For organizations going through the arduous but revitalizing process of a Content Strategy, this Airtable base provides the infrastructure to support loads of information while giving options for different ways of consuming that information.
At Fiddlehead, we’ve found that a good Content Strategy starts with a Content Audit, then Strategy is built using pertinent data, and when approved, gives life to a handy, helpful Editorial Calendar—all organized here.
This Airtable is particularly useful for a mid-sized company with several products/topics, annual events, and a robust marketing and approval process in place—and one with the desire to stop reacting to content requests and start operating around a broader content strategy. (For more on this process, visit fiddleheadhq.com/blog/how-to-make-your-own-content-strategy-a-template-db4w7)
Our team Timeshare CMO likens this process to cleaning out your closet. It’s best to start with a Content Audit—the process of taking everything out of your closet and dumping it on the bed so you can see what you have. We use the first table in this base to pick through the piles, determining what’s worth keeping, what’s worth “mending” and reusing, and what can be thrown out.
In the Content Audit table, we’ve used labels to sort existing content by step in the funnel and by topic, which makes it easy to see where your content gaps are.
The second step is the Content Strategy. Informed by extensive data (hopefully) and tough conversations with the client or key players (ideally), the content strategy is the view forward. Organized into buckets of content by theme, you can take a bird’s-eye view of the coming content year. Where do you need to add outreach? What steps in the sales process need attention? What content will support your product launch, annual event, or suite of offerings?
In the Content Strategy table, you’ll notice a column for marking a project’s level of difficulty and level of reward. Picture a matrix with four quadrants, representing whether something is high difficulty/high reward, low difficulty/high reward, etc. This forces a team to rank the efficacy of the tasks that eat up the most time. Anything high difficulty/low reward? You may want to consider scrapping it.
The third step is creating the Editorial Calendar. This is the meat of the process and the table you’ll visit nearly every day. Informed by the previous tab (Content Strategy), the Editorial Calendar breaks out the many content pieces and deliverables that it takes to make your organization go through the content year with confidence.
There are many ways to split this out and many ways different people will think about a year’s worth of content. Some people think month-by-month. Some people think in terms of sales opportunities. Some are focused on the promotion of a particular product or event. The beauty of Airtable is the ability to organize this cumbersome list of to-do’s in different ways for different uses or members of your team.
We especially love the month-by-month Kanban. It shows what’s due each month, ranked in order of the difficulty/reward rating we just described.
We’re passing along this skeleton Airtable in the hopes that it helps organizations who are going through this “closet-cleaning” process that is so worth it in the end. Thanks for reading, from your friends at Fiddlehead.