The editorial calendar should be governed by a master calendar that takes into account key dates and events. It not only provides an overview of what content will publish by day, week, or month, but also ties that broader schedule together with specifics such as holidays, trade shows, company announcements, events (such as webinars), or new product launches.
Don’t forget to take international holidays into account if the content is targeted at foreign countries. These key dates should also help inform the editorial calendar with ideas for content themed for the Christmas season, perhaps, or a major industry conference at which you’ll be releasing a whitepaper.
More Tools of the Trade
An editorial calendar is a must-have tool for any content marketing strategy and one that can be adapted to varying needs. What follows is a list of additional resources for the content “newsroom” that range from nice-to-have to must-have elements of content marketing initiatives, depending on the organization and goals.
Personas
As discussed at length, in “Content Curation and Aggregation,” the archetype characters represent the varying segments of a target audience.
Keyword List
Based on search engine optimization (SEO) research, this is the list of words and phrases most critical to your business, products, and services when it comes to being found on the Web. If you don’t have an SEO expert on staff, anyone and everyone involved in content creation should receive foundational training in SEO and how to appropriately use keywords (and other SEO principles) in content creation.
Brand Brief
Most organizations with a marketing department have already created this (usually one-page-long) description of the corporate brand
Style Guide (Writing)
A detailed and comprehensive set of rules and guidelines for written content. Very often, the grammar and usage portion of this guide is based on an existing, standard source such as the AP Stylebook, and it’s adapted for the organization’s content needs. This document should also address tone, voice, and writing style.
Editing Guidelines
A checklist to ensure that editors (and in many cases, copy editors) are thorough to ensure high-quality content. It’s the editors’ job to uphold all the style guide requirements, of course. They are also responsible for checking facts, ascertaining that submitted content is original, validating hyperlinks, proofing images to ensure they’re properly labeled and tagged, and a variety of other critical housekeeping tasks.
Graphics Repository
A collection of ready-to-use images such as logos, executive portraits, and product shots that the content team can easily find and deploy. Depending on your needs, you may also want to make multimedia material available in this manner.
Submission Brief
An outline of expectations and concepts (often accompanied by a visual template) for outside or occasional content contributors. You’ll be glad you have this once you’ve explained, in detail, how to submit an article to your blog or your newsletter for the twelfth consecutive time
Last word
Can be either a calendar or more general scheduling guidelines for removing or archiving outdated content, as well as assigning that responsibility to someone on the team
