Whether you’re a blogger, marketer, or content marketing strategist, having a dynamic editorial calendar that outlines your content strategy is invaluable.
Bill Gates said, “Content is King.” That was true in 1996 and still remains true to this day. While marketing experts understand that constantly providing high-quality content or blog posts are critical for driving traffic and converting leads, maintaining a consistent publication cadence but without a central hub for planning, tracking, and organizing content maintaining team efficiency is tough.
An editorial schedule includes all of this and more.
However, the editorial calendar for a business may be surprisingly complex; it involves creating content marketing objectives, developing a strategy, and methodically strategizing all of your content ahead of time in order to achieve better outcomes for your organization – whether that means a higher search engine ranking, increased traffic, or both.
Don’t worry. In this blog, we are going to show you why and how to build perfect editorial calendars for your business.
Table of contents
What is an Editorial Calendar and Why is it Important?
An editorial calendar is a planning tool that provides a glimpse into your publication pipeline.
It assists you in the planning, management, and coordination of the various stages of content development- concept generation, production, publication, and promotion.
Formerly, editorial calendars were mainly used as a blog calendar to illustrate blog postings and articles. However, editorial calendars are not just limited to give you an overview of your tasks. You can expand yours to manage any form of content that you produce. Whether it’s social, internet, print, or video content, the possibilities are endless.
By giving a bird’s-eye view, an editorial calendar lays out your objectives and demonstrates how strategically you’re developing your content to engage with your target audience at various stages of their buyer’s journey.
Additionally, if you sell to a variety of target groups, you can determine if you have enough content ideas and if you are providing enough content for each.
Apart from providing a bird’s eye view, it will also provide you and your team with a game plan for constantly churning out content.
If your marketing team has weekly meetings, it can be helpful to bring up the editorial schedule during each meeting for a quick review. This keeps the calendar updated with the users’ minds.
Therefore, it functions as both a content strategy planning tool and a platform for collaboration with your team to ensure a consistent, on-track content calendar.
To summarize, an editorial calendar should:
- Serve as an idea bank for content ideas and key topics.
- Facilitate team collaboration when developing material.
- Create a publishing schedule to keep consistency.
- Allows you to make immediate drag-and-drop adjustments with working
- Assist in visualizing your content marketing strategy in order to make it more understandable to everyone.
“An editorial calendar should be a resource for your whole team, not just content creators,” says Ash Read, Buffer’s editorial director. “It should be something anyone can easily access to see what’s coming up and also suggest content ideas. Sometimes the best content suggestions will come from people outside of your marketing team.”
In conclusion, the main reason why you need an editorial calendar is that it enables you to strategically plan your content. When you are responsible for continuously creating relevant content – for your blog post, social media posts, email marketing campaigns, and any other marketing methods you use – it is critical to plan and strategize your content calendar. It will not only save you time but will also assist you in achieving consistently better results from your content.
How Do You Create The Perfect Editorial Calendar?
Step 1: Establish your content marketing objectives
The first step in planning your editorial calendar is determining your marketing and commercial objectives.
Begin with your business objectives: How can your content marketing assist you in achieving these objectives? Once you understand this, you can develop campaign goals, such as the following:
- Increasing the volume of traffic to your business’s website
- Raising your website’s search engine optimization
- Boosting your brand awareness and reach
- Increasing target customer loyalty
- Generate more leads and conversions in order to grow your list
- Acquire new customers and increase sales
Step 2: Research Possible Topics And Possible Strategies
It is not necessary to produce headlines at this point, but rather to generate some preliminary ideas for the type of content you should develop in order to achieve your marketing objectives; for example:
- To increase more leads, increase content downloads.
- To increase visitors to your website, offer engaging content (such as listicles, useful how-to guides)
- To optimize your search engine optimization, generate material that is valuable to your audience while also targeting specific keywords.
- To foster loyalty, prioritize quality content that adds value to your audience (e-books, webinars, extensive guides)
- Create more information regarding your product (such as case studies) as well as content that enables you to market to your audience in order to attract new consumers and increase sales (such as webinars)
- At this point, all that matters is developing a basic notion of the type of content you should write to accomplish those objectives.
Step 3: Do Content Research And Understand Your Analytics
To be more strategic with your content, you should also conduct research on your audience and the types of content they prefer. You can do this by reviewing your own analytics to identify top-performing content in your niche:
- Which types of content are most shared?
- Which headlines are the most effective?
- Which content strategies are most effective with your target customers? (brief or lengthy content, listicles, how-to guides, and ebooks, for example)
- What are the most popular topics?
- Which type of content creates the most traffic/leads?
Similarly, if you want to increase your search engine optimization, it’s critical to conduct extensive keyword research in advance and create a list of the long-tail keywords you will use in your content creation process.
Step 4: Come Up With Content Ideas
At this point, you should have a good understanding of your target audience, their preferences, and your own content marketing goals.
This is an excellent opportunity to begin developing your actual headlines. If you’re part of a larger team, brainstorming content ideas together can be really helpful in generating better ideas that you might not have considered initially.
Consider one critical question when you brainstorm headlines and topic ideas before adding them to your calendar: how will this specific item help me achieve my marketing goals?
Because if an idea does not help you attain your goals, it may be better to dismiss it and try something else.
Step 5: Continuously Monitor Your Results And Optimize Your Strategy
No editorial calendar should be rigid; in fact, it’s best to regularly evaluate the performance of your content and utilize that data to optimize your content calendar and, consequently, your content strategy.
For instance, if you’ve experimented with a particular type of downloadable goodie and it failed to generate a sufficient number of leads (which, in this case, would have been the primary objective), it’s critical to understand why this occurred and how you can improve your strategy and content in the future.
Consistently monitor your performance while keeping your marketing objectives in mind, and make necessary adjustments to your strategy and timetable.
5 Best Editorial Calendar Template and
Tools
The perfect editorial calendar tools allow you to assign posts to different team members and track their status. Editorial calendar ranges from paper-based (and mainly free) to many software alternatives, including interaction with your favorite platforms.
1. Traditional Calendar
Old-school printed calendars are ideal for those who require a break from the digital environment in order to gain a better understanding of their content workflow.
You can use the typical yearly calendar or four quarterly calendars in conjunction with monthly calendars to keep track of events.
However, these calendars have significant drawbacks:
- Traditional calendars do not support team collaboration. There is no way you can connect your team members to jointly use the calendar to manage editorial job assignments.
- A traditional calendar cannot be edited. You cannot change content progress between stages, such as ideation to in-progress, or delegate them as once the relevant content is marked off in the editorial process it cannot be undone.
2. Monday.com
Monday.com is a task management and scheduling software for individuals and businesses. This software is great at assigning tasks, tracking status, establishing priorities, and displaying each task’s due date and timeline.
Features:
- Calendar view
- Project overview
- Team planning
- Gantt views
Monday.com is an affordable solution for content management activities. The software includes features that cater to the needs of individuals, teams, agencies, and large businesses as well.
3. Trello
Trello is a simple-to-use content management program that’s best for editorial content management for individuals and teams. The app allows complicated content management teams and tasks to be easily managed from one place.
Features:
- Timeline view
- Assign and monitor due dates
- Automated command runs
- Activity logs
- Advanced checklists
Trello is one of the best applications for managing editorial content calendars. However, you must subscribe to a subscription plan in order to use the calendar view for task and content management.
4. HubSpot
The fourth editorial calendar example is from HubSpot. This calendar shows an individual month’s snapshot of what and where content will be posted. It uses a spreadsheet template for managing your blog staff. The calendar template is suitable for managing material on a website or social media presence. You can also alter the template to meet your specific content management needs.
Features:
- Customizable templates
- Blog editorial sheet
- Quick overview of upcoming tasks
The Hubspot Blog Editorial Calendar template is a free tool for managing blog content. You can use it with MS Excel and Google Sheets and Google Calendar to manage large content projects and teams.
5. Google Calendar
Google Calendar is an incredibly user-friendly and effective online scheduling tool. Content managers and website administrators can use google calendar to assign assignments and establish deadlines to individual employees as well as for teams. The application can sync data between multiple desktop and mobile devices.
Features:
- Tasks and reminders
- Create events, notes, and reminders
- Integrate with Google suite apps
- Yearly, monthly, and daily calendar views
Google Calendar is a simple and straightforward online scheduling tool. Content managers can use the app to assign, track and evaluate work.
Google Calendar Tracking with Time Tackle
To effectively track events and tasks on your Google Calendar, you need to use a browser plugin or any time tracking tool. There are several apps that can help you track and analyze your calendar time. However, with over 100,000 users, we recommend Time Tackle.
TimeTackle is a time tracker which allows you to measure your time spent on tasks in real-time and analyze whether you’ve achieved goals or not. It provides an easy way for managing multiple calendars from one calendar directly so that you will be able to track hours and time spent in a meeting in new and inventive ways. You can see everything at a glance and at the same time
What makes TimeTackle special is that it caters to all types of users’ time management needs. You can use TimeTackle’s automated Google Calendar to Ms Excel, Google Sheets, or CVS exporter and automate your time tracking and exporting process. TimeTackle streamlines your exporting process which saves loads of time and allows you to format and filter calendar data in different intuitive ways to streamline your event organizing process.
To know more about Calendar Analytics and TimeTackle’s features visit the link: TimeTackle Features
Summary
Content marketing is a very time-consuming activity, but when done correctly, it is incredibly effective. To maximize the effectiveness of your content marketing, try to organize your editorial schedule in advance by focusing particularly on your marketing objectives. This will not only increase your productivity and save you time, but it will also increase your ROI since you will be focusing exclusively on material that generates results – and continuously optimizing your approach and ROI.
