Content marketing in the life sciences sector is soaring. Your target audience is reading, watching and interacting with content to help navigate their buy cycle. Marketers are creating and distributing content at a furious pace. Creating an editorial calendar can help you better manage your content marketing and make your campaigns more effective.
An editorial calendar is a month-by-month, week-by-week, or even a day-by-day schedule for content publishing. Every media company creates an editorial calendar in advance. Life sciences companies that are publishing their own content need an editorial calendar as well.
An editorial calendar will help you:
- Document your content strategy—what you are doing when and why
- Direct your short-term execution and articulate long-term content marketing goals
- Create alignment among the team you rely on for content creation and distribution
- Avoid the fire drill of having to create content at the last minute
Here are ten best practices for creating an editorial calendar that will help you achieve your content marketing goals.
1. Write an editorial mission statement
The purpose of a mission statement is to articulate your content marketing goals and guide your content creation efforts. Your mission might be to grow your social media following, generate leads from gated content, establish thought leadership, or build customer loyalty, among others. Everything you do in content marketing should support your editorial mission statement. If not, a campaign or task doesn’t belong, or your mission statement needs work. Either way, the mission statement is your guidepost.
2. Start with the big picture to help set your publishing frequency
The big picture includes your budget and resources. You can only create and distribute content within the bounds set by those two factors. Your budget and resources will help you determine how much content you produce and the frequency in which you produce it. When determining frequency, try to align content publish dates with industry events/conferences, product launches planned, upcoming corporate announcements, quarterly sales goals, and other milestones that must be supported with content marketing. Tip – plan out no more than 3-6 months in advance so that you can make adjustments.
3. Define audience and voice
Spend time understanding your audience personas. Who are you creating content for? What are their informational needs? What are your reasons and goals in communicating to them? A great resource to tap into when determining topics is your Technical Support Team. Ask them for the top 10 questions they receive from their customers to determine their pain points. It’s also important that your audience can relate not only to your content but to your tone. Formal or informal? A professor or a post doc? By establishing the right voice you can connect with your audience emotionally, and emotions play a big part of any decision making during the buying process.
4. Align with the buyer’s journey
By its nature, your editorial calendar will span a period of time. Your buyer’s journey—from exploration of needs, to evaluation, to purchase decision, to post purchase—also spans a period of time. Make sure you take the journey into consideration by creating different content types that are likely to be consumed during different stages of their journey. For example, thought leadership content helps generate awareness and need in your audience. Case studies, comparisons, specifications and other product details help buyers evaluate options and make decisions. Training, support and how-to content help customers optimize the use of your products. Each of these types of content belong in your editorial calendar. Then decide which channel best aligns with the journey stage and serve the appropriate content.
5. Determine topics
Content topics should align with your goals, your audience needs, and industry trends. The most important question to ask: Is this topic of interest to my target audience? Validate your favorite ideas by running them by your best customers. Find inspiration from the editorial calendars of publications in your industry or programs from related scientific conferences. You can also perform keyword research, which can help you discover what topics are hot now, and can also increase the chances of editorial content on your website being found through search.
6. Decide on content type
Today’s life sciences researchers consume a wide variety of content: articles, webinars, videos, infographics, blog posts, press releases, technical specifications, application notes and more. You should plan and schedule different types of content to support your sales strategies, but most importantly, align them with what stage of the buying journey that content is most likely to be consumed. You can also save time, ensure message consistency, and increase efficiency by creating content extensions from a core piece of content. A great example is a webinar. A number of content extensions can be created from a webinar, such as a Q&A highlights, an infographic based on polling or registration questions, or a video further demonstrating how the technology referenced in the webinar works.
7. Choose publication channels
An editorial calendar should include not just when content will be published but also where. Be sure to think about the channels used to house and distribute the content, as this will impact the format, word count, and tone (or voice). Popular channels include application notes hosted on websites, product videos hosted on product pages, video snippets used for social media postings, articles for enewsletters, blog posts, etc.
8. Set metrics to measure performance
For each type of content and for each channel on your editorial calendar, set metrics to measure performance. This allows you to make changes to your plan based on data, so you can do more of what works well and dial back underperforming content. The metrics you choose depend on your goals, content format, and channel. Example metrics include:
- Open rates and click-through rates on email
- Social media shares
- Number of page views
- Comments on blog posts/articles
- Time spent on page and/or site
- Time spent viewing video
- Leads generated/converted
- Cost per lead
9. Line-up content resources
Unless you have a robust stable of creative and production resources—and few companies do—you will likely need to contract with writers and designers. Qualified professionals that understand and can communicate your technology and business value may be in short supply, so plan ahead if you want to keep to the schedule set forth in your editorial calendar. One place to find great writers is through your industry media partners. They are in the business of publishing content, have domain expertise, and many of them offer now content creation services. Another great resource is your customers and raving fans. Many times they are happy to be interviewed for a Q&A piece or a customer testimonial video.
10. Revise your calendar as needed
While it’s important to create an editorial calendar that provides a long-term view, don’t put blinders on your vision. Nothing you do has to be set in stone. Don’t be afraid to make adjustments to your editorial calendar along the way based on content performance, unexpected opportunities, changes to available resources, or other factors.
Organization of all this data is key! Many people use an excel spreadsheet to keep track of the following: topic, content headline, desired persona, content type, channel used for dissemination, due date, publish date, dates for key industry events or product launches, person responsible for creating content, meta data tags, article status, key metrics, and call to action used in conjunction with the content. More advanced tools include editorial calendar plug-ins for WordPress, or paid software solutions such as KaPost, Contently, and Compendium.
Stay tuned, as Biocompare is about to embark upon a market research study to help determine which content is consumed during the different stages of the buying journey. Watch for a summary of the research findings in an upcoming issue!