Consistency is essential to a superior marketing strategy. Optimizing your editorial calendar can ensure you’re consistently releasing content. However, the quality of your content is just as crucial as putting it out consistently. Consumers are constantly flooded with images, video, and other content, which can be overwhelming. The majority of consumers will ignore marketing that doesn’t create value. For that reason, producing quality content can work wonders for your marketing campaigns. Optimize your editorial calendar to ensure you stand out from the competition by generating unique and relevant content that creates value for your customers.

5 Signs it’s Time to Revisit your Editorial Calendar:

1. You weren’t seeing traffic so you gave up content creation.
2. Your content is all about SEO. Your prospects will catch on quickly and stop visiting your pages if you’re just writing for SEO.
3. You’re writing about the same subject and not adding any value.
4. You’re not achieving your content goals, or perhaps you’ve never set content goals and just write whatever you feel like.
5. Your online audience is declining, you’re not expanding your community, and your user engagement is low.

If any of these apply to you, read on to learn how to create valuable content for your community.

Track Industry-Leading Blogs & the Competition’s Social Profiles

The easiest way to discover which content is creating the most engagement in your industry is to track your competition. As we’ve already established, resources valued by your online audience will have more impact than random content. Knowing this, you can watch for your competitors’ posts that receive a substantial number of comments or shares. A simple way to automate this activity is with Kompyte. The platform scores each blog and social post so you can spot the online content that generated the most impact & engagement.

Identify Industry KPIs: Activity & Engagement to Decide Targets

Prepare and optimize your editorial calendar based on what you’ve discovered to be the most engaging content. Your editorial calendar should be a living document. Create goals, such as increasing leads or driving engagement. The next step is to start drafting valuable content in order to become an industry thought leader.

Produce new content based on data regarding:

• Your competition’s past blog posts with the highest impact
• Comments or questions on your competitors’ online content
• Your competitors’ social media content – look for the posts that received the most engagement

Identify Content Strategy Insights for your Calendar

In the past, an editorial calendar was a year-long document. In the digital age, a month is a long time. Schedule monthly meetings with your team to review your competitive analysis data and create your content strategy, as well as a rough content plan for the next month. In addition, you may find that a weekly meeting, especially initially, is helpful just to make sure things are on track and to make necessary changes and improve content quality.

Analyze and Adjust

Ensure your content is always fresh and intriguing by making adjustments to your editorial calendar as needed. Don’t hesitate to make changes if you notice the market isn’t responding the way you thought they would.

A great editorial calendar is just a starting point to learn and edit from. Your strategy needs to be flexible. It’s important to get in on the conversation and follow new trends you notice on social media even if you didn’t originally plan these into your calendar.

Like everything else in marketing, creating a successful editorial calendar is more of an art than a science. It takes effort to position yourself correctly and consistently generate quality content.

How to Calculate the ROI for your Company

After optimizing your editorial calendar with insights from your competitors, compare KPIs such as engagement, impact and new followers. The time and effort your team invests to research competitors’ content strategies in order to improve your own content quality can be drastically reduced. Analyzing your current numbers compared to past results will give you an idea of community growth and success that competitor analysis is creating for the company.

For more tactics to increase your marketing performance visit our Academy

Liana Calicchia

Product Marketing Director