A strategy without a tactical plan is useless. To ensure your content strategy will be implemented exactly the way you want, you need a clear roadmap for the months ahead. This roadmap is known as a content calendar (or an editorial calendar).
Using Semrush Marketing Calendar you can quickly create an editorial calendar and:
- Maintain your frequency of publication
- Accumulate content ideas
- Avoid publishing similar content on your blog
- Tailor your content for important events, holidays, slowdowns, etc.
- Control the content creation/update process
- Align your process with the social media department
- Reduce stress in the team by dividing the workload
How can this be done?
- Go to the Marketing Calendar and create a campaign or several campaigns if you develop content for different projects/channels. Mark campaigns with different colors for better differentiation.
- Add campaign activities (content that should be created and published). You can tag activities (for example, “Guest Posting”,”Ebooks”, “Webinars”) to find and group them quicker or turn them into recurring ones.
- Set tasks within each activity to make them easier to manage. For example, the activity “Launch a new webinar” can contain tasks “Find speakers”, “Invite speakers”, “Define the webinar topic”, “Define the webinar structure” etc.
- Invite team members, assign activities to your colleagues and track their work progress by checking how they are moving forward (you can filter activities by owner, campaign, status and tag).
Next Steps
Using these features, you can create a transparent editorial plan. Having all of your content marketing activities in the same place will help you create a consistent editorial line, and develop your content channels in a balanced way to attract new users and transform them into a loyal audience.
Once you’ve created your editorial plan, enable your team members to understand their role in the content creation process – and how it overlaps with the responsibilities of everyone else involved in your content strategy:
- Analyze the performance of different team members and reallocate resources if needed (you can connect Google Analytics and track your results in the “Performance” tab).
- Check if all the content gaps are covered (for more ideas use Topic Research).
- See if your content performance can be increased (use Content Audit to find articles to rewrite or update).
- Once your articles are published, use Social Media Poster to distribute your content on social media.