Blogging is an invaluable lead generation tool, making it possible for businesses to fill their sales funnel with engaged, interested prospects.
Crucially though, creating a consistent pipeline of leads requires a consistent blogging schedule. Your content creation needs to be targeted, well-informed and meticulously organised. So, to help your business organise its blogging and content creation, we've put together a free editorial calendar template.
We've created an intuitive, easy-to-use Excel spreadsheet, containing all the crucial elements required to plan, schedule and manage an ongoing blogging strategy.
You can use your editorial calendar to:
- Manage and track your buyer persona targeting, and ensure content is created for each of your persona types.
- Create in-depth briefs to manage your marketing team.
- Record your keyword targeting, and monitor your blogging strategy.
- Ensure that content is created consistently, and delivered to schedule.
To help you get the most out of your calendar, I've offered a brief explanation of each of the template's columns, and how to use them. I've also filled out the first row with an example blog post from our own blog - so you should be able to start using the calendar straight away.
Topic/Title
Each blog post you create needs to centre on a single topic - usually one of your buyer persona's pain points or questions. This section allows you to define the key topic at the heart of the blog post, and focus your writer's energies on solving the problem it poses.
Learn more about creating great titles: How to Write a Great B2B Blog Post Title
Content Details and Post Structure
Blogging needs to be a calculated, structured process. This section makes it easy for marketing managers and copywriters alike to plan the basic structure of their post, and ensure that all of the post's key issues are covered.
Learn more about structuring a great post: How to Write an Exceptional B2B Blog Post
Resources
Research is a crucial component of any inbound marketing strategy - especially within the SaaS sector. Any relevant resources, blog posts and whitepapers included here will help your writer understand the subject, and enable them to include relevant statistics and illustrative graphs to help communicate their message.
In particularly technical SaaS niches, it's often important to interview subject matter experts for their advice on complex topics. For more advice, you can read: How to Create Engaging Content in Niche B2B Businesses.
Keywords
A strategic approach to keyword targeting can work wonders for targeted lead generation - and once you have a defined keyword strategy, this template will allow you to target each of your core keywords, one-by-one.
Offer/CTA
Blog posts are designed to attract potential buyers to your business, and begin a process of lead nurturing. To achieve that, it's essential that each of your blog posts promotes a targeted call-to-action (CTA). Wherever possible, choose a CTA that ties-in with the topic covered by your blog post. This congruence will improve the click-through rates of your CTA, and improve the odds of converting anonymous prospects into identifiable leads.
Learn more about creating lead generating CTAs: How to Write Whitepapers That Generate B2B Leads
