Use an Editorial Calendar to Align Content Plans
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define an editorial calendar.
- Explain the difference between a content calendar and an editorial calendar.
- Start building an editorial calendar.
- Integrate content and editorial calendars into a holistic content strategy.
What Is an Editorial Calendar?
An editorial calendar captures a bird’s-eye view of your planned content themes and campaigns. It connects those themes and campaigns to big-picture marketing goals. The editorial calendar encapsulates your long-term vision for how your content meets your objectives.
As a high-level view, the editorial calendar is ideal for sharing outside the content marketing team. People in other parts of the business, like sales or merchandising, gain a view into your content plans. They can use that view to align their plans to content.
The Difference Between a Content Calendar and an Editorial Calendar
You might think that an editorial calendar sounds a lot like a content calendar. They have similarities, but they’re used for different purposes. A content calendar helps your plan and manage the production of your content. It’s a tactical view of your day-to-day content operations. Your organization might have several content calendars. For instance, you can have one calendar per persona or line of business.
An editorial calendar captures a broader and more high-level view than content calendars. It shows themes, goals, and campaigns. With an editorial calendar, you see themes and campaigns that cut across all your content calendars.
Why Have Editorial and Content Calendars?
Your editorial calendar helps you keep your content aligned to your strategy and planned themes. It can seem like too much effort to maintain so many calendars. It’s not. An editorial calendar tracks fewer items than a content calendar, making it simple to keep up to date. You can create the calendar on an annual basis, refining it as needed.
Editorial calendars have their roots in traditional media. Editorial and advertising sales teams used them to align on planned content. The editorial team managed the details of content, like writer and photographer assignments, on a separate calendar. Sales teams referred to the editorial calendar for a high-level view of publication plans.
Let’s say the editorial team for a parenting magazine chooses “Summer Fun” as its theme for June, with a planned cover story on vacation ideas. The ad sales team can then sell ads to businesses, like hotel brands and sunscreen makers, with offerings that fit the theme.
You can use your editorial calendar similarly. Think of it as a high-level map for content. You select themes. List all relevant personas by theme. Align everything to goals. By sharing the editorial calendar, you give people visibility into your year-long plans—and what you hope to achieve with content.
Driving Content with an Editorial Calendar
Your editorial calendar captures the content themes, personas, and dates that are important to your organization. The simplicity of an editorial calendar makes it easy to visualize the direction you’ve chosen for content.
Having a visual framework helps you to make decisions at a high level about the types of content you need. You can use that to define the content pieces that help further your strategy. The editorial calendar helps you answer a number of questions about your content, such as:
- Do our themes address the concerns of our personas?
- Are we balancing content across themes and personas appropriately?
- What types of content align well with these themes?
- Do we have the right SMEs and budget to meet the needs of our themes and personas?
- How could our day-to-day content better map to our editorial direction?
Keep It Simple (But Not Too Simple)
Like with a content calendar, you need to decide what to track in your editorial calendar. Track too much, and it’s not easy to visualize or discuss at a high level. But tracking too little will leave people wondering how you plan to align your content to themes.
Experiment to see which items work best for your organization. Here are a few to get you started.
- Theme: This one is a must-have for an editorial calendar. The most minimal editorial calendar would consist of a calendar and themes.
- Campaigns: List the campaigns you plan to run in conjunction with the theme.
- Personas: Note which personas align with each theme.
- Goals: List both the metrics that you will use to measure success and a tangible goal. For example, you might have a goal of 100+ marketing qualified leads.
- Content examples: Give a couple of examples of planned content that match your themes and campaigns.
Use Your Editorial Calendar with Your Content Calendar
It’s best practice to use your editorial and content calendars together, especially as you plan specific content. As you review your editorial calendar, brainstorm the types of content your personas prefer. Then think of topics that go with your themes. Start adding your ideas to the content calendar.
Let’s say one of your personas is a web developer. You’ve learned that how-to blogs and videos perform best for that persona. Use that knowledge along with your themes as a starting point for content topics that feed into your content calendar.
What if you’re stumped as to how to align themes and personas to topics and channels? It can be tempting to take a more-of-the-same approach with your content. Rather than grappling with the themes and personas, you could develop blogs and other content similar to what you’ve done in the past. Luckily, your editorial calendar is there to keep you focused. So you research the themes more deeply to come up with content ideas that truly fit.
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