(This is another in a week-long series on forming oneself as a Catholic business person.)
While social media and content marketing strategy ideas benefit from new thinking and approaches, you can also incorporate offline best practices that make sense, even if they may seem old.
For example, one client expressed challenges in refreshing and featuring seasonally-based story ideas year after year. In answer to this challenge related to content marketing strategy, I realized something from my spiritual life demonstrates a great lesson applicable to developing an editorial calendar to take advantage of recurring content opportunities.
An Offline Way to Plan Online Content Marketing Strategy
Attending mass on a daily basis has helped reveal the underlying calendar that plans which Bible passages are read at each Catholic mass. An approved lectionary (in essence, an editorial calendar) sets the direction. For weekdays, some readings are assigned to annual cycles and other to biennial ones. During special liturgical seasons, all daily readings are the same each year. For Sunday services, readings rotate every three years. Specific feasts and holidays during the year may cause the replacement of that day’s passages with other related Bible readings instead.
The end result, beyond emphasizing different messages with varied frequencies, is simple: over the course of the daily and Sunday calendars, approximately 95% of the Bible's books are included through at least some passages.
If your organization has many stories to tell and needs to reinforce key messages at different times (with varying rates of repetition), adopting a comparable editorial calendar approach could make sense for you. Employing a similar strategy for content marketing strategy requires answering critical questions. These include:
- What's the full range of content we want to cover for the organization and target audiences?
- What content priorities need more frequent reinforcement, and which can be addressed less regularly?
- What are special events that need coverage and should rightfully interrupt the editorial calendar?
- What options can be provided to content creators (either in topics, style, etc.) to allow creative flexibility?
- What strategic links exist between content areas and associated SEO and keyword strategies?
The questions may seem daunting. There is incredible upside in the content marketing strategy opportunities generated from implementing a strategic editorial calendar that reflects both repetitive topics and new twists on old stories.
If the prospect of creating an editorial calendar and collaborative blogging plan seems overwhelming, let us know. We'd love to help streamline developing and implementing your social media and collaborative blogging strategies.
Has your organization done anything like this? Have you tried a similar approach for a smaller organization? How has it worked, and where, if anywhere, have you struggled? – Mike Brown
