Monthly Archives: March 2021

A content calendar, also called publication calendar or editorial calendar, is used for the control of publications on multiple channels: social media platforms, newspapers, blogs / videoblogs, emails, etc. The main goal of any content calendar is to ensure that all relevant post types appear regularly on the relevant posting channels. Therefore, such calendars are very important for an internal organization of a publishing process. According to advice shared by digital editors, an editorial calendar also makes it easier to refer to content that has already been published. In addition, more links to them ensure better search engine rankings.

The usefulness of a content calendar

Sharing content calendars with advertisers makes it possible to attract the latter and to better organize an advertising act. The same is true for readers. Posting (relevant) posts on a well-planned schedule causes them to visit a company’s social media pages / accounts at regular intervals. It aims to build a loyal readership. good Example of an editorial calendar is the one designed for the Special Reports section of Financial Times magazine. He points out that the articles are expected to be published more than a year and a half in the future.

Recommendations for creating a qualitative content calendar

Add enough detail

According to For Maria Sotra, member of Forbes Councils and vice-president of marketing at Geotab, we must aim to make an ultra-detailed editorial plan. First, it means creating a comprehensive list of topics, trying to comprehensively cover the topics most relevant to readers. Second, it means specifying the type / format of a post and whether it is part of promotional or editorial content. Different formats serve different purposes. Also, providing your audience with different types of content will help to hold their attention longer and ensure better engagement. Some popular types of content are:

• videos,
• case studies,
• infographics,
• leaflet,
• event documents (including for virtual events).

To better serve your readers, your content calendar can include synopses for the articles you are going to publish. A title alone is often insufficient to infer what will appear in any published article. Therefore, it can be useful to include a rough overview of an article / article if it is available. This is not required for all articles, and it is not necessary to follow these outlines like the 10 commandments when it is time to publish. A subject exposed to further examination dictates its headings or elements which may differ from those originally intended.

Make it resilient by giving it flexibility

Some scheduled interviews may not work, some topics may become irrelevant overnight. Others may emerge spontaneously requiring urgent attention from a whole team. Your content schedule is never set in stone, but enough effort is needed to provide at least some flexibility and resilience. This means including backup or alternate topics, specifying which topics have higher priority. Some lower priority topics could be omitted if necessary. Fortunately, when your subject is automotive news, it is usually easy to come up with an alternative or backup ideas that would still prove relevant to many readers.

There may be times when your team may not be able to deliver posts on time. A life saving solution, in this case, might be to hire a third party who provides on-demand writing services. Among the latter, a huge niche is occupied by services which help students in their academic work. As expert Estelle Liotard writes about one of these services, “while GetGoodGrade Thesis Writing Service mainly focuses on helping students with their theses or academic work, they could easily provide you with a business or marketing case study, or many other types of specialized content. Those who are willing to take this approach further might even use this third-party content for entire sections on their websites or social media pages.

Make it an ongoing team effort

Creating a content calendar should bring everyone involved together for brainstorming sessions. This is how you can capitalize on the variety of perspectives your team can produce, even though some of them may be contradictory. When completed, this product of teamwork would serve as a guiding document for an entire team. This allows them to have an overview and to better direct their efforts. In addition, it helps to avoid working on overlapping or redundant content and the confusion and perception of inefficiency that this can cause. As your schedule needs to be adapted / updated, this needs to be done in a transparent way so that your whole team is in the know. You can use the most basic collaboration software tools for this purpose (such as Google Sheets).

Do not limit the diversity of the content provided

Because it has timelines and friendships / follow-up, social media is a powerful tool to hold the customer’s attention. The typical format and length of a post varies greatly from one social media platform to another. However, they are usually considerably limited for each platform. This should not affect the diversity of posts that will be scheduled in your content calendar.

For example, automotive industry news can benefit a lot from:

• high-resolution image galleries from a Automobile exhibition,
• rotating 3D representations of car models,
• interactive diagrams and graphs comparing car specifications,
• long reads and long videos, etc.

Often times, social media platforms are ill-suited or unable to display such content or simply too slow to process it. But social media is only needed to present readers with an engaging snippet of information – the rest of your content in any format is accessible on the relevant website through the accompanying link. Videos are some of the types of content that work very well on social media – in general, videos attract more traffic, lead to higher conversion rates, and offer better ROI.

Final thoughts

The link established with the public via social networks is a precious instrument. It can be exploited to engage with it over and over for a variety of purposes, including for sales proposals. But to maintain visibility on social media, it is essential to post original content frequently and at regular intervals. This is further amplified by the operation of recommendation algorithms (timeline) on these platforms. A content calendar can make the publishing process much more efficient and organized, benefiting content publishers, client audiences, and even advertisers.

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