How To Make An Editorial Calendar For Your Business
Editorial planning is a daily process that connects your short-term content to your long-term strategy. The editorial calendar helps you prioritize your content by aligning it with your audience's needs and your business goals. This is an incredibly important practice for any online business owner for it will not only help you see better results from your content efforts, but it will also help you establish sustainable strategies to support your business in growing both now and into the future. What I appreciate the most about using an editorial calendar system is that it helps me provide my content with a direction as well as a purpose while also giving me room to be flexible with my plan in response to the ever-changing nature of online marketing. Within this article I share what an editorial calendar is, how it differs from a content plan, and ways you can set up an editorial calendar for your business.
What is an editorial calendar
Your editorial calendar functions as your publishing schedule, keeping track of all of the content you will be creating and sharing across multiple media channels. Editorial calendars are used most often by bloggers or writers of any nature, business owners, digital marketers, business owners, and basically anyone who is taking their media management really seriously! What I have found by using an editorial calendar consistently is that it helps me bring much more focus and intention into the media I am creating and releasing for my business, which ultimately helps me increase the results I experience from all of my content efforts. Your editorial calendar is a longer-game planning method, where you are looking at the bigger picture of what media you are creating to help you reach your long term goals. Your editorial calendar helps you to outline the specific types of content you are intending to create and publish over an extended period of time.
Your editorial calendar is going to help you keep track of the content you are creating and publishing both in the short term and long term future. What is wonderful about using an editorial calendar is that it acts as a running list of the various media you are creating. This, in turn, helps you look at your marketing strategy from a broad perspective, allowing yourself to easily view what you are marketing, how you are marketing it, and when you are marketing it. I find this to be tremendously helpful for any business that operates with multiple services or products, for it can often be challenging to organize all the things you are marketing and selling in a seamless way. This is also beneficial for folks who are preparing for upcoming launches, for it allows you to look at the launch as a whole and make sure you are balancing direct sales driving marketing with more value and brand building marketing. I love to take a marketing approach that leads with valuable, information based content so this is especially helpful for others who also like to lead their marketing in that way because it will help you to ensure you are adding value to your audience’s feeds while also ensuring you are still marketing your products and services so to sustain your business.
On my editorial calendar I include when I am publishing blogs (and the topic of the blog), when I am publishing newsletters, when I am publishing strategic social content (and the topic of them), and so on. My editorial calendar tracks the status of each item, such as noting whether it has been moved into the drafting phase, editing phase, or completion phase. My calendar also assigns me deadlines for when the content needs to be published. Editorial calendars are great to use when planning in monthly, quarterly and yearly windows, making it a wonderful tool to use when establishing your bigger picture intentions for your business and the direction you want to head into. In your editorial calendar, you lay out your overarching themes and topics for content based on what I like to refer to as ‘seasons’. The content you are planning to create should directly relate to what you are wanting to market during that time of the week, month, quarter, or year. This way, you bring focus into your media strategies, which directly impacts the results you will experience.
What is most important to understand about editorial calendars is that you need to know your marketing strategies as well as your content pillars in order to get the most out of using an editorial calendar. If you don’t know what your goals or intentions are for your content (the marketing direction!) or you do not know what your content pillars are that you create content around…then using an editorial calendar will probably not make a lot of sense for you. In order to benefit from this strategy, make sure you have solid marketing strategies and content pillar clarification happening!
Where should you house your editorial calendar?
Personally, I use Notion to create and manage my editorial calendar as well as my weekly content planner. Notion is a fantastic platform to use for all things business and project management and it is the platform I use with all of my clients!
How editorial calendars are different from content calendars
If editorial calendars outline your long game strategy for the media you are creating and sharing in a way that directs your marketing intentions, then content calendars can be looked at as your short term strategy to help you execute your overarching editorial calendar! Your content calendar will reflect your day to day content, content direction and marketing strategy, helping you to stay focused on what you need to do each day to support your longer game editorial calendar and goals. Your content calendar focuses on what you need to do each day in relation to your content, marketing and publishing activities. Your content calendar will directly relate to your editorial calendar, where your editorial calendar supports the design of your content calendar. If your editorial calendar is set up in a solid way, you will notice that your content calendar will become quite easy to establish and manage! The way I work with my content calendar is that I allow my editorial calendar to support the direction of my weekly and daily content plan. From my editorial calendar, I know exactly what I am creating and publishing every day and every week. When I sit down to craft content, I reflect on my editorial calendar to help me set up the upcoming content. This allows me to get ahead on my content, batching content out in advance for my content calendar so that I never feel like I have to create media on a whim or rush!
What is great about this editorial calendar method is that, if your editorial calendar is done well, your weekly content planning becomes a breeze! I have noticed that, since incorporating an editorial calendar system into my business, I’ve had far more ease and consistency happening with my content creation and publishing efforts. I’ve also noticed that it has helped me build stronger brand awareness, audience trust, and interest in my services!
how to begin setting up an editorial calendar
Editorial calendars help you outline high level frameworks that support your content efforts. Your editorial calendar is the starting point for your content calendar. Without an editorial calendar, it can feel like you can never keep up or catch up with your content marketing methods!
When beginning to establish an editorial calendar, it is helpful to do a brainstorming session where you begin to think about your most important topics of content, types of content, and timelines for media creation. This is where you work with your content pillars (both business pillars and brand pillars) and you begin brainstorming content ideas based on your content pillars and your marketing intentions.
When planning your editorial calendar, it’s important to consider how your calendar will relate to as well as be relevant to your target market. We want to stay relevant with the media we plan to release, considering how the media we share directly speaks to and supports the very people we are creating for. This is where you may need to incorporate market research methods to help you come up with content ideas or support you in developing strong messaging and copy for your content.
Finally, you want to make sure you have your marketing goals and intentions planned out. This means, determining what you are marketing (products, services, freebies, email list, a community, to take a certain action, to enroll in a certain thing…you get the point!) as well as determine specific launch windows for your products and services. The more you have your marketing strategies established, the easier itll be to lay out your editorial calendar!
As well, we also want to brainstorm what type of publishing schedule best aligns with us. Some people love to create and share social posts every day M-F (a 5 post a week schedule), whereas others prefer to do less such as a 1 or 2 post a week schedule. In my opinion, it is more important to align with a publishing schedule that you can actually stick to in a consistent manner than try to establish a publishing schedule based on what someone else told you works best. Your schedule that you can commit to is what will always work best! Finally, before going into setting up your editorial calendar, you want to map out your resources and research needs. It’s no joke when I say that editorial calendar planning as well as content calendar planning are both a lot of work. That’s exactly why there are people like me who specialize in helping other people set up and manage their calendars! During this period you need to get real with yourself regarding what you can actually manage on your own. You may notice that you have a need for support in this area and if that’s the case I recommend considering hiring someone to help you manage your media. If you have any questions on media management feel free to reach out to me or visit my services page to learn more about my approach to media management!
A more detailed walkthrough of designing your editorial calendar
The first thing you want to do if you are preparing to establish an editorial calendar is to identify your goals for the current or upcoming quarter. This supports you in defining your strategic objectives for the upcoming season, which will directly influence what goes on your editorial calendar. Your goals and objectives should help you brainstorm what types of content you want to be creating for the upcoming quarter as well as what topics you want to form your media around. It also helps you summarize your marketing intentions.
Next, you want to ensure that you are establishing a mix of content types for the quarter. This is where you want to sit down and get clear on all the various forms of media you want to create. This can include email marketing, social media content, blogs, podcasts, videos, and so on. Having an editorial calendar with a wide range of content types helps you ensure you are hitting all the marks for how you want to generate and share media for your business. It also helps you establish a long game, sustainable strategy for your media. Once you complete the first two steps above, you then want to move into plotting your calendar. In this phase, you begin strategizing your editorial calendar by deciding on the topics for the types of media you’ve established, the authors or creators assigned to the content, when first drafts need completed, when editing needs completed, when finalization and deadlines are, and so on. During this phase, you also want to consider what pieces on your editorial calendar are your cornerstone pieces. Your cornerstone pieces are what I refer to as your macro content. This content is your largest media you are creating that will most likely take the largest amount of time and energy to create. Your cornerstone content should be extremely intentional in reasoning for creating it and it should directly support your quarterly goals.
Once you lay out all of the above actions to help you set up your editorial calendar, you want to conclude by defining how you will measure the progress of your content. This is a step that is often overlooked but it is critical for the success of your media efforts!
additional tips on setting up your editorial calendar
The following things are highly important to make sure you are considering as well as clarifying when setting up your editorial calendar…
Important dates: Including nationally and internationally recognized dates, launch dates, promotional windows, vacations / time off, etc!
Media themes and topics (and subtopics as needed): Based on the season you are planning for and the products/services you are marketing
Media types (in various formats): The types of media you want to create content for, such as videos, reels, tiktok, carousels, pinterest, twitter, blogs, newsletters, etc
Posting cadence: How often you post that sets your consistency meter. This should be set for all types of media you produce, such as how many newsletters you send a month, how many Instagram posts you share a week, and so on
Distribution channels: What platforms you are distributing your media on (both primary and secondary)
I hope this article has helped you to not only grasp just how much an editorial calendar can help you organize as well as manage your content and marketing efforts, but also just how doable it is for you to begin implementing this sort of system into your own business! If you find yourself with any questions about how to set up an editorial calendar after reading this, feel free to reach out! I’m always happy to offer advice. If you are someone who loves this idea of working with a streamlined content and marketing system but do not have the time or desire to set it up let alone manage it yourself, reach out and let’s talk about whether media management would be something your business is ready for!
Until next time…
Natalie Brite
