Writing great blog content is difficult: Identifying the right topics, Choosing the right angle.Finding the right words.
Optimizing the content, is all the more difficult if you do not have an editorial calendar to know what you are about.
Should write and when No sailor would face storms and great crossings without a map or a compass.
A good editorial calendar organizes all content actions and initiatives, So you can be sure you’re covering the right topics and posting at a regular cadence.
Conversely, if you don’t have a reliable way to stay organized, you’re all the more likely to get scattered and fail.
Our agency often finds that branded content strategies aren’t really because they’re not specific enough and are mostly too informal.
A clear roadmap backs a good strategy, A steady posting rhythm is critical to inbound marketing success.
However, this requires an editorial schedule or, rather, an editorial calendar to publish at a regular rate.
When we work with clients, we help them implement a sustainable and repeatable process to stay on track and achieve their long-term goals.
We will see together how to create an editorial calendar and organize your content marketing with the advice of an editorial agency and web content writing.
What is an editorial calendar?
An editorial calendar is a tool used by businesses, content creators and bloggers to plan the creation, publication and promotion of content on different communication channels, such as blogs, newsletters, social media and all others.
Content delivery methods, Editorial calendars help structure and optimize the delivery of content types, promotional channels, authors, and publication dates.
An editorial calendar should be part of a larger content marketing strategy to reach the widest possible audience consistently.
An editorial calendar should:
- Be a vault to secure post ideas and key topics.
- Coordinate resources for content creation.
- Provide strategy and more consistency.
- Make continuous adjustments with great simplicity.
- Visualize your strategy to make it understandable for everyone.
Why create an editorial calendar?
Here’s why you need to create an editorial schedule:
1. Get organized
An editorial calendar gives you a centralized file or tool to store content ideas, view your publishing schedule, and create a workflow.
With it, you can know what is to be done, in progress, in the editing phase, etc. – all at a glance.
2. Strategically plan content
Good content marketing is strategic, This involves creating content that addresses your target audience’s issues and meeting them on their buying journey.
You can’t get a big picture of how each piece of content connects to others and their purposes until it’s presented in an editorial calendar interface.
You get an easily understandable overview of the following:
- What content to create?
- Who will create this content?
- When should content be created?
- Why create the content, and for whom?
3. Provide more visibility on created content
In addition to showing you what’s in production, an editorial calendar makes it easy for stakeholders to see.
Leaders, social media managers, content managers, editors, communication managers, project managers, product managers, external content specialists, SEO, web admins… There are many stakeholders in a content strategy.
Such a holistic view means you can coordinate content campaigns and themes. Moreover, you can know how much content you publish for each conversion funnel stage.
4. Manage and meet deadlines
Nothing makes coordination as easy as a timeline specifying dates for the production and release of content and space to assign editorial tasks. A content calendar provides this information.
Key players involved in content creation gain visibility into the tasks they are responsible for and the associated timelines.
This way, you and your team are more likely to keep up with the work by limiting last-minute requests (and panicky moments or oversights).
In addition, the workflow that an editorial calendar offers helps secure the publication pace.
5. Publish more content better and easily
You have everything you need to publish with a well-planned workflow, better deadline management, and rich content topics.
In fact, by getting ahead in your approach, you can focus on quality content, You’ll create each piece of content upfront, which means there’s plenty of time to go back to it, proofread it, and polish it.
An editorial calendar gives you plenty of time to produce quality content, whether keyword research or getting approval from stakeholders because you can do all of this in advance.
How to create an editorial calendar?
A successful editorial calendar is an evolving and dynamic project that your business can improve upon as you develop and adapt your content strategy.
To start the process of creating your own, we have some tips to help you create a really useful editorial calendar.
Choose the best tools for an editorial calendar.
There is no perfect editorial calendar, each company and each editorial manager can adopt any calendar as long as they adapt to needs and expectations.
However, some formats will be easier and more accurate than others to help you achieve your team’s goals.
Once you’ve decided on a format, you’ll also need to decide how to implement it — choosing a tool, file, or platform that offers the most features or interface your business needs.
Here are some of the different formats available for your editorial calendar:
Traditional calendar or calendar app
Whether you’re keeping track of deadlines on a large paper calendar on your desk or through an app like Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar, it’s one of the easiest ways to know what’s happening and when.
However, these calendar tools are probably too simple for most projects, This is because there is more to project and content management than release dates, and a calendar may not always be efficient enough on its own.
Spreadsheet
Spreadsheets (Google Sheets, Excel…) have always been a key tool for content management, What a pleasure to see all the useful data and information aggregated in one place and neatly organized in rows and columns!
With Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets, spreadsheets are easily accessible and don’t have a steep learning curve.
One of the benefits of using spreadsheets is that they can easily be combined with calendar apps and content management tools.
By importing a csv file, you can load the information in multiple places depending on the tasks.
Indeed, spreadsheets are standard files easily imported and exploited via other tools.
Be sure to set up collaborative files with rights and access specific to each stakeholder for optimal coordination of resources and stakeholders!
Kanban board or other project management tool
Kanban is a visual and agile project management system that involves moving cards through different project stages.
This tool combines both a global and quick view and the possibility of setting up collaborative work.
A Kanban board can easily accommodate your content calendar if you need to set up planning, production tracking and content management, all 100% online. The most popular project management and Kanban tools are Trello, Airtable, and Meistertask.
Content calendar (and management) applications
Let’s take the concept of the editorial calendar one step further, Some applications and software platforms have been designed specifically for content management.
They include the timing and project management aspects needed to get the job done and other useful features for high-volume content marketing teams.
The most popular scheduling and content management tools are CoSchedule, Contently, and Loomly.
Identify participants in the editorial calendar.
Creating great content takes time and work, There are many stakeholders involved with different roles and levels of involvement.
But let’s be clear: you don’t necessarily need separate team members for each role, especially if your resources are limited, or you’re a one-person team.
You need someone to fill the roles; if you’re short on limbs, one person can wear many hats. For the latter, start by listing all the work involved in creating content. Start by fulfilling these roles:
- Writers: They choose or take keywords and use them to write the final content.
- Graphic designers: They create branded visuals like blog headers, social media posts, and even GIFs explaining processes in handy pieces.
- Editors-proofreaders: They proofread and correct the content of the editors to verify its accuracy.
- Project managers: manage the high-level elements – the stories you want to tell, dig into your audience’s interests and coordinate everything – from content ideation to briefing and final sign-offs.
- Analysts: They collect performance data on published content to determine how well it achieves its goals.
Remember, you don’t need people with specific job titles to do all these tasks. Depending on the structure and size of your team, different team members can fulfill these roles.
In addition, with a different context, other roles are added in this process – such as the preliminary work of an SEO project manager.
Create a publishing process
Having clearly defined steps in your process or workflow makes publishing on a set schedule possible.
It also makes team collaboration efficient, laying out everyone’s responsibilities through specific timelines.
Follow these steps to create a well-oiled workflow :
- Determine each step involved in creating each piece of content.
- Identify who will be best at performing these tasks.
- Decide project handover points between team members.
- Determine the time allowed to complete each task (and in what order).
- Assign and coordinate tasks with team members.
This can allow you to create another more detailed list with all the steps, the people involved in each step, and the time required.
The learn b2b marketing blog, for example, offers us the following list:
- Proposal of topic ideas (entire team – 30 minutes).
- Estimation of publication date (project manager – 5 minutes).
- Keyword research (SEO specialist – 2 hours).
- Writing an editorial brief (project manager – 2 hours).
- Content writing (content writer – 8 hours).
- Editing content (writer/project manager – 1 hour).
- Production of visuals and layout (graphic designer – 4 hours).
- SEO Optimization (SEO specialist – 30 minutes).
- Proofread content (writer – 30 minutes).
- Writing a publication for social networks (writer – 1 hour).
- Writing a newsletter (editor – 1 hour).
- Planning the date and time of publication (project manager – 5 minutes).
Finally, add the due dates for each content and the necessary tasks in your calendar. Sharing this checklist with your team ensures that no step is missed.
Some tools embed reusable checklist templates that are automatically added to each editorial calendar content.
Overall, you will have a clearly defined workflow with each job to be done alongside their timelines.
This makes the editorial calendar an effective place to plan and coordinate content and a tool to help keep the publishing schedule on track.
Establish a publishing rhythm
Despite all the envy in the world, you’re probably unable to publish all of your ideas as actionable content (unless you’re seriously out of ideas?).
This is especially true if your team has limited resources for your branded content.
Think of your publishing schedule as a marathon, don’t sprint your way through the day (publishing dozens of content all at once).
What is a realistic editorial calendar for you? This can range from three articles per week to two per month, depending on your abilities and industry.
- How many blog posts will you publish each month?
- How many social media posts each week?
- How much premium content (white paper, podcast, case study, etc.) will you publish monthly?
No matter your publishing cadence, you can easily scale as you master your process. Remember that producing content is not enough, You will also need to set aside time to promote it.
This means that you must plan time to ensure the distribution of your content:
- Schedule newsletters.
- Create social media posts.
- Optimize the SEO referencing of your content.
- Find contacts with your partners or other specialists in your sector.
Find content ideas.
Now that you know what to post work on what to post, Remember that not all ideas align with your marketing goals and your audience’s interests.
This is why I recommend you identify your content’s core before jumping into idea generation.
Understand the core of your content
The best content ideas must interest your audience by meeting their expectations and offer you business opportunities by presenting your know-how, for example.
This right balance between useful and commercial content ensures that it generates attention and provides relevant information to the right target.
To find out if this content would be of interest to your target, you can:
- Do a keyword research.
- Set up a brainstorm.
- Listen to employees in contact with customers (sales, customer relations, etc.).
- Ask your target directly.
- Track analytics performance.
Encourage short brainstorming sessions.
Nothing beats a good brainstorm (“brainstorm”) or a content ideation session to fill an editorial calendar!
Start this one by writing each idea that comes to mind on a post-it solo or in a team for 10 minutes. Beyond that, participants lose energy and efficiency.
Don’t forget to ask customer-facing teams, such as the sales team, to join the session or submit their ideas.
These people spend much time chatting with prospects and customers. They know their difficulties, their weak points and the questions they ask.
Write down your ideas to find the best topics.
Of course, not all ideas will become content, This is why you should list all content ideas before sharing them with all decision-makers.
If you have the time and the resources, feel free to find an idea scoring system.
- Put all post-it ideas on a board or spreadsheet.
- Ask participants to rate each idea between 1 (poor) and 5 (great).
- Add the points.
- Do the ranking.
Prioritize the best blog post ideas
Select the topics that got the highest rating. From there, choose the most relevant to your strategy: these are your priority topics.
If it’s up to you or your team, doesn’t agree, objectively evaluate the ideas based on which ones are most relevant to your business and your target audience.
You can also dive into keyword research to approve ideas based on keywords with the highest ranking potential on Google.
Add your best ideas to the editorial calendar.
Finally, add the priority content (the most interesting) to your editorial calendar with their important dates.
This should outline timelines for each step in the editorial creation process – up to the publication date when the content should be ready.
Having all the content topics, steps, and deadlines for each article in your editorial calendar helps you be more organized, productive, and competitive against your competition.
As for the remaining ideas that performed well, add them to your content list. You can pull them out whenever you have your next brainstorming session.
Use them when you’re stuck in an ideation rut, Some content will have to be published at a specific time to respond to SEO seasonality, professional events (trade shows, etc.), chestnut trees, etc. Choose the publication dates carefully!