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Here at Write Angle, one of our long-held assertions is that technology marketers live in a publish-or-perish world.

Simply put, if you’re not producing thought leadership or educational content that can be repurposed on a regular basis, you can’t drive or shape industry dialog. And without a steady cadence of fresh assets that map to buyer personas at specific stages of the purchasing lifecycle, you’re stuck playing catch-up with competitors. Worst case, you run the risk of being rendered derivative, irrelevant or invisible.

Turns out that one of the most marketing-relevant solutions to what we jokingly refer to as “content interruptus” is the venerable (and often overlooked) content calendar, AKA editorial calendar.

If you’re like most clients, you have good intentions to develop one, but never get around to it. Even the more disciplined marketing departments that make the effort frequently fail to use it to best advantage. 

One of the challenges is how easy this tool is to ignore. Editorial calendars are just so 20th century, right? This is an unfortunate rap because the goal of attracting, converting and retaining customers makes a content calendar indispensable. It’s also ideally suited for modern tools associated with social media platforms. Think Kapost, Central Desktop and Contently, among many others out there today.

What it should do

Think of the content calendar as a GPS that maps all your content assets to your prospect “food chain” with guidance on how best to reach them in terms of timing and channels.
 
Say you’re making a blog post on a segment included in an eBook you just published. You may want to use multiple channels to re-purpose this material via email (auto-responder) or sites as varied as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Tagging the material (AKA meta data) with identifiers that label your target’s persona category (awareness, consideration or decision) helps you track the effectiveness of each asset. Same for SEO keywords and content type such as white papers, video or case studies.

Accountability is key. At the risk of stating the obvious, each asset should have a designated owner responsible for production and delivery. Your content calendar should also specify the asset channel: e.g. eBook, blog, buyer’s guide, solution brief, use cases, etc. And, since a calendar is a management tool, factor in workflow processes no matter how seemingly mundane: think proofreading, editing, legal review cycles. Equally important, honor deadlines for creating and publishing your assets. While slippages are a fact of life, don’t make them a habit. 
 

Setting it up

Here’s a 10-step approach to setting up an effective content calendar:

1. Content headline
2. Content type
3. Buyer persona
4. Call to action
5. Owner
6. Final review deadline
7. Publishing channel(s)
8. Publish date
9. Status
10. Metrics (page views, downloads, comments)

Refresh Your Calendar
 
It’s important to stay vigilant when updating your content calendar, especially if you generate one on a quarterly basis. Given the rapid rate of change in virtually every technology industry today, you don’t want to be caught flat-footed with dated material. Publishing yesterday’s news can seriously de-position an organization’s value proposition.

No matter what kind of content we’re tasked with producing – whether it’s a case study, new web copy, a solution brief or a ghost-written thought leadership article – invariably there’s an interview with a subject matter expert to guide the output.

That’s a given.

But not all interviews are the same, no matter what questionnaire template you design. In fact, they are like diamonds, snowflakes, and fingerprints: they are utterly unique.

So how do good interviewers extract the most meaningful information for content development purposes? In my experience as a former journalist trained in the art of asking probing questions, sometimes it’s the unexpected follow-up that yields the best results.

I’ll give you a good example. For the past two years, Write Angle has been producing case studies for Pure Storage. Yes, we’ve developed a questionnaire that asks about the nature of a customer’s business, their pain points, the evaluation process, selection criteria, key technical and business benefits and TCO/ROI results. And yes, the questionnaire has evolved over time to keep pace with product innovation and shifts in value propositions.

What’s not built into these interview guidelines is what I refer to as the art of the redirect or subtle insistence on elaboration. Sometimes a seemingly innocuous question can yield a dynamite response, especially with a difficult interviewee that isn’t terribly expansive.

A case in point involved a financial services customer whose corporate communications team sat in on the interview to “oversee” the interview. While this presented a gating influence from the outset, the subject of the interview was a “just the facts” spokesperson. After getting blunt and uninspiring input, I decided to shift gears i.e. utilize the redirect. I decided to ask about this individual’s history as an IT director so he could get comfortable talking about himself. Not only did this “loosen” him up, it provided some historical context that allowed me to probe for his experience with legacy storage systems and how this contrasted with his organization’s adoption of flash storage.

The results were dramatic. Suddenly, I had an expansive and engaged subject. By invoking the redirect strategy, I succeeded in pushing for greater elaboration to responses. This resulted in terrific real world examples of “before and after” scenarios involving his storage infrastructure. What had been a teeth-pulling exercise morphed into an engaging story with real drama: a subtle yet growing problem threatening a segment of the business; a proof of concept trial ripe with competitive give and take; and a powerful resolution with meaningful results that went well beyond technical metrics.

So what’s the takeaway? Like great jazz musicians, be prepared to improvise when leading an interview. Sometimes straying from the melody can take you in an entirely new direction with better results.