The new year is almost here, so it’s time to start chalking up those resolutions. We can’t help you get to the gym more, but we can help you use MindManager to make your content marketing process more productive and efficient. You can get started with this Simple Marketing Editorial Calendar and start using it as a scalable dashboard for planning, scheduling, and tracking your content marketing.
Eliminating Content Chaos
Recent content marketing research conducted by the Content Marketing Institute shows that most content marketing programs suffer from a lack of direction and focus. A disorganized content marketing strategy is associated with a lack of confidence and satisfaction in content marketing efforts.
This Simple Content Marketing Editorial Calendar provides a straightforward, scalable framework for you to replace chaos with certainty in your content marketing program. Here’s how it works:
Replace chaos with synergy. Use the Simple Editorial Calendar to get a big picture view of your marketing. It helps you simplify content planning, maximize the quality of individual projects, and boost content productivity by re-purposing previously-addressed topics.
Promote team-based content production. Identifying monthly themes and upcoming content needs in advance will boost efficiency and simplifies delegation—especially important when content creation involves a partnership between writing, design, and IT.
Extend the life of your content. Use existing content as the building blocks of future projects. More and more published books and profitable video projects originate as blog posts. In a recent interview, when I asked David Meerman Scott how he could be substantially rewrite his New Rules of Marketing and PR every two years, he responded, “I’m always blogging.”
Getting Started
The heart of the Simple Editorial Calendar is to select a theme for each month as far ahead of time as possible, and using the monthly themes as a framework for the majority of your content around that topic. Understanding the difference between themes and topics is the key to planning and implementing a better content marketing program.
Although topics and themes are terms that are often used interchangeably, there are significant differences between them:
Themes describe broad categories, or groups, of topics. Themes save you time by eliminating decisions and jumpstart your content marketing by providing a structure for deciding what to write about each week
Topics refer to ideas and titles describing specific articles, blog posts, newsletters, podcasts, or videos. A topic typically addresses a specific approach, breakthrough, challenge, example, solution, or trend.
Take it to the Next Level
The next step is to break each project into the tasks needed to complete it, and use MindManager’s Resources feature to assign responsibility and Start Dates and Due Dates for each task.
The tasks associated with blog posts, for example, require:
- Choosing the title and preparing the first draft.
- Reviewing the title and tweaking its search engine appeal.
- Creating graphics to appear at top of the blog posts, as well as within each post.
- Additional graphics must also be sized and formatted social media promotional use.
- Revising and editing the first draft from a fresh perspective.
- Posting the blog post.
Turn the Editorial Calendar Into a Content Dashboard
From this simple start, you can build additional features into your editorial calendar. You’ll be surprised at how much detail you can include without losing sight of the 12 content themes that will bind your content together.
The more you explore the resources built into MindManager, the more you’ll grow to depend on your Simple Editorial Calendar as the hub of your content marketing. Download the template today and see for yourself!