What IS an Editorial Calendar, and why do I need one?

If you are new to the #digitalmarketing game, you may hear marketers refer to an Editorial Calendar. If you are wondering what the heck that is and why people keep talking about it when discussing your marketing strategy – keep reading. This blog is for you.

If you read last month’s post, you know how much I love a good plan. Therefore, it should come as no surprise to you that I find great value in editorial calendars. In short, an editorial calendar is essentially a master plan for your content. Your content is organized in calendar form and planned in advance. The result of this effort has many amazing benefits. Here are my top three benefits to using an editorial calendar:

1. An Editorial Calendar provides you with a Macro-view of your Marketing Campaigns
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Your marketing strategy is (or should be, in my opinion) comprised of campaigns based on your business goals. Campaigns are executed over a time period to help a business achieve results. This requires an over-arching view of said goals, and action points to achieve them (your strategy). Without a strategy, you can end up with tunnel vision - only seeing what's in front of you in the short term. 

For example: (We've all done this) When you post on your business social media page "just because you haven't posted in awhile and need to post something today."  but you really have nothing relevant to say - sound familiar? When we do this, content can quickly become scattered and serve no real purpose. This is not effective in achieving long-term business goals.

​Who wants to spend a whole bunch of time on content that doesn’t actually serve any type of purpose? 
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No one. That's who. 

2. An Editorial Calendar Keeps Your Content Organized
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With a little bit of planning you can organize your content into categories. Categories are defined by your marketing goals and action points (I realize this requires a bit more explanation – but that’s a whole other blog post). What is important to note is - defining your content categories helps ensure that your content is relevant to your goals, and that you are sending consistent messaging about your brand and business to your audience. An editorial calendar is helpful in this endeavor because you can visually see your content spread out to cover ALL your goals over a time period. This way, you don’t keep hammering the same point home and missing all the others, or focusing on one goal and losing sight of the rest.

For example: Not all your posts should be a sales pitch. Not all your posts should be promoting an upcoming event. Your audience will get sick of hearing about it and lose interest in you all together (ouch).

Once more - your calendar should be comprised of alternating content categories to ensure ALL your goals are getting equal love throughout the month.​

3. An Editorial Calendar Helps You Get the MOST out of One Piece of Content

We all know that creating content can be SUPER time consuming. However, if we are being strategic with our marketing, one piece of content can be utilized in multiple ways and across multiple channels of communication – such as a blog, a newsletter or a social media post. When you can repurpose your content in multiple ways, you can spend less time on content creation. Such a time-saver! That being said, you have to organize yourself (on your calendar) so that when you are utilizing that one piece of amazing content across many channels, you are doing so strategically and in a timely way.

So, there you have it! My top three benefits to using an editorial calendar. At this point - I think it is pretty clear I’m really into using Editorial Calendars, and I definitely think you should be, too.

If you need a hand getting started – contact me, I love this stuff.