Blogging is a powerful tool. But taking the time to plan how you’ll develop content and aligning it with your company’s brand and goals – both externally for your customers and internally for your employees – makes it even more powerful. It’s an approach that will help elevate your brand from an idea to an asset.
An editorial calendar holds you and your staff accountable for generating fresh content. Externally, consider the topics your customers are interested in and how you can demonstrate your expertise, service offerings, and opinions on industry trends, or news to cross-sell or generate new leads. Identify subject-matter buckets that will help you write about the topics that serve your customers and your business. Plot those subjects out on a calendar and work to generate a steady stream of fresh ideas within each bucket.
But how can you leverage that calendar to build greater value internally, among your employees? And how can you shift the blogs away from feeling like a burdensome assignment?
Try building teams around those subject matter buckets to share the responsibility and elevate your employees as experts. Give them a voice on your company’s behalf. You can even develop a connection between individual goal setting (blog contributions, continuing education, lead generation), and an internal reward and recognition program (nominate each other for leadership, dedication, innovative thinking, sales leads).
Internally, the editorial calendar sets the assignment. By building teams, you can drive collaboration, education, fresh thinking, and build connections among employees at all levels of your organization with your business goals and your brand.
Can an editorial calendar do more? You bet. Express your expertise and build on your brand promise externally, while connecting your team to the behaviors that make your company successful, and build star employees along the way.
