As part of a b2b inbound marketing strategy, managing a blog for your buyer personas is an important and often time-consuming task. Have you set yourself a more or less regular publication pace, but you are not anticipating enough? Do you often find yourself caught off guard without an idea for a topic for your next article, or lacking time to write it? In this article, find out why it’s important to set up an editorial calendar for your b2b blog, and how to get started.
Why establish an editorial calendar?
Maintain a coherent editorial line for your target
A professional B2B blog will logically deal with subjects related to your field of activity and that of your target. However, coming up with ideas for topics can be tricky, especially after several months of posting where you feel like you’ve already covered the topics you could cover. Having an editorial calendar allows you to have an overview of what has already been covered or not and thus to comprehensively understand your content strategy. If your blog has several categories, it is interesting to analyze how many articles there are in each of them, in order to avoid too great an imbalance. Thus, the calendar will bring logic and relevance to your editorial line.
The editorial calendar at the service of SEO strategy
When you start the adventure of a B2B blog, it is essential to include SEO in your content strategy. SEO is long-term, using an editorial calendar is ideal for planning your content creations according to the most important requests for your target.
Centralize content production information in one place
In the long run, it becomes more and more complicated if not impossible to keep an overview of all the content on your blog without using an editorial calendar. By keeping track of the content already published, you facilitate the definition of future topics for articles in production, the use of the calendar facilitates collaborative work, allowing everyone to know the next deadlines and the people involved in the production of contents for their clients alike buyers of recycled plastic granules.
What should an editorial calendar contain?
Certain elements are essential to see clearly, but above all, you must have the items you need to develop your inbound marketing strategy. The model that you will have initially is not fixed, on the contrary, it is relevant to make it evolve over time according to your results and needs. Regarding the essential information to find, we can quote:
- The title of the article , and / or a reference (a number for example), in order to find it quickly and to be sure that everyone is talking about the same, especially when several similar subjects have been treated.
- The URL of the article, once published it is always relevant to add it in order to find it in one click.
- The category your article is in: It is important to be able to know at a glance how many articles are in each category in order to keep a relatively balanced proportion.
- The keywords on which you are positioned with this article, in order to vary from one article to another and to be positioned on a maximum of strategic queries for your activity
- The person assigned to writing the article, in order to know who to contact in case of questions or comments
- The planned publication date then effective, in order to plan regular publications over time and meet deadlines.
- The status of the article (brief, writing, validation, published, etc.). This information is particularly relevant when several articles are in progress, or even distributed among several writers, in order to always know at what stage each one is to ensure that the prescribed deadlines will be respected.
- Internal links integrated into the article, in order to effectively work on your internal networking, which will improve your SEO referencing and therefore you’re positioning in Google search results.
- The level of the purchase cycle in which the article is located (discovery, evaluation, decision), in order to distribute the number of articles equally in each of the categories.
- The targeted buyer persona, among your different buyers personas (target customers), which one are you targeting in this article and therefore for whom are you writing this article.
This list is not exhaustive, but it is a good basis for setting up your content marketing strategy.
What tools should you use to create an editorial calendar for your professional blog?
Today there are many free tools and software suitable for setting up an editorial calendar. We advise you to opt for a collaborative solution, so that all team members can easily access and contribute to the tool.
Excel
Known to everyone and easy to use, especially when editing an editorial calendar that does not require any complicated formulas, Excel is a very good alternative to start the exercise. Using a color code can help you navigate quickly and know at a glance the progress of each item.
The only downside that we can find is the impossibility of working with several simultaneously on the same file.
Trello
Trello is a free collaborative tool that is very easy to use thanks to its very intuitive interface. You can indeed arrange the “cards” as you wish, change the format at any time, play with colors, etc. The options are multiple, so you can categorize according to the information you deem the most relevant. For example, you can create a list by writer and include cards corresponding to the articles assigned to them, or a list by status (subject validated, creation of the brief, published, etc.) and the corresponding articles inside, your options are endless. The functionalities offered by the platform are very numerous: you can leave comments, divide a task into sub-tasks, set a deadline, integrate attachments,
Wunderlist
Wunderlist is also a very easy-to-use collaborative tool. It works mainly on the basis of checklists that you can themselves break down into sub-tasks. You also have the option of setting a deadline, entering notes, setting up reminders, or inserting an attachment. Once again, you can work with others on this type of platform, and organize it in the way that suits you best.
Asana
Asana is a very complete project management software, often used in companies during group projects. The free version allows the management of an editorial calendar for a maximum number of 15 users. As for the first interfaces presented, there are features such as assigning a task to a member, setting a deadline, writing comments, inserting an attachment, having a calendar view, etc.
Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar
The very basic calendars linked to your mailbox can also be very useful in your development of an editorial calendar. To start, this can indeed be more than enough, by tagging the person responsible for the article in question, registering a reminder in his calendar for each of the creation stages and providing important information relating to the article in the space dedicated to comments. You can then migrate to a more complete solution without losing anything from previous publications thanks to the histories offered by the platforms.
Now you know why it makes sense to incorporate an editorial calendar into your inbound marketing strategy and content creation, and where to start. But while the editorial calendar helps you follow a guideline, it is important to be flexible: a “hot” topic for your target represents a high potential for traffic in a short period of time and should be high on your publication calendar. . To capitalize as much as possible on the content you produce, we advise you to set up a marketing automation tool. This will allow you to vitalize and distribute your content as well as possible on social networks in order to reach the right target. Right time, and thus give all its power to your production.
