Wanna set up an editorial calendar within one day?
Take about 20 students + 8 hours + 1 Content Marketing lecture with Gerrit Grunert from Crispy Content, at FH Joanneum Graz and you are all set. ; ) ..okay, let’s be serious, in case you do not have the components mentioned above, here are 6 useful steps out of the lecture, that will guide you on your way to your editorial calendar.
As part of the 3rd semester of FH (University of Applied Sciences) Joanneums master’s program “Content Strategy”, and its course Content Marketing we developed an editorial calendar for a digital magazine of a german porcelain company — solely by answering and working on the questions beneath:
1. What are your brand values?
As a groundwork for establishing, an editorial calendar a company needs to know about its core brand values as this will build up on the question behind its target group as well as the content territories that one will work on later on. Core values could for example be (or in our case they were) the following: Tradition & Authenticity, the Family as the Foundation, Premium Brand, Roots in European Culture, German Quality, State of the art Production and Sustainability. As a company you should find these values in your mission and vision statement.
If you’re not familiar what brand core values are in general, here’s a good blogpost about that topic, that I found here on Medium.
2. What’s your positioning?
The position process is important as it forces you to think about your competitors and helps to narrow the direction your’re heading with your product, campaign or in our case the online magazine.
A helpful tool that we were introduced at University is the positioning canvas. The canvas consists of 7 major questions/themes that one should keep in mind when determining ones position:
· Competitive Alternatives
If you don’t exist, what would customers use?
· Key Unique Attributes (USP)
What unique features/ capabilities do you have that alternatives do not?
· Value
What values do the attributes enable for customers?
· Customers that care
Who cares a lot about that value?
· Market you win
What context makes the value obvious to your target segments?
· Product name and one-line description
One sentence
· Relevant trends
What trends are relevant to you and your customers right now?
I found a similar, ready to fill-in, canvas here, in case you want to write down your positioning.
3. Who are your personas?
The purpose of personas is to create reliable and realistic representations of your key audience segments for reference. Having them in mind while creating content will be so much easier as they represent your target group and make them lively.
In class we created 5 different personas that would fit to one each of the companies values we defined beforehand. After coming up with a catchy expressive name and picture, an estimation of their age and educational background, we tried to imagine how our personas would end the following sentences to become a better understanding for them:
· Story
I really want to…
I love to…
· Key Attribute
I care a lot about these things…
· Challenges
I want to…
· Objections (towards the products)
Will it make…
Do I have…
Does it fit…
· Solution (that the company you work for has for your persona)
We poured the gathered information into profiles. May I introduce you to Alma Schmidt, NeoClassical Bruce, Classy Conrad, High Qulity Helga and Laura Verde — the personas for our fictional online magazine of a german porcelain brand:
4. What are your content territories?
Now, in regards to your brand values and the interests of your personas, define some territories that fit your company and that you would like to create your content in. For a better understanding, let me show you the content territories for our class example:
. Alma Schmidt: Gifting, Family, Home Decor
. Classy Conrad: Wine & Dine, Architecture, Design, Culture & Art
. High Quality Helga: Art, People, Quality craftsmanship, Hospitality
. Laura Verde: Cooking, Green Living, Fairtrade value chain
. NeoClassical Bruce: Bar&Wine, Culture, Dining, Innovation
In the best case, the territories of each persona will somehow interfere, as in this case your produced content will probably reach several personas of yours at one time. Keep your territories in mind, we will be coming back to it for setting up the editorial calendar.
5. Do you know your customers journey?
The customer journey is the complete sum of experiences that customers go through when interacting with your company and brand. Instead of looking at just a part of a transaction or experience, the customer journey documents the full experience of being a customer.
A customer journey map often looks like this, describing the several steps your user/potential customer takes:
For the content creation itself, it is crucial to keep in mind at which stage you are approaching your user/customer as it will strongly affect the way how you choose images, languages and information. A user who is still in the awareness-phase will need more information about your products and the production than a user who is already in the purchasing process as for this customer a smooth shopping experience is important.
In case you would like to dig deeper into how to set up such a customer journey map here’s a nice blog post that I found — “7 steps to your customer journey map” (german only).
6. Ready to set up your editorial calendar?
Now, all that is left to do is setting up a calendar with the ideas for small content pieces. Do that by having all the steps that you just followed in mind:
. Which content territory is your company in?
. Which persona do you want to create content for?
. Where on the customer journey do you want to meet your persona?
. What do you want to deliver and which kind of media would fit best to deliver your information best? This could for example be a video, a checklist, a piece of text and an image etc.
This is the point where you can get very creative and play around. If you do have the chance sit together with your colleagues and I promise you will come up with topics within a minute.
If you are interested into reading more about content marketing in general, here’s a free download link to“the Making Content Ultimative Content” (E-Book) of Crispy Content.
If you would like to read about how others are coming up with personas, here is a nice blog post of one of my colleagues where she talks about the personas that they are referring to in her work place.
Hallo Verena and Reinhard — Welcome the personas for DER STANDARD’s regional reporting
I would love to see some editorial calendars of yours — leave me a comment :)
