I used to mistakenly approach the marketing editorial calendar as a trivial list of topics and deadlines. I’ve learned that an editorial calendar can be the passionate superhero of your content marketing story .
When implemented correctly, an editorial calendar is your strategic roadmap to improving SEO and lead generation. The secret is to think about your editorial calendar in relation to conversion funnels.
BLOG Editorial calendar and lead generation
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A conversion funnel is a content-based path that your website visitors can follow phone numbers philippines become customers. A website visitor would find your blog post in a basic conversion funnel, click a CTA, and land on a landing page for something awesome (like a case study or white paper). The visitor would receive that awesome thing via email and follow-up emails inviting them to learn more about your organization.
Conversion Funnel ContentYour content will be considered a “superhero” when it works to feed the funnel so that at some point in the journey, the right message is received at the right time and BOOM, an action is taken leading to a conversion.
These first two steps are geared toward someone starting from scratch, but it's still good to do them periodically, even if you've already established a more sophisticated process.
Step #1: Conduct a content audit.
A content audit aims to determine what content you already have and how it’s being used. A content audit is invaluable because most organizations have a lot more marketing and sales collateral than they realize. Check your current website, of course, and gather any collateral that’s commonly used in print (e.g., trade show brochures or lead folders). Your sales team may also have collateral that could be useful.
Start connecting the dots with the content you’ve found, paying attention to the performance data for each piece of collateral.
Step 2: Decide what content works well.
Once the audit is done, it’s time to decide what to keep and incorporate into a conversion funnel. You have two important guides to evaluate your content: analytics and buyer personas .
Use analytics to evaluate online content.
Analytics are a good place to start because they tell you what content brings people to your website and how that content performs once visitors arrive. For blog posts, keep these metrics in mind:
Total number of views: The more popular a post is, the more visitors it attracts to your website. Look for trends in your most popular blog posts – do they all focus on a similar topic? Or maybe they all share a format, such as a “How to…” or an industry update.
Time per page view: Once visitors land on your blog post, how long do they stay there? Longer times typically indicate higher engagement, which translates into more visits to the related landing page. Sometimes the most successful blog posts (in terms of conversions) are the ones with fewer visitors but higher engagement.
Bounce Rate: A high bounce rate usually indicates that visitors land on a web page (in this case, a blog post) and decide it's not what they were looking for. Blog post topics that have a high bounce rate may not be appropriate for the audience they're targeting.
Let buyer personas guide your content choices.
Speaking of your target audience, your buyer personas offer another lens for making content strategy decisions. Each buyer persona may have unique content needs. For example, CEO Chandra may be concerned about the immediate and long-term content marketing ROI of her SaaS solution. But manager Mike would likely be more interested in best practices for getting end users to adopt the solution. Both personas play a role in purchasing decisions, so you need content for each of them.
When evaluating existing content, determine which buyer persona (if any) it best fits. Remove anything that doesn’t fit a specific buyer. Keep in mind that some elements could use a little strategic revision, and include those revisions as part of your editorial calendar.
Step 3: Choose an anchor for each conversion funnel.