It has to be understood that unlike traditional marketing, priority of content marketing is not selling but a goal of communicating with customers or any audience suitable. The final aim may or may not be sales.

1. Quality Content

A well managed calendar helps a marketer to exhibit quality content by making aware of its presence. Usually, readers tend to judge whether the content was rushed or not. Factors such as editing, adding pictures, files for improvements can be taken advantage of with help of a calendar.

No one likes to scramble for ideas at the last minute. Having local or global audience, timing the content in as per holidays is important. The calendar can be a traditional view calendar such as Google Calendar, an online spreadsheet or particular software, the content can be certainly viewed in a glance.

2. Marketer Personas

Imagine how easy life would be on seeing your activities on a daily planner, weekly planner or monthly. Most editorial calendars offer the luxury of viewing the calendar as convenience allows.

In addition, with smart-phones in use, view can be integrated with each device differently. Also, for a content marketer, burn out can be a major hindrance as they are prone to be surrounded by content all the time. To counter this, one can plan the content well in advance with the help of a calendar so that content is supreme even if mood isn’t.

3. Reminders

In the world of content marketing, appointments can come up at the craziest of times. A calendar ensures the marketer doesn’t miss any of these. Be it due dates or such deadlines, the calendar ensures you are reminded.

In addition, usage of calendars helps align milestones within. Thus, if there is a flagship event or launch of new service, one can write the content accordingly. In addition, because of this, the marketer is made sure to write the content well in advance giving her/him the flexibility of marking days off.

4. Contributors

For a content article contribution by researchers, writers, editors and publishers are equally important. All these can be aligned together within a calendar. Furthermore, with the help of drop downs, a community can be created for only the same group to see. Hence, the work contributed becomes very transparent for others to see.

Such communication helps crucial functions such as webinars, conferences, reviews and periodic newsletters which can be attended with the help of templates.

This also gives a single or group of content marketers the opportunity of scheduling. Imagine this; be very efficient, writing all posts on Sunday morning, scheduling them, and then the week is sorted. [With the added bonus of no duplication of content; yes that is important.]

5. Color-coding

Having a variety is always advantageous for a marketer. This variety can be in the form of importance or added value which can be color-coded in a calendar. One can use this to increase or decrease the importance of content message. Example, the user can color-code content which is ready to be published or for archiving.

This encourages further usage and organizing as the marketer gets used to with the workflow of the calendar. Such as, ones marked in red would signify coming deadlines and green ones, the meetings.

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Significantly, this remains private. Like in case of the Brightpod Calendar, wherein the assigned color codes are not shared with viewers to whom the calendar has been shared. However, this can be changed by allocating “Makes changes and manage sharing” rights to the viewers.

6. Enhance audience participation

Content marketing wouldn’t simply be content marketing if there are no audience reviews. The audience can be anyone from end readers to colleagues to third party test viewers. For good content marketing, audience interaction is necessary.

By allowing such audience to give feedback directly on the calendar or manually updating it highlights how the activity is faring. Also, having a record of audience with their loyalty points or vouchers is a great advantage calendar offers. This encourages readers themselves creating chat threads or forum and assisting in the awareness of the brand.

7. Tracking and Search Optimization:

Tracking content ideas is a necessity of a content marketer. One of the advantages an editorial calendar offers is re-usage of already published content. This existing content can be used for various purposes; mostly as call to action.

Linking the text after a certain period of time can increase the search results of the services of the firm. This linking is done for a new content altogether or a already conveyed message.

Vatsal is a brand strategist who loves evaluating creative briefs. He maintains a blog at vatsalshah77.wordpress.com . His core area of interests include Branding & Identity, Digital Marketing, Campaign design, and Consumer analysis. One can also contact him on @vatsalogy.