Any good marketing plan involves the use of an editorial calendar. This tool is utilized by content creators or teams involved in a marketing campaign. An editorial calendar helps keeps track of everything needed to create in terms of content as well as specific milestones and deadlines.
Editorial calendars were also used by magazines and newspapers as a way for them to better manage their projects in a timely setting. As more content began getting published online, editorial calendars were used for everything related to content planning, from social media posts to blogs.
You don’t need to be a large business to receive the benefits of an editorial calendar. Even freelancers can use the tool to monitor their projects and help them with their time management.
What exactly is in an editorial calendar?
This multi-functional calendar that allows you to manage content creation and publication. While it lists the days of the week in a month, it also helps you input themes or campaigns that you can cover within that period or on a weekly or bi-monthly basis, depending on your own business’ needs and marketing push.
This is useful because then you have an overview of all the content you publish in a given time frame. By seeing the themes planned ahead at a glance, you can determine if how best to execute your marketing strategy as well as if the content is aligned with your projected path.
How an editorial calendar helps your business
Marketing plans and their effectivity are dependent on the quality and direction of content that you publish. You can be publishing great content every day, but if these assets are not cohesive or connected to your particular goals or are not aligned with your marketing strategy, then these efforts won’t contribute as efficiently to your business’s overall growth. Considering the effort it takes to produce content, this is considered an opportunity cost due to inefficiency.
An editorial calendar helps you easily identify the gaps in your content and strategy and ultimately saves you time through planning ahead. Is there a blog post that feels disconnected with the rest? Are your social media posts supposed to simply build awareness, or push a new campaign? Is this month’s theme properly focused on what you’re trying to achieve? Answering these questions is simpler when you can properly map out everything using an editorial calendar.
The versatility of an editorial calendar lies in the variety of content it can cover. This includes not just blog posts, but also content that goes into your different social media channels like Facebook and Instagram. Content that you intend to streamline can be prepared and assessed with an editorial calendar.
More benefits include:
Easily customizable and more manageable content
By keeping track of important events and relevant content, you can work towards keeping your online content organized and unified. You can easily utilize your editorial calendar to better execute your marketing strategies and release content that your audience will find more appealing, from using the best hashtags to even planning out a Facebook Live.
An editorial calendar can also help you determine in advance if certain posts are appropriate, and if not, can help you stay flexible while keeping organized.
Improved team management
It’s easier to assign tasks to members of your team when everyone is on the same page. An editorial calendar is the easiest way for your team members to know what is happening, and who is assigned to what.
It’s also a great way to track how much of a specific project is completed and if a task should be assigned to someone else.
Better scheduling
Perhaps the biggest advantage of an editorial calendar is having better scheduling. You are now able to plan on when you should publish a specific content and to which platform. This is highly beneficial when you have several social media channels and want to create posts that are more specific to each one.
Keeping track of events in a calendar is also more convenient, especially for planning appropriate content related to national holidays. It allows you to work in bigger chunks instead of having to brainstorm for content every day, which also lets you catch potential mistakes more easily.
