How to Create an Editorial Calendar

How do you build an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is a crucial tool in content marketing.

It helps businesses be strategic in their content creation and keep publishing content consistently throughout the year.

Ideally, consistent content marketing helps achieve marketing goals, including increasing brand awareness, generating more leads and conversions, gaining higher SERP rankings, boosting brand credibility, etc.

According to recent research, 88% of marketers said consistent content marketing had helped them successfully raise brand awareness and build credibility, while 72% admitted it helped boost engagement.

In other words, the effectiveness of content marketing is irrefutable – in a past study, 96% of marketing decision-makers said content marketing was effective for their brand.

That’s why an editorial calendar is essential, as it helps streamline the content production process.

This guide shows you how to create an editorial calendar (step by step) to assist you and your teams get more organized and optimize your content marketing.

Areas covered include;

• What Is an Editorial Calendar?
• What Should an Editorial Calendar Include?
• Is There a Difference Between an Editorial Calendar and a Content Calendar?
• Why Do You Need an Editorial Calendar?
• How to Create a Successful Editorial Calendar
• What Tools Can You Use in Creating an Editorial Calendar?
• Examples of Editorial Calendars

What Is an Editorial Calendar?

An editorial calendar is a visual workflow used by content publishers (businesses, bloggers, publishing companies, etc.) to outline content creation, publication, and promotion.

It looks at the bigger picture, identifying themes and topics around which to weave content.

As a result, the publishing teams get to produce relevant content consistently throughout the year.

Besides scheduling content themes and topics, an editorial calendar also outlines the production timelines, thereby keeping everyone accountable.

In other words, maintaining an editorial calendar ensures your target audience remains engaged with your brand through various content – blog posts, social media posts, email newsletters, infographics, case studies, webinars, etc., consistently.

With the calendar in place, the teams prepare the content on time while ensuring the publishing schedules coincide with relevant events, seasons, or industry trends for maximum engagement.

What Should an Editorial Calendar Include?

An editorial calendar is a framework that guides your content marketing, which means it should contain all the essential details to help your team stay organized and keep producing relevant content without lags.

While the specific details may vary from calendar to calendar, depending on the content strategy, here are some basics you should incorporate into your calendar.

• Type of content – The calendar should highlight the kind of content to be created. This could be a blog post, email, podcast, webinar, guide, social media post, video, infographic, etc. Doing so helps create a balanced content plan to engage your audiences across their preferred channels.
• Topic/Headline – Headlines are an essential part of a copy as they help guide the audience on what the content is all about. A headline summarizes the benefit of reading the content, which is crucial in grabbing the audience’s attention. Providing the topic/headline in the editorial calendar guides the content creators to produce a copy that aligns with your theme/objective, thereby increasing the effectiveness of your efforts. This is especially important as statistics show that more than half of content produced by brands is not meaningful to consumers.
• Target persona – Creating buyer personas is an essential step in content marketing. It helps you understand your audience so you can serve them content they resonate with. In most cases, a business may have several buyer personas depending on its solutions. Highlighting the target personas on the editorial calendar enables the team to create targeted content that meets the audience’s needs.
• Keywords – Keywords are part and parcel of a successful SEO strategy. Listing the focus keywords on the editorial calendar provides direction to the writers enabling them to create content that targets the right audience. In other words, keywords help them create highly relevant content to attract the right audience and drive the desired actions.
• Content producers – Assigning authors and editors to the individual posts clarifies who is responsible for each piece, allowing them to prepare in advance. It also helps eliminate confusion and any potential delays that may result from late assignments.
• Offer/Call to action – In the same way a headline highlights the content of a copy, a call to action reveals the objective of a particular piece of content. Ideally, the ultimate goal of content marketing is to encourage the audience/customers to do something. This could be purchasing a product/service, subscribing to the newsletter, registering for a webinar or course, sharing content, downloading a freebie, signing up for a free trial, etc. Outlining the call to action on the editorial calendar allows the writer to tie the content to the desired action, ensuring you don’t lose your customers.
• Content due date – The editorial calendar should also outline the due date. This is the date by which the content should be ready for publishing. The production process has several due dates, e.g., the deadline by which the writer should submit the copy, the date the editor should finish editing, etc. However, the due dates for the different stages usually feature in the content calendar; the editorial calendar only bears the due date for the final copy. Generally, setting the due date gives the publishing team ample time to upload and schedule the posts to go live on the publish date.
• Publish date – Setting the publish date guides the production teams, enabling them to fit the different stages of content production (brainstorming, research, writing, editing, graphic design, publishing, etc.) within the timeline for timely publication.
• Distribution channels – Since the audience on every channel consumes content differently, highlighting the distribution channels allows the creators to create highly relevant content for each platform – website, social media, email, etc.

Is There a Difference Between an Editorial Calendar and a Content Calendar?

The terms editorial calendar and content calendar are often used interchangeably.

While the two are used in planning and scheduling content creation, they have a notable difference.

An editorial calendar outlines the long-term plan of content strategy.

Ideally, an editorial calendar is a guiding framework that focuses on the main themes and topics you intend to cover over a longer period – month, quarter, or year.

This allows you to conceptualize ideas in advance and assign responsibilities to teammates to prepare the content for publication.

On the other hand, a content calendar is a short-term plan that outlines a day-by-day content management schedule.

Unlike the editorial calendar that focuses on the bigger picture, the content calendar gives a detailed plan of all content activity, including exact messaging, type of content to post on each channel, and the publishing dates.

Moreover, the content calendar allows agility as teams can make publishing changes as the need arises and still remain consistent.

Why Do You Need an Editorial Calendar?

Having understood what an editorial calendar is and what it entails, let’s now look at why you need to have one.

We have already mentioned some benefits of creating the calendar, such as enabling you to be consistent in your content marketing.

Essentially, the calendar helps you figure out what to write. But that’s not all.

There are other benefits that are equally important. Let’s go through them as well.

Save Time

An editorial calendar helps you get organized, which saves you time in the long run.

Once you draft the calendar, writing the content takes much less time than brainstorming ideas for a new post every time you need to write.

As a result, you get to free up more time to concentrate on other areas of your business.

Publish Content Consistently

With so many responsibilities demanding your attention, producing content consistently can become challenging.

Even when you set aside time each week to plan, you might find other activities taking up your time and messing with your schedule.

An editorial calendar enables you to overcome this as you get to plan your content for a longer duration – month, quarter, year – in advance.

With the responsibilities assigned and deadlines set, each team member works to ensure they deliver on time, thereby guaranteeing consistency.

Streamline Content Creation

Without an editorial calendar, you risk creating repetitive content while leaving out some other essential content.

A calendar helps you balance publishing various content types to optimize your marketing potential.

In addition, by planning, you get to capitalize on important events and seasons by producing content to coincide with them.

Enable Collaboration

Another benefit of creating an editorial calendar is that it provides easy collaboration among your team members.

With online tools such as Google Sheets, Google Calendar, etc. (see later section), every team member can access the calendar, check their assignment and deadlines, and view the progress of each post.

Identify Content Gaps

As the calendar provides a long-term view of your content plan, you can spot any gaps and make changes accordingly to address them.

On the same note, the calendar allows you to experiment with different content types.

As a result, you get to refine your content strategy by concentrating on what works for your business.

Better Scheduling

Having an editorial calendar enables you to achieve better scheduling.

Instead of writing individual posts every time you want to post, you can have your team create the posts in advance, allowing you to schedule them at a go.

Besides, you get to keep track of events, allowing you to prepare and schedule the most relevant posts for better engagement.

Better Understanding of Project Roles

As each team can access the calendar, they’re able to understand their roles early in the project.

This allows them to consult and ask any questions and clarifications way ahead of time, ensuring they complete the project timely and accurately.

Improved Team Management

As the accessibility of the calendar by all team members ensures everyone responsible for the creation process is aware of their roles, team management becomes much easier.

Besides, you can easily track the project’s progress and make appropriate decisions to address any lags.

Decreased Stress Levels

Having an editorial calendar provides better organization, which in turn reduces stress levels.

As everyone can view their role and deadlines, there’s less confusion, resulting in efficient project execution and less stress.

Helps You Stay Organized

An editorial calendar allows you to organize your content ahead of time.

Mapping the campaigns over a long period, say a year, enables you to create a balanced content production plan.

In other words, it helps you visualize your marketing objectives and fit them into a schedule for execution.

Measure Your Content Marketing Effectiveness

Ultimately, an editorial calendar helps you measure the effectiveness of your content efforts.

By analyzing the schedule, you can discover the trends in the content you publish.

How various themes and topics perform. Engagement levels over different times. What content does the audience prefer most? And so forth.

By so doing, you can use the insights to optimize your future content strategy.

How to Create a Successful Editorial Calendar

Having dealt with the basics, let’s now discuss the steps you should take to create a successful editorial calendar.

While there are ready templates that you can use to create the calendar, understanding each of the steps gives you more power over the process and flexibility should you decide to use alternative tools such as spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets).

That said, here are steps to follow;

Define Your Objectives

When creating your editorial calendar, the first step should involve defining your content marketing objectives.

Otherwise, writing content without clear goals can lead to generating content that’s not useful to the consumers.

Remember, as earlier mentioned, studies have revealed that more than half of the content produced is not meaningful to the consumers?

For this reason, you need to make your content valuable by remaining objective.

Some common content marketing objectives to drive your campaigns include;

• Raising brand awareness
• Boosting SEO
• Increasing website traffic
• Generating more leads and conversions
• Building brand authority and credibility, etc.

Once you have defined your goals, it becomes easier to create content that aligns with the specific goals.

Moreover, it helps balance your content to ensure you’re not neglecting some objectives.

For instance, while it’s important to publish content to help boost your SEO and raise brand awareness, you shouldn’t ignore to engage your existing audience to nurture them to conversion and so forth.

Choose a Format That Aligns With Your Needs

Remember, the main objective of an editorial calendar is to help you get organized.

But the format you choose may vary depending on the scale of your needs.

For instance, if you have a two-person team comprising the writer and editor, drafting the editorial calendar on a spreadsheet (Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets) would help them collaborate effectively.

However, if you have multiple teams collaborating on the project, you would require an automated calendar format for better access and communication.

In other words, the format you choose should offer the features your team needs to stay organized and collaborate effectively despite their size. Some common formats include;

• Traditional calendar/calendar app – This is the most basic way of tracking and managing your content production. You can use an ordinary calendar or an app like Google Calendar.
• Spreadsheet – Another simple format you can opt for is spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets). Besides, they allow integration with other content management tools. You can easily import a .csv file on the content management platform for easier task execution.
• Calendar apps – There are platforms specially designed for content management, where you can create your calendars for easier collaboration and task management. These are especially ideal for teams with high-volume content marketing needs. (We will discuss the platforms in detail in the next section).

Research Topics

After defining your objectives, you need to research topic ideas to meet those objectives. For instance, you could create;

• Listicles and how-to guides to drive more website traffic
• E-books and webinars to build brand authority
• Case studies and demos to generate more leads and conversions
• SEO-optimized posts to boost SEO ranking

Review Your Analytics to Understand Your Audience

At the same time, you need to understand your audience, especially the type of content they prefer.

This will allow you to create highly relevant content to drive better engagement.

You can achieve this by studying your analytics. Data to look for include;

• Most effective headlines
• Content types with the most shares
• Best-performing content formats
• Most popular topics

This, combined with a detailed understanding of your buyer personas, should allow you to plan relevant content that provides the information your audiences are interested in.

Identify Your Anchors

One of the purposes of an editorial calendar is to mark special events and seasons and prepare content in advance to maximize the opportunities during those times.

These are your anchors and may include industry events, product launches, start and end of a buying season.

Map Out Content Sources

At the same time, you should map out your content sources.

The more sources you explore, the more variety of ideas you will have. Some of the possible sources to consider include;

• Internal sources – Your employees, especially those interacting with the customers, might have great ideas on the kind of content the customers would like to read. Holding a brainstorming session with them can provide valuable insights.
• External sources – You could also outsource content creation to agencies or freelance writers. However, you need to provide them with clear information about your business to enable them to create content that your customers would be interested in.
• Customer advocates – You could also have your customers help with content generation. For instance, you can request your loyal customers to write or record reviews. Similarly, you can compile a case study highlighting the customers’ success stories. Customer-generated content is powerful, and you can use it for awareness creation, building credibility, or even boosting leads and conversions.
• Repurposed content – In addition to creating fresh content, you could also repurpose old content for the same or different media. For instance, you can turn a video into a blog post and vice versa to reach a new audience segment.

Develop a Publishing Schedule

Your publishing schedule should be unique to your customer needs.

This means you should study your analytics to determine how often you need to engage your target audience.

Are there times of the day, week, or month when the engagement is higher?

What types of content garner the highest traffic during certain seasons or days of the month?

Understanding how your audience consumes content should inform your publishing schedule.

But to start you off, you can follow the following plan as suggested by the Digital Branding Institute;

• One to two blog posts a week
• One to three social pushes (number of times you promote your content on social media)
• One eBook every year
• One guide every quarter
• One email newsletter every month
• One to two posts per day on social media

Once you start analyzing the engagement levels, you can tweak the schedule to align it with your audience’s needs.

Lastly, while the period your editorial calendar covers entirely depends on your preferences, making quarterly plans gives your teams enough time to prepare quality content in advance.

Assign Roles and Deadline

Once you have your calendar ready, you need to assign roles to team members – writers, editors, graphic designers, etc.

Each assignment should have a deadline so that team members can work within the schedule to avoid lagging in the project.

It also helps streamline the process as each member gets to prepare in advance, leading to organized and efficient content production.

Audit and Optimize the Calendar as Necessary

Finally, you should audit your content regularly to understand what’s working and what’s not.

Study analytics closely to see the engagement levels of each type of content.

In so doing, you can pick trends to inform your future content creation.

For instance, if data shows your audience prefers a particular type of content, you could repurpose it or create similar content to duplicate the success.

Also, watch out for insights on what content performs best on which media to allow you to maximize the various platforms.

In other words, conduct regular audits of your content to analyze its performance and optimize accordingly to engage your audience better.

What Tools Can You Use in Creating an Editorial Calendar?

There are numerous tools you can use in creating an editorial calendar.

Some are simple with a shallow learning curve, while others are specifically designed for creating editorial calendars and may require some learning to understand how they work.

Nonetheless, no matter how simple or complex they are, a good tool should allow;

• Easy gathering of content topic ideas
• Tracking the status of a piece of content throughout the production process
• Assigning of roles
• Customization to embed structured processes
• Multi-device access

With that said, here are examples of tools available for you.

Google Sheets

Simple and easy to use, Google Sheets is an ideal resource you can use to create your editorial calendar.

Being an online program, you can easily share the spreadsheet with the team members, comment and edit in real-time, and track the progress of your content production.

Besides, Google Sheets allows multi-device use. You can use it on your computer or download the app for your mobile phone.

Using Google Sheets is free, and it gives up to 15 GB per user secure cloud storage on the drive and 100 participants video and voice conferencing on Meet.

However, large businesses that require more capabilities than the free version provides can sign up for the business standard package at $12 per month, which includes 2 TB per user, up to 150 participants on video and voice conferencing, and 24-hr online support, among other benefits.

WordPress Editorial Calendar

If you run your website on WordPress, there’s a free plugin you can use to create and manage your editorial calendar – WordPress Editorial Calendar.

The calendar provides an overview of when each post will be published.

Besides, you can move the posts through drag and drop to edit them and manage the entire blog within the calendar.

In a nutshell, features of the editorial calendar include;

• Drag and drop to change post dates
• Manage drafts with the drafts drawer
• Quickly edit post titles, times, and content
• Publish posts
• See post status
• Manage posts from several authors

Semrush Marketing Calendar

If you’re searching for a premium tool with more features and integration capabilities to power your marketing objectives, then Semrush Marketing Calendar is an ideal solution for your team. The tool enables you to;

• Plan and align your marketing campaigns – Gather your marketing plans in one place; create recurring activities, access templates, and create a campaign budget
• Collaborate in real-time with your team – Invite an unlimited number of team members, access activity history log, comments with mentions, read-only permissions,
• Analyze campaign performance – Integrate with Google Analytics for an instant overview of metrics
• Manage all marketing tasks – Send customizable notifications, view assignees and due dates, and track the progress of your tasks
• Share your plans with clients – You can share calendars to clients by external links, PDF export, or CSV export

Semrush offers a 7-day free trial, including their calendar and their entire marketing package, after which you can upgrade to their Guru plan at $229.95/month.

Microsoft Excel

Another simple spreadsheet, Microsoft Excel, provides templates that you can adapt to your needs. Solutions such as HubSpot also offer editorial calendar templates created on Microsoft Excel.

Microsoft Excel calendars are highly customizable.

For instance, you could have the twelve months in one or separate worksheets, display weekdays from Monday to Sunday or Sunday to Saturday, daily schedule tracker, task trackers, and so forth.

Evernote

Evernote offers customizable templates that you can use to create and manage your editorial calendar.

It allows you to create and assign tasks with due dates helping you and your teams stay organized and efficient.

Evernote also supports multi-device use, meaning you can use it on your computer, via an app on a mobile phone, and online.

To start using Evernote for your editorial calendar, you can create a note for each month, then list the days in each month, scheduling topics for each day.

The basic plan is free but comes with limited features.

For instance, you can sync only two devices.

The other packages include personal at $7.99/month, professional at $9.99/month, and Evernote teams at $14.66/user/per month.

With the personal plan, you can edit, track, and manage tasks, add due dates to tasks, set reminders, and integrate with Google Calendar.

But you cannot assign tasks and track progress.

This is available on the professional plan.

However, if you want to unlock unlimited collaboration and better integration capabilities, you should try Evernote Teams.

Trello

Trello is a leading collaborative tool that you can use to schedule and manage your editorial calendar.

Used by leading brands including Google, Zoom, VISA, and more, Trello empowers you to collaborate effectively and achieve peak productivity.

To start creating your editorial calendar, team members can drop ideas on the incoming list.

Once the topic is approved, the card is moved to the forming stage, which is a holding list where it waits for further research before being assigned a deadline. The task (cards) move progressively to the writing, editing, and final edits; then, it’s ready for uploading.

Upon uploading, the post is analyzed for SEO audit, after which it’s scheduled and published.

Trello offers four different plans, which provide varying features.

The most basic plan is free, but if you want to scale collaboration and manage more work, premium packages start at $5 for standard, $10 for premium, and $17.50 for the enterprise.

Asana

Asana is another platform designed to help teams get organized, track and manage their work.

With lists for efficiently organizing and assigning tasks, a timeline showing how work maps out, and boards defining content priorities, Asana provides a simplified solution to streamline your content production.

Using Asana’s editorial calendar templates, you can;

• Manage content in one place by adding all the pieces of content you intend to create on the calendar
• Break down the publication process by assigning tasks – drafting, editing, approving, publishing – and set deadlines for each
• View the status of the content by tracking it through the production process
• Keep communication together by updating the team on any changes

Asana offers four plans – basic, premium, business, and enterprise. The basic plan is free and comes with unlimited tasks, unlimited file storage, list view projects, assignee and due dates, 100+ free integrations, and you can collaborate with up to 15 teammates.

Airtable

Airtable is a cloud-based collaboration platform that allows teams to customize their workflows and collaborate for organized and efficient project execution. Used by popular brands such as Medium, Netflix, Shopify, and others, Airtable helps move work forward faster in a unified fashion.

With Airtable’s pre-built templates, you can start building your editorial calendar right away to plan and optimize your content production.

The tool has four plans – free, plus, pro, and enterprise.

The free plan allows up to 5 creators or editors with only one sync integration. However, you can access additional features with the premium plans, which cost $10/month and $20/month for the plus and pro.

MeisterTask

MeisterTask offers a secure team management solution for teams allowing you to track task progression from conception to completion.

With MeisterTask, you can assign, schedule tasks, and keep your team aligned for increased efficiency.

To start using MeisterTask for your editorial calendar, you can create new tasks to capture your ideas on the project board, categorize your articles under the different sections – proposed, in progress, completed – for easier filtering, set deadlines for the in-progress articles, and upload your draft to the article task and request for feedback.

MeisterTask has four plans – basic, pro, business, and enterprise.

The basic plan is free and accommodates unlimited project members but can support up to three projects.

For unlimited projects and other added features, you can upgrade to the premium versions, which cost $4.19 and $10.39 for pro and business.

Examples of Editorial Calendars

Having laid out the details of creating an editorial calendar, what does an actual calendar look like? Let’s look at a few examples below;

HubSpot Editorial Calendar

HubSpot has created a free editorial calendar, available for download in three formats – Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, and Google Calendar. While you can still customize the template to your content needs, it comes with standard columns to get you started planning for your content. These include;

• Publish date
• Due date
• Author
• Topic/title
• Content/Details
• Keyword(s)
• Target persona(s)
• Offer/CTA

In addition, HubSpot has written out instructions and provided blog management tips to guide you as you start.

Trello Editorial Calendar

Trello runs its editorial calendar on its own platform – Trello.

It allows them to collaborate seamlessly with internal and external authors to coordinate the process from creation to editing, publishing, and distribution.

At a glance, they can track the status of every post from ideation to publishing, manage drafts and assets for each post, track the progress, and keep everyone (editors, designers, social media managers) accountable.

Trello’s calendar highlights the workflow as follows;

• Information list – Contains information on how-to’s to guide tasks throughout the process
• Incoming list – Team members drop the ideas and pitches for posts here
• Forming list – Holding list where the approved topics wait for further research or information before being assigned a due date
• Writing list – Shows the posts being written
• Editing list – Written posts ready for the first review
• Final edits list – Here, the author commits the final edits based on the review feedback
• Ready to upload list – Contains blogs that are ready to upload to the (HubSpot) CMS
• SEO audit list – This shows the uploaded blogs being analyzed for SEO
• Scheduled list – Contains blogs that are scheduled for publishing
• Published list – Has a list of the published blogs

QuickBooks Resource Center Editorial Calendar

When QuickBooks Resource Center started using Airtable’s editorial calendar, the editor needed an ideal solution to manage thousands of pieces of content with more than a dozen writers across different time zones.

Once on Airtable, the editor set up the content database and contributors and made tasks accessible to different stakeholders.

The calendar template contained the title, description, writer, editor, Google Doc, status, type, and draft due fields.

With the essential details highlighted, it was much easier to streamline the process as the content moved through the production process as follows;

• Content ideation (editor)
• Keyword search (SEO strategist)
• Article pitching (editor)
• Writing content (writer)
• Editing (editor)
• Designing image (designer)
• Search optimization (SEO strategist)
• Publishing (editor)

Conclusion

An editorial calendar is a crucial tool for businesses seeking to maintain consistency in content marketing.

This is because consistency in content production is key to business growth.

For instance, it helps raise brand awareness, increase website traffic, build credibility and brand authority, not forgetting boosting leads and conversions.

Having an editorial calendar enables you to stick to your publishing schedule, ensuring your audience remains engaged with your brand consistently.

In addition, it saves time, allows you to stay organized, identify content gaps, achieve better scheduling and understanding of your project roles, improve team management, collaborate with teammates and streamline content creation, and measure your content marketing effectiveness.

Ideally, an effective editorial calendar should outline all the details your content production team needs to create content on time.

At the very basic, it should contain the type of content, topic/headline, keywords, target persona, content producers, content due date, publish date, offer/call to action, and distribution channels.

Creating a successful editorial calendar requires following specific steps, including outlining your objectives, choosing a format that aligns with your needs, researching topics, understanding your audience, identifying your anchors, mapping out your content sources, developing a publishing schedule, assigning roles and deadline, and auditing and optimizing the calendar as necessary.

And with the help of editorial calendar tools such as Google Sheets, WordPress Editorial Calendar, Semrush Marketing Calendar, Microsoft Excel, Evernote, Trello, Asana, Airtable, and MeisterTask., you can easily create a calendar that suits your business content needs.