Why is an editorial calendar essential?
When we begin a new project with our clients, we quickly realize just how deeply they care about their business and the history their company has gone through.
However, when we ask them why they don’t communicate about these various aspects, we find that the task of speaking out is beyond them. Establishing an editorial calendar can be an excellent solution to this problem.
The editorial calendar is an integral part of your company’s content strategy. Whenever you think about content, you should think about your calendar. It will greatly help you communicate with your audience for a variety of reasons.
1. Content creation can't be improvised
When it comes time to write a post, it can be difficult to come up with a topic, draft the text, and illustrate it with an image or two. As a result, it’s common to put this off until another day, only to realize later that posts are few and far between.
Creating an editorial calendar will help you organize your thoughts, list topics, and address them according to the deadlines you’ve set for yourself. It will simply help you set aside the time needed for your communications.
2. Force yourself to set publication dates
The goal here is to determine how often you want to engage with your audience. You’ll also want to consider key moments in your business, such as preparing for a trade show, launching a new product, or hiring a new employee. From there, you can easily link a date to the topic you’ve decided to cover.
Your schedule is starting to take shape, and you now have deadlines to meet. It's time to start writing your content.
3. Content Writing
This step can be quick if your idea is well-developed, but it will generally require a bit of preparation. Give yourself time to let your ideas mature,organize your thoughts, do your research, and determine how you want to communicate with your own customers.
The editorial calendar will help you develop your content, guiding it from an idea to a publish-ready article. Along the way, it will go through various stages, such as “selected topic,” “in draft,” “under review,” “approved,” and finally “scheduled.”
Are you starting to realize just how much the editorial calendar will help you structure your writing process?
4. A collaborative tool
Within your company, it’s very likely that you’ll assign someone to create your content. However, a decision-maker will certainly approve its publication. Perhaps you’ll be the one handling everything? In that case, you’ll certainly appreciate having a colleague to help you, even if it’s just with brainstorming ideas.
Do you see where I'm going with this? The editorial calendar will be the perfect tool to help you collaborate. Together, you can track the progress of content creation. You'll be able to share and discuss ideas that are inspiring and productive.
5. Communication Formats and Channels
We’re talking about articles here, but there are many ways to share your message. These can includeblog posts, social media posts, video messages, photo shares, and more. Depending on whether you choose to communicate on your website or social media, you’ll opt for one format or another.
The communication schedule will prompt you to consider this. It will help you choose the best medium based on the communication channel you select.
As you can see, the editorial calendar will help you organize your thoughts and your writing process. It will save you valuable time and, most importantly, it will naturally lead you to produce high-quality content and get it published!
Which tools should you choose?
Have we convinced you to start an editorial calendar? If so, we’d like to suggest a few tools to help you make it happen. Try Office Planner, Trello, or Google Calendar. Take a look at these tools and see which one inspires you the most. Now all you have to do is get started!
Would you like us to explore this topic further? We're here to help.