Think of your content marketing strategy as our human body: limbs, organs, our brain – simply everything in our body needs to be supplied with blood at every second. Our heart is responsible for this. If it does not function properly, too little blood reaches our limbs and they become numb.
An editorial plan is nothing but the heart of your content marketing.
It is indispensable when it comes to covering all areas at all times so that no branch of the company misses out. But an editorial plan alone is not the key to success.
We have summarized here what you need to pay attention to and which points absolutely belong in an editorial plan.
What should be clarified before creating an editorial plan:
- Aim & target group
Normally, you have already defined your target audience and your goals in your content marketing strategy. If not, you should define now at the latest exactly who and what you want to reach with your content?
- Channel
Which channels does your target group use? And where does it make sense to actively advertise with content? What’s the point of being active on Instagram if your target audience is businessmen between 40-50 years old?
- Format
Another factor that also plays a role in the choice of channel is the format in which the content is to be published. Videos, for example, unfold their full potential on social media portals that allow longer videos to be played or on special video portals such as Vimeo. Texts, on the other hand, make more sense as native ads on serious websites, and images, on the other hand, show their greatest impact on social networks like Instagram.
- Topic
What topics do you want to educate people about with your content? Do you prefer a motley mix or is only one topic area suitable for social media? Or do you even have several topics that you would like to work on alternately?
- Author / Editing / Access
Designate one or more authors to take care of the content. It is also a good idea to always have one or two people on board for proofreading. Also, make sure that all relevant employees in your organization have read-only access to the editorial plan. That way, everyone is informed and can provide further input if necessary, or use your editorial plan as a guide when meeting with customers.
- Scope
Provide a rough framework for the length of your content. Ideally, you should orient yourself to the respective channel – eternal text captions for image or video contributions are usually not read anyway.
We create an editorial plan. These columns should not be missing in any case.
- Publication date/ fixed posting structure
Set the days when you want to publish content. People like habits and regular processes. For example, you can also structure topics, formats and channels. Here is a small example of a sensible posting structure:
▸ Posting days: Monday, Wednesday and Friday
▸ On Mondays they always post a video on channel A
▸ Wednesday they post a picture on channel A and B
On Fridays, you post again on channel A with a link to an interesting blog post, the latest developments in your field, or similar. This post does not necessarily have to be from you. Give your visitors added value, even if it’s not directly from your pen. Your visitors will appreciate your openness to other contributions and see it as a strength.
- The actual content
Here it is advantageous to create several columns at once. And that’s for all content to be used in your post, for example, text, video, image, links internal, links external, etc.
- Call to Action
Animate your visitors to take action. Ask questions in your posts that your followers can respond to or want to leave your post a Like. Include buttons that allow users to make reservations or participate in rankings, for example. The possibilities are endless.
- Status
The status column(s) are used to record for everyone to see if the content has already been taken down, if something is missing, if it needs to be posted manually or if it is already online.
- Hashtags/ Keywords
Especially in social media, nothing works without hashtags. They help your post to be found better. A column in which you insert hashtags and, if necessary, also keyword, should therefore not be missing in any editorial plan.
After the posting is before the reporting.
It’s not an absolute must, but if you want to know in the long run whether your posts are having the desired success and which topics are resonating best with your target audience, it’s worth recording the weekly “insights” of your posts in a spreadsheet.
As you can see, it doesn’t make sense to just plan mindlessly just so you can say you have an editorial plan at the end of the day. A preceding brainstorming with all responsible persons and creative minds is not only team-building, but also makes significantly more sense.
We at Erklärungsvideo have also created our editorial plan this way and are very happy with it.
