometimes a spreadsheet-type format works great. Calendar example number 2 is within a content management platform.

This one is from DivvyHQ. This one has an actual calendar format where you can toggle based on specific due dates, what calendar, so what business unit it's for, the team member it's assigned to, content type, or your content strategy. No matter how you decide to organize your editorial calendar and what you include in your calendar, make sure it has that content mix that we spoke about, and that everything is organized. So go ahead, write down your plan, and put it in a calendar.

Source: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/content-marketing-foundations/crafting-your-plan-and-editorial-calendar