One of the questions that plagued me as a child was how damn methodical Santa Claus must have been to deliver gifts to all the children in the world across a 24-hour period.
Now, as a writer, I marvel at the strategies we could build if only he would gift us with his organization skills some fateful December eve. Until that day, we’ll have to draw from real-world experiences and structure our content creation process with the tools we’ve got.
The first one that springs to mind is the editorial calendar. Let’s break it down so you can plan and create one yourself for an aligned and productive editorial strategy.
What an Editorial Calendar Is (And What It Isn’t)
An editorial calendar is a high-level overview of editorial initiatives within a broader content strategy. But it’s more than a fancy planner. It collaborates with other content operations to tack out an overarching approach, ensuring everything from blog posts to social media updates strikes the right chord with your audience.
What Features in an Editorial Calendar?
At the outset, the exact image of any given editorial calendar depends on the creative enthusiasm injected into it. You’re in a dynamic industry, so there’s no hard and fast rule. However, there are a few features that make it beautiful and helpful.
Notifications and Deadline Reminders
Your editorial calendar should include active notification and reminder functions to keep relevant parties accountable for their role in the workflow. Something as simple as a pop-up notification or email reminder will do the trick.
Organization Features
The only thing worse than a large wall of text is a billion tiny segments of identical-looking text to process productively. Give your brain a break and use color coding to distinguish tasks. Sort according to content type, topic, urgency or anything else that makes sense to your strategy.
Communication Methods
You’ll likely collaborate with multiple parties across the workflow, so ensure you have a solid communication method and get everyone on board. This could be a chat app like Google Chat or Slack, or as simple as on-calendar notes.
Assignment and Tracking Features
To avoid derailing your content train, make use of assignment and tracking features. Collaborative calendars allow you to share tasks with involved parties and keep them updated with progress.
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Historical Content-Generation Activities
Historical records are the go-to for analyzing productivity, progress and strategic realignment. Your records will also help optimize performance as you measure changes in editorial production and impact.
Accessibility on Laptop or Mobile Devices
From a content management perspective, you can empower responsiveness by ensuring your interface is clear and accessible across multiple devices.
What An Editorial Calendar Is Not
An editorial calendar is not every kind of marketing calendar under the sun. Instead, it’s the strategic HQ of written operations, showing the big picture of what needs writing. It works in conjunction with — but shouldn’t be confused with — a range of other content calendars.
For example, a social media content calendar collaborates with editorial as posts are written. Together, they ensure your social messaging snippets all sing the same tune. However, social calendars incorporate targeted design and strategic briefs, distinct from their wordsmith counterparts. Similarly, video and editorial calendars synchronize during scripting, though the video calendar moves into the deep dark world of talent sourcing, shooting and edits.
A communications calendar manages PR, press releases and internal comms, ensuring messages are consistent across all channels. Writing teams help to achieve this, but they aren’t solely responsible.
Editorial planning denotes the written stage of production. Meanwhile, other calendars are specialized, each handling its domains but working together to create a seamless content strategy.
Who Should Use an Editorial Calendar?
If you’re producing editorial content, you might think about getting one. It’ll keep your content production organized and deadlines visible regardless of whether you’re a lone wolf content creator or a team of 50+. Use an editorial calendar if you need:
- Enhanced accountability: A visual representation of production dates and delivery expectations helps plan time around hitting deadlines. Missed cutoffs become a thing of the past, or at least, more easily identified and managed.
- Support with idea generation: Clearly laying out upcoming collateral and themes in one go keeps you aligned with your digital marketing strategy and highlights potential content gaps. For example, email marketers can time their newsletters and promotional blasts to sync with major content drops, amplifying reach and engagement.
- Flowing content: Especially in SEO, regular posting is the mecca of impact. Moreover, other teams — such as social media and email marketing — rely on editorial content delivery to hit their own targets. Your calendar enhances collaborative efforts and prevents potential overlaps.
- Clear records: Juggling multiple campaigns? Lay the balls down in front of you and look at what you’re working with. Beyond grounding the chaos, editorial records show useful information like your content distribution and publishing schedule, which you can later compare against performance to optimize your strategy.
At Brafton, we couldn’t produce the volume of editorial content we do without a good calendar in our content marketing platform. With multiple user options, including task lists and calendar view, each writer has a clear understanding of what’s ahead in the monthly circus and can plan their schedules accordingly.
Editorial Calendar: Make Your Own
There are plenty of programs and tools around to make your own editorial calendar. This includes collaborative workflow platforms such as Click Up and Monday.com. But to keep it simple, we’re going to build one in a Google Sheets to show you how the magic happens. Or, save yourself the effort and download the template:
Building an Editorial Calendar: What To Include
First, decide whether to build your calendar from the ground up or take a load off and use one of the many available templates online (like ours). Once you have your framework in a style that’ll work for your team, consider adding some of the following details:
- Content type and topic: Keeping track of the content type visually represents the work cut out for the month ahead. Categorize content according to whether it’s a blog, infographic, podcast, social post, eBook or otherwise. With your content topic or keyword focus, you should see an aligned direction across your editorial deliverables.
- Production dates: Dates are key to showing when planning, writing and posting are expected during the month. Keeping these updated helps everyone stay on the same page and ensures critical deadlines are hit.
- Editorial workflow: Designating separate areas for keyword planning, article outlines and posting URLs means everyone involved can access each part of the editorial workflow. This is great for transparency and helps teams stay in tune with others’ progress during cross-functional productions.
- Posting channels: It may seem obvious, but adding the channels you plan to post in ensures no crossovers are being created for the month. It also makes it easier for your posters to get your editorial content out there smoothly and efficiently.
- Team members responsible: Showing which team members are responsible for each stage in the editorial process helps individuals stay accountable for their roles. It also details what teams and departments accomplish during a month. At the end of the month, when it comes to analyzing performance, you’ll easily see ways to improve performance or spread out the workload in the months ahead.
Your editorial calendar should provide a high-level overview of what the editorial department plans to achieve in the month ahead, how they will set about getting there and which resources they need to succeed. Consider adding visual elements, target personas or client information for easy access and smooth sailing as you conquer new editorial worlds.
Get Creative With Your Calendar
An effective editorial calendar bolsters your content marketing efforts by adding an element of calm amidst the chaos. Generating ideas in advance and having a clear plan to move forward provides structure, accountability and direction so you can put your creative juice into producing high-quality content.
The benefits of an editorial calendar in content planning also mean a tight publishing schedule — which SEO loves — and an approach to ensure important dates aren’t missed.
Explore the online tools available to organize your editorial projects to see which options work for you and your team. Alternatively, download the calendar template provided or get creative making your own and watch it lift your content marketing strategy.
