3 reasons why you need to use an editorial calendar for content marketing

Editorial calendars aren’t just for newsrooms anymore. More companies across every industry are urging their marketing and communications departments to create a calendar that maps to major company milestones — be it product releases, events, holidays, and more.

Why? Consistency. It’s really hard.

Many journalists cover specific topics such as a specific technology, industry, etc. They usually have daily, weekly, and monthly quotas of articles they must hit. When I was a journalist at a business trade magazine, I was responsible to have 2–3 web news articles and 1 blog post written per week, then a slew of other types of articles for the monthly hard copy of the magazine. This was years ago, and I recognize those numbers are much higher for journalists today in a world where people consume news 140 characters at a time. While it can get tiresome at times to produce all that content, it’s because we live in a 24/7/365 news cycle. People expect to get the latest and greatest news at any given moment, on any given device.

This ethic of consistent content deadlines hasn’t always translated to the marketing and communications world of B2B and B2C companies. This isn’t necessarily because marketers and communicators in these companies are lazy. They just have a ton of stuff to do. Most also aren’t necessarily trained (read: scarred) in the art of constant deadlines via journalism. Marketers and communicators generally have other roles in addition to content marketing (unless you have a devoted content marketing department whose sole job is to churn out content across multiple form factors constantly). The world of marketing and communications is blurring, so it isn’t a surprise to see a marketer work on blogs, press releases, social media, email campaigns, event logistics, and internal sales enablement materials within the course of a standard workday.

With all of these types of tasks on a marketer’s plate, no wonder it’s so difficult to stick to a consistent content marketing strategy. According to a survey from Gleanster Research and Kapost, managing the overall content process was the top challenge to content marketing success among mid-to-large B2B companies. Thirty-six percent of firms miss deadlines due to a lack of a centralized calendar.

If you’re able to create an editorial calendar — and stick with it, which will be the point of next week’s post — you will be able to drive results. Recent research found that 85 percent of marketing top performers manage a centralized calendar for content production, compared with only 44 percent of average companies.

Why will you be able to drive results with an editorial calendar? You’ll be able to provide a framework for being deliberate and intentional about how you’re reaching and building trust with your audience. Editorial calendars are the result of a beautiful recipe for business success that’s one part strategic and one part internal team organization.

Sounds scrumptious, doesn’t it? Here are three reasons why you should start creating a content marketing editorial calendar for your organization:

1. Marketing and communications require strategy. If you’re just creating content for the sake of creating content, you are wasting precious time and resources without likely achieving your goals. If you’ve been following past articles, it’s extremely important to come together you’re your sales counterparts and executive team to agree on a set of specific goals for your company. From there, you need to map your marketing and communications strategy to achieve those goals. Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to map any successes back to tangible metrics anyone cares about besides you.

2. You will make it much easier to be consistent, which will help you achieve your goals and find happiness. When you get a process in place to do virtually anything, it’s going to make it that much easier for you to stick with your plan as you go along. We also generally accomplish what we focus on. So as an example, if you’re focused on building traffic to your website or blog, making a concerted effort to plan your content it will make reaching your goals easier. Visits will increase when you make consistency and quality top priorities.

3. Your team will thank you (yes, that’s important). Your team is probably slammed doing many tasks at once. If everything is a constant last-minute rush job, not only is the quality of your work going to be diminished, your team will think there’s no strategy in place. If your team thinks you don’t have a strategy, they will likely respect you less as a leader. If your team doesn’t respect you, they’re less apt to do good work for you or want to be employed by you. If they don’t do good work for you, then you’re not achieving your goals — making your life more difficult. If they leave your team, you’ll have to take the time and resource to replace them — making your life more difficult. If you can show your team members how all of their work aligns to major company goals — and it’s written down — they’re more apt to follow you. They’re going to be able to plan their work out ahead of time so last-minute tasks are the exception rather than the rule. When there are less stressful last-minute tasks to accomplish, your team will be able to focus on the tasks at hand and the quality of their work will improve.

It’s one thing to create a shiny editorial calendar. It’s a completely different ballgame to create one that actually works and is agile enough to meet your evolving business needs. Next week, I’ll share some of my pain (read: tips and tricks) to create an editorial calendar that gives you guideposts instead of prison bars so you can stay on message while having the flexibility to course-correct when necessary.

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This article was originally posted on LinkedIn.