The editorial calendar is a response to too many missed deadlines, lack of strategic messaging alignment, and a host of other ills that can beset content marketing teams. And in an age where marketers are overwhelmed by the volume of marketing channels, they help to maintain sanity.
Simply put, they are beautiful to behold.
So is rigorously adhering to your content calendar an unbreakable rule or are there times when you should take a step off path and seize an opportunity that suddenly arises?
Here’s what happened recently with an enterprise client that we helped capitalize on a sudden opportunity, and how it worked for their content team.
Recognizing the opportunity
The year kicked off with a content plan that centered around the rollout of a series of innovative new products. Excitement built around content that would focus on each new product and feature as it came online, and how it would be transformative for their company’s key target sectors. Everyone bought in and was teed up for the 1Q.
Then, just several weeks into the new year, talk around tariffs in the media and across industries picked up momentum. Our client is a leader in contract management and, after years of working together, one of the things that is at the top of our radar (and that we’ve written extensively about) is what is contained in agreements. A lot of the thought leadership centers around this: How do companies surface the clauses and phrases that could present opportunities—and those that represent risk?
When the chatter around tariffs started showing signs of going from bubbling up to boiling over, we acted quickly and proposed a blog post about terms and conditions in vendor agreements that could present very expensive risks to buyers. The client instantly saw the value of a piece like this.
Developing the content
Our writing team did a deep dive into the topic, and there was a lot. We waded through and very quickly put together a draft. Then we looked for places to consolidate and trim, and trim some more, so that the resulting piece was chock full of information and organized for readability, scanability, instant usefulness, and SEO friendliness.
We also made sure to frame the information so that it was specific to what’s in vendor agreements. It wasn’t a treatise on tariffs; it was: this is what you need to do today with your contracts.
Striking SEO gold
When you hit a vein of content that’s at just the right time and well done, you’ve hit search traffic gold. No one had a post about tariffs in their plans, but everyone on this client-partner team had the foresight to recognize a timely and smart idea when it arose.
Organic traffic to the post took off; very, very soon the piece ranked position 1 or page 1 for terms like “tariffs impacts on supplier agreements”. An abbreviated version of the post also generated impressive stats, but the robustness of the longer version is what really got searchers’ attention.
Sharing the thinking
When our client’s content executive leadership team met and the topic of tariffs came up, our point of contact was ready. Not only did they prove themselves proactive, they had tangible proof to boot. Rounds of applause filled the room, interest from the web spiked.
No one can absolutely predict when an opportunity will come knocking, but there are things that, as an outsourced writing partner, MarketSmiths can do: keep our ear to the wind for what’s happening in the greater landscape, bring an outside objective perspective, share ideas from working across dozens of industries and across the globe. We’re here to make opportunity happen and create thought leadership content that capitalizes on the moment.
