Editorial Calendars Work: Part I
What is it? An editorial calendar helps you schedule your content production.
Why do you need it? It helps you strategize your content and deliver on your communications.
Our clients juggle a lot of content-related balls: They want to publish or republish white papers; they’re working on e-books; they’re rolling out articles for trade publications; they’re creating new blog posts; they’re updating their websites.
They’ve got a lot going on, but they don’t usually have it going on in an editorial calendar.
Maybe “editorial calendar” connotes too much insider knowledge to sound useful to anyone outside of a publishing or marketing team. Maybe it seems unnecessary for (theoretically) easily producible writing-related tasks.
But while content is (sometimes) easy to produce, it’s most definitely not a one-and-done effort. Quality writing is brainstormed, strategized, roughed-out, edited, market-tested, proofread, published, and then republished again (and again).
It requires a lot of (sequential) steps. To make those steps as easy and efficient to execute as possible, use an editorial calendar.
Like regular calendars, an editorial calendar reflects the annual marketing cycles of your business, including:
- Launches
- Events
- Routine touch-point opportunities
Unlike regular calendars, an editorial calendar also denotes:
- The assigned writer and/or editor
- The relevant audience personas
- The target channels
- The relevant workflow elements, especially status and notes
Editorial calendars help businesses get content done. But they do a lot more. An editorial calendar can help you develop content strategy and manage communications. And, as we’ve said before, all content should be multipurpose content. An editorial calendar makes clear how work already is (and can be further) repurposed.