December brings many traditions: enjoying the holidays, wrapping up projects from the year that’s ending, and gearing up for the year ahead.

Intermediate/ Digest...

Setting up your editorial calendar isn’t difficult. A basic Excel sheet or Microsoft Word Table will do the trick. At a minimum, it should contain the following information:

• Date
• Writer or content producer responsible for drafting the piece
• Working title
• Your target keywords
• Content format (e.g. blog post, white paper, etc.)
• Call to action
• Status

More fleshed out content calendars can include any or all of the following:

• For individual pieces, they might include approval chains, alternate titles, and target publications
• Overall campaign goals, mapped to each individual piece
• Details on your audience profiles, mapped to each individual piece. Who are you speaking to with this article? What aspect of their experience do you want to dial up, specifically?
• What publications are you targeting with your overall campaign, what’s their demographics and contact details?
• What are your key performance indicators overall for the campaign? How is each individual piece performing against those metrics?
• What are the biggest successes of the campaign?
• What roadblocks or issues have you run into as part of the content campaign you’re managing?

Your editorial calendar can become much more than just a list of dates and targets. It can serve as a centralized workbook where you manage your entire content flow. It can also serve as a strategic hub that makes it easy to evaluate your progress at any specific moment in time.

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Overview...

The Alchemy of Content: A Formula for Overcoming Four Major Content Pain Points”: offers a step-by-step process for overcoming four common content pain points:

Content Development and Distribution: How to organize resources to establish an effective and efficient process.

Content Creation: How to effectively “feed the content beast” with content that resonates.

Content Cadence: How to get the publication cycle right.

Content ROI: How to make sure content is working hard enough for the investment made. Defining your value story requires a methodical approach.

1. Clearly identify KPIs aligned with business mission.
2. Identify the metrics that will work as a unit to tell a value story.
3. Identify the sources of those metrics and pull into a dashboard using connectors.
4. Create an algorithm that weights each metric in relation to their importance to the “story.”
5. Analyze performing and non-performing metrics for each KPI on a periodic basis and use to calibrate approach.

Digest...

Based on my experience working with the HubSpot team and the Boston Content community, here’s what you might expect as your content team scales:

1. You will remember that content is for resonance, not just reach

Unfortunately we get caught up in things like headlines, SEO practices, social sharing, and email — all are wonderful distribution mechanisms, but content is about resonance, not just reach. Something great has to happen after the click, so if your content mission is to “get eyeballs,” you are overlooking the fact that you’re targeting real people who have thoughts, emotions, nuances, and biases.

2. You’ll develop niche playbooks to be able to move more quickly and create content with purpose

While a small, emerging content team might only need to have a single content publishing “playbook,” or approach to content creation, our team has found itself with a dire need to create multiple playbooks, each addressing a different strategic goal, in order to scale elegantly.

3. You’ll start to specialize and hire complementary team members

With scale often comes specialization, as well as the need to work smarter against specific goals, not just really hard against every goal (though the hard work never goes away). Some personalities or areas of specialty that will likely start to emerge.