Do You Need an Editorial Calendar?

Do You Need an Editorial Calendar? Yes, you do!

An editorial calendar is an essential tool that can help organize your business marketing plan. It’s a central place to organize, track and plan your blogs, schedule postings on your website and manage your company’s online marketing content across all social media channels.

An organized business is a successful one. To be successful, a company has to promote itself. In this digital marketing age, it’s all about content: blogs, tweets, Facebook postings, videos and email newsletters. It’s a lot to keep track of and that’s where an editorial calendar comes in.

Related Article: Social Media Can Help Market Your Business

What is in an Editorial Calendar?

You can’t just create and post content haphazardly. An editorial calendar can help plan and manage content and schedule postings weeks in advance. You should consistently post fresh content – a key ingredient of a digital marketing campaign.

According to Adhere Creative, an editorial calendar is more than a schedule showing dates when content should be published. It’s a place to plan and assign content for your website. A properly organized calendar should include:

1. Yet-to-be-developed content, existing content and content that will be repurposed
2. The content’s writer and team leaders
3. Audience targets
4. Delivery methods
5. Publishing schedule

Regardless of the size of your company, an editorial calendar can help manage and organize your online content. You can use it to assign tasks, communicate with your staff and keep track of projects. It’s important to plan your marketing strategy and an editorial calendar is the perfect tool to have in your arsenal to manage your campaign.

Organize Your Content

Remember, an editorial calendar is all about organizing your online blogs and posts to help market your business. To get the most out of it, ask yourself: What are the goals of the content? What audience are you trying to reach? How will the content be promoted?

Content Marketing Institute says an editorial calendar can be used to schedule postings, track the status of a piece of content from its inception to completion, date of posting and publication and meta description/tags.

An Excel spreadsheet or a WordPress calendar plugin can be utilized. Determine if you are promoting a new product or offering a seasonal or special service. Schedule social media postings for these items.

Related Article: Using blogs to market your business

Creating an Editorial Calendar

Here are some steps to create your editorial calendar:

1. Content – Decide what content you want to develop and post such as blogs, articles or videos. Also, determine how much you will need during a specified period.
2. Posting – Set a publishing schedule of your posts and articles and the frequency: Daily, weekly or monthly. Consider creating posts for major holidays or eclectic holidays such as National Ice Cream Day. Also, create posts promoting community events. This a great way to have relevant content and engage your audience.
3. Personality – Sprout Social recommends that your posts highlight your company’s culture or showcase who you are as a brand.
4. Fill up the editorial calendar – Fill the calendar with links to relevant content, your posts and resources. These social messages will ensure you’re providing your audiences with smart, useful content and give them a reason to follow you, says Sprout Social.

Do you need an editorial calendar? The answer is, yes! Consider using an editorial calendar that can help organize your business marketing plan.