In the fourth step of the old content marketing planning process, I asked budding content marketers, \u201cHow will you structure and manage your operations to activate your plans?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I answered my rhetorical question about \u201cprocess\u201d by urging them to create \u201can operational plan that enables your team or department to function as a media company.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then, I told them to look at content marketing as a sustainable, ongoing operation, not as yet another form of campaign\u2010based marketing. As they looked to structure those operations, I also recommended constructing the appropriate guidelines or \u201cplaybook\u201d by including the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The vast majority of the budding content marketers that I taught had never worked in media companies, although many had worked in marketing communications (marcom) departments, where they’d learned how to produce sales brochures. Some of them used this playbook to crank out what could charitably be described as \u201cbrochureware.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And most didn’t read Rebecca Lieb’s book, Content Marketing: Think Like a Publisher\u2014How to Use Content to Market Online and in Social Media<\/em> (2011).<\/p>\n\n\n\n So most didn’t learn what Lieb was also trying to teach: \u201cContent marketing is no longer a nice\u2010to\u2010have. It’s a must\u2010have. It’s imperative that businesses create content on an ongoing basis. They can’t create just any old content, of course. It must be relevant and high quality. It also must be valuable and drive profitable customer interactions. And it must be about customer needs and customer interests, not ad\u2010speak, which is all about the \u2018me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Things slowly got better. A growing number of content marketers had started to \u201cthink like publishers\u201d and were beginning to \u201cfunction as media companies\u201d before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID\u201019 to be a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And you already know what happened next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As a short article in the McKinsey Quarterly Five Fifty<\/em> newsletter entitled, \u201cThe Quickening,\u201d which was published in July 2020, noted, \u201cIf you’re feeling whiplash, it might be the ten years forward we just jumped in 90 days\u2019 time. How fast is the world moving around us? Consider how quickly ecommerce has replaced physical channels in three months. Or how consumers are reconsidering brand loyalties and the stores and websites where they shop.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Microsoft read the memo. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on quarterly earnings call that month, \u201cWe’ve seen two years\u2019 worth of digital transformation in two months.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In response to the pandemic, 64 percent of B2B and 54 percent of B2C marketers in North America adjusted their editorial calendar. Hopefully, they did this after they’d changed their targeting\/messaging strategy. Why? Because your editorial calendar is not your targeting\/messaging strategy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, if they adjusted their editorial calendars without changing their targeting\/messaging strategies first, then this was just a sad example of what the British call \u201cpanic stations,\u201d which is a short period in which there is a lot of confused activity because people feel anxious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you’ve never created an editorial calendar before, read the article entitled, \u201c7 Steps to a More Strategic Editorial Calendar<\/strong>,\u201d which was written by Kelsey Raymond, the co\u2010founder and CEO of Influence & Co., and published by CMI on Jan. 6, 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She says, \u201cToo many companies focus on the logistics of their editorial calendar\u2014what days content is publishing, at what times, and at what cadence\u2014and ignore the strategic elements. Anyone can schedule blog posts regularly, but the best content marketers create robust, strategic editorial calendars.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her seven\u2010step guide details how to build an effective editorial calendar:<\/p>\n\n\n\n She concludes, \u201cFollowing a strategic approach to your editorial calendar is a never\u2010ending process. But that ongoing work should be affected by your evaluation process. Review your key metrics toward the end of the quarter as you begin to plan for your next three months. It gets easier each time you plan the editorial calendar for the next quarter because you’re simply tweaking your previous plan rather than starting from scratch.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The overwhelming majority of content marketers say that video<\/em> has become more important to their organizations over the last 2 years. And future investments into video are expected to climb even further.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To up your video investment and make it the backbone of your overall marketing approach\u2014like a lot of your peers are planning to do\u2014you need a video content calendar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You can start by borrowing a page out of the\u00a0YouTube creator playbook for brands<\/strong>. In the section entitled, \u201cSchedule your content,\u201d the playbook recommends building a channel calendar to map your programming strategy over the year. It advocates producing three types of complementary content in the following framework: help, hub, and hero content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This playbook was published in October 2015. I would argue that brands have added a fourth type of content to this framework in the past two years: hygiene content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you would like some examples of each these four types of content, check out this very small sample of the 754 videos that YouTube uploaded to the brand’s 10 channels in 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the fourth step of the old content marketing planning process, I asked budding content marketers, \u201cHow will you structure and manage your operations to activate your plans?\u201d I answered my rhetorical question about \u201cprocess\u201d by urging them to create \u201can operational plan that enables your team or department to function as a media company.\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-content-marketing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/download-4.jpeg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5322"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5322\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5323,"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5322\/revisions\/5323"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/workhouse.sweetdishy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Adjust the Editorial Calendar<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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