5 steps towards working with a successful content calendar

Your ambition is to produce and publish more original content, and you have a brand new newsroom with every functionality imaginable at your disposal. Congratulations! Now what? Is your content calendar up and running already, or could you do with some extra advice?

1. Formulate a strategy

Communication is a mean, not a goal. Who is your target audience and why? Which stories do you want to tell, and in what way do you want your readers to interact with you? A clear communication strategy gets everyone in your boat rowing in the same direction. Make sure your team is familiarised with guidelines regarding tone of voice, objectives, target audience et cetera.

Subsequently, you need to ensure you start publishing stories with a certain degree of regularity. More posts means more visitors. Columns or series can be of great help in this regard. A recurring theme, be it monthly or weekly, makes for much easier content planning. Series simplify the brainstorming process and are quickly recognised by your readers, who will eventually come back on their own initiative to look for them.

2. Gather the right people

Writing engaging stories your readers will gladly tweet about, is not something any employee can ‘just do on the side’. It takes skill to write and edit well, and to come up with the right subjects and angles. So make sure you gather the right mix of experts who are the best at telling stories about your organisation, and professionals who can turn those stories into inspiring and engaging content.

3. Document your planning

This is where the content calendar comes in. Solid content planning is of vital importance to the success of your communication strategy. Plan as far ahead as possible and be as concrete and precise as you can be. What date do you want your post to be published? What will it be about, do you have a title yet? Who’s writing it, and in what form (e.g. interview, blog, infographic)? Who is in charge of editing and when is the deadline for the first draft?

To give an example of what we mean, we put together a dummy content calendar, for a fictional university. In addition to the previously mentioned elements, we also reserved a column for current status. By using conditional formatting in Excel, you can easily and automatically colour in the individual cells, providing insight into your progress at a glance. We also included a second worksheet with an overview of all series and their respective frequencies.

4. Monitor your results

In the dummy content calendar, you’ll also find a column for the number of pageviews, which you can enter after a post has been online for some time. Naturally, you’ll also be using your standard tools for analysing the results, but writing them down in your content calendar provides an extra level of oversight, instantly telling you which posts and series do better than others.

This could also be a column in which you apply conditional formatting. Green cells for successful posts, yellow cells for average ones, and red cells … no one will ever want to see a red cell next to their post, so this will actually work as a motivator as well.

5. Keep evaluating

Don’t forget to frequently evaluate the content calendar itself. Those columns and series can be mighty handy, but can also lead to slackness. Are there really any more angles to be discussed after fifty editions, or has the series maybe run its course? Is your column only in need of some more brand awareness, or is it maybe just not that interesting?

Make sure you’re just as critical about publication frequency, appointed editors, forms of storytelling, exact moments of publication et cetera. With a good strategy, the right team and a constantly evolving content calendar, your audience will grow steadily and significantly, and you’ll be using your newsroom exactly for what it is meant to do.

6. Extra tip!

The dummy content calendar is primarily meant to help you on your way. Every organisation has its own objectives and KPI’s, and will therefore have its own content calendar. Meanwhile at PressPage, we are busy developing a fully integrated content calendar which our clients will be able to use within the PressPage Manager. More news about this will follow soon!