Is your Content Marketing Strategy Disorganized?
October 25, 2010
Streamline your content marketing strategy
Both Scott Maxwell and Firas Raouf discuss the topic of the impossible marketing dream team. For the same reasons they describe in their discussions, your company’s content marketing strategy can seem disorganized and simply put, wasteful.
Picture this: You are part of a small marketing team tasked with doing the impossible, such as – improve our search engine traffic, participate in social media, perfect content development, build our brand, improve customer engagement, be cutting edge, deliver more quality leads, define the direction for the product, run an influence marketing program, and so on.
Each of the above topics is often included in a comprehensive list of to-do items so it is easy to see how a content marketing strategy can become confusing. Your content marketing initiatives alone may include:
- Writing news releases
- Creating a weekly newsletter
- Creating and designing an ebook
- Managing a curated content site
- Feeding content for social media and/or influencer programs
- Developing audio content
- Creating video content
- Writing articles
- Writing blog posts
- Managing freelancers
- Creating the strategy
If you are not communicating the logistics of your content marketing plan with your company, your activities may seem one-off or ad hoc. It’s evident that an opportunity for improvement exists.
THE EDITORIAL CALENDAR – This is one tool that can help bring clarity to any content marketing initiative.
Editorial calendars will bring simplicity to your team efforts and organize the creation and promotion of your content. The tool will help put everyone’s mind at ease when it comes to planning. Here are the important components of editorial calendars to get you started:
- Clearly indicate the owner of the content
- Label important dates (due dates, holidays, delivery dates)
- Include the content type
- Include the theme or topic so you can match the content to the specific topic
If you are new to creating editorial calendars, check out my post on OpenView’s editorial calendar or Michele Lin’s post on the OpenView sponsored Content Marketing Institute.