Having an editorial calendar helps your business cost-efficiently focus on content that is going to meet your company’s objectives.

Editorial calendars form the backbone of most content marketing campaigns. They serve as a roadmap to success. Companies that fail to implement a detailed content marketing plan have a significantly smaller chance of meeting their plan’s objectives.

What is an editorial calendar?

At a minimum, a basic editorial calendar is a list of topics that your company plans to write as well as their publishing dates. However, advanced calendars go into a lot more detail than simply the topic and proposed publication date.

For example, the calendars that Tempesta Media creates are quite comprehensive. They go into content type, focus keywords, word length and article outlines. We also include proposed research sources for each topic.

What should a typical editorial calendar include?

At the most basic level, your editorial calendar should define:

• What type of content should you produce?
• Who’s going to write the content?
• When will you produce the content?
• Who is the target audience?
• What is the estimated impact associated with that content?

With these key components together, you can clearly articulate how they will fit within the overall digital marketing strategy. Therein lies one of the biggest values of an editorial calendar.

What types of editorial calendars exist?

There are many different types, including:

• Standalone – These are focused on specific types of content, for example, written content versus video content versus podcasts.
• Integrated – This incorporates multiple forms of communication over many different distribution mechanisms and publication method mechanisms.

They are all brought together as part of an overall strategy.

What are the benefits of using an editorial calendar?

At the most basic level, an editorial calendar is going to:

• Provide better organization of your content marketing plan.
• Help you focus on your target audience so that you are delivering the right message to them in the right medium.
• Focus your company on results.

In addition, it’s usually built with the expectation that it’s going to meet certain metrics or financial objectives. It also acts as a review mechanism to ensure that what is being produced matches up with those objectives.

In summary

An editorial calendar is a fundamental and critical component of any company’s content marketing program. It can help your content marketing team to focus on meeting specific company objectives and doing it in the most efficient way possible.

Need help?

If you have a content marketing program or are planning one, download our ebook 100 Mistakes Businesses Make When Starting, Optimizing and Scaling Content Marketing Programs.

This ebook will walk you through the mistakes of hundreds of other companies and the challenges they faced in implementing their content marketing programs. To learn more about how Tempesta Media can help you streamline your content creation process and deliver quality content at scale, contact us today.