How to create a top tier editorial calendar

What is an editorial calendar?

An editorial calendar is an essential part of organisation when it comes to PR, social media, and content marketing. It sorts all of your ideas and content into one place, so that you can keep track of your plans for the future. An editorial calendar will contain all of the content that you plan to publish, usually for the upcoming year. This means that you’re less likely to run out of ideas, with a solid calendar for any and all relevant content ideas.

Depending on which area of marketing you work under, the editorial calendar you create may look different. For example, a digital PR executive might choose to have a seasonal editorial calendar alongside a master calendar, to allow for reactive opportunities. The same goes for content marketing, with ideas for both topical and evergreen content. 

What are the benefits of an editorial calendar?

There are many benefits to using an editorial calendar, which is why so many businesses use them (including here at TAL Agency). Check out the reasons why using an editorial calendar will improve your blog posts and campaigns.

Elevate your content ideas

The great thing about an editorial calendar is that there’s usually no rush to create it – it can be added to gradually. This means that the ideas you generate are likely to be well thought out and can be tailored to your marketing strategy. Fewer rushed ideas means more high quality content, which will drive traffic and attention to your brand and website.

Keep consistent

Having a reliable editorial calendar that’s chock-full of ideas means you have content to fall back on with tight publishing deadlines. This makes it much easier to consistently post content – which is crucial for growing your brand and helping your content to perform well. 

Stay organised

Organisation is a key skill for developing your career – creating and managing an editorial calendar is an effective way to work on this skill. Not only does being organised help your career and skill set, it also minimises the risk of human error as you’ll be less likely to forget or miss things. Therefore, an editorial calendar is essential for keeping all of your content and ideas organised, meaning your process will run more smoothly.

Keep track of existing and upcoming content

The last thing anyone wants is to spend hours writing a blog post, only to realise there’s already a similar piece on your website. So, keeping track of the content you’ve already published in an editorial calendar will prevent you from wasting time or uploading duplicate content. An editorial calendar also allows you quick access to content that’s due to be written or uploaded. This is perfect for when a client or boss wants to know your plans and may need a quick answer. 

Have the whole team on the same page

When working as part of a team, communication is crucial. Having an updated editorial calendar that all of your team can update when necessary will help to keep your team cohesive and on the same page. It can be helpful to assign different projects to different people, so that everyone on your team knows who’s doing what. This prevents misunderstandings and will massively improve the cooperation and communication within your team.

How to create a top tier editorial calendar

Not sure where to start when it comes to creating a top tier editorial calendar? Although every business’ editorial calendar may be hugely different, here are some tips for starting to create an editorial calendar.

• Determine what your content marketing objectives are. This could be anything from improving SEO to generating more sales. Feel free to have multiple objectives, but try to limit to no more than six.
• Research and decide on your strategy so that it aligns with your goals. For example, if you want to drive more traffic to your website, you may want to focus on improving SEO within your content.
• Come up with content ideas. There are a few ways to do this – from researching competitors to holding team ideation sessions. Make sure that all of your ideas are relevant to your strategy, and undertake keyword research to create SEO-friendly content.
• Monitor performance and change the editorial calendar when you need to. As we said, each business will use their editorial calendar differently, so don’t be afraid to customise your calendar to suit your needs.

Editorial calendar example

We’ve given our best tips for creating an editorial calendar, but sometimes it’s better to show than to tell. So, here’s an example of our own editorial calendar that’s used for planning blog posts on our Content Hub:

As we try to get our content to rank as high as possible on the SERPs, we put a lot of emphasis on keyword research and finding the best keywords for each piece of content. We also create our editorial calendars on Google Sheets, so that all of our content marketing team are able to add to and edit the calendar as they go along. Once a piece of content has been written and published, it’s highlighted green so that it’s clear which titles have been published onto the website. Remember – this is just an example of one editorial calendar, and yours could look entirely different but still be incredibly effective.

Our content marketing team loves to stay organised with an amazing editorial calendar on hand at all times. If you’d like to read some copywriting tips for beginners or address some content writing mistakes, we have all this and more over on our Content Hub. Get in touch with us for more information on what we do at TAL Agency.

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