Content marketing tip #8: Why do you need an efficient editorial calendar

bysmartketeer

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Updated 6 years ago

In the previous tips I've covered topics like: content types, content formats, content structures and content styles ...

Today I'm going to tell you ...

Why do you need an efficient editorial calendar for your content marketing strategy?

The term itself is quite self-explanatory, but let’s see why is useful to have an editorial calendar. The main reason is very simple: while you must promote your content using many different communication channels and content platforms, the technological and conceptual differences won’t allow you to follow the very same practices on every platform or medium. In other words, you’ll always have to tweak and to adapt your content to align it with the medium or network it’s published on. This is why you’ll have to find an efficient way that will allow you to visually see how you are scheduling the very same content across various networks or platforms. According to Curata 69% of companies use an editorial calendar for content marketing.

No matter if you are an organization with multiple decision levels and responsibility areas involved or an individual marketer, a clear, transparent editorial calendar will help you to easily identify what days the content will be published and also, to set dates in advance to remind you of the assets that need to be created. An editorial calendar will help you not only to determine an efficient content cadence, but also to develop “good habits” forcing you to be strategic about what you want to create and why.

It’s a funny thing, but it’s true: content calendars for whatever reason usually scare marketers. Probably they think that there is some big, complex and very elaborate thing. Wrong! There is no need for any fancy solutions. In fact, you should keep it as simple as possible. You can use a simple Excel file or a Google calendar to create a simple, transparent visual plan that will include all your content marketing efforts for a given period of time:

• Content-related issues; you’ll have to define the basic attributes, such as topic, length, format, structure, resources, creatives, etc.

• Responsibility areas; if you are working with a team, you’ll have to define the assigned author and the exact roles, tasks and responsibilities for every member of your team.

• Deadlines; the exact deadline for every step involved in the content creation process, planned publishing dates, etc.

• Promotion; the exact dates and times for scheduled mailings, social media posts, ad campaigns, etc.

As you can see, it’s definitely not rocket science. If you have lots of different tasks and items that must be included in your content calendar, a spreadsheet-based format probably will work better than a regular calendar, but after all it’s just a simple agenda, nothing more.